What Garrick Gaieties?: A Note on Reference and Source Material

WHAT GARRICK GAIETIES? A NOTE ON REFERENCE AND SOURCE MATERIAL ALL OF US WHO TEACH DRAMA have a tendency to invoke the splendor of particular productions, even those we have never seen; a mythical aura hangs over, say, Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines or Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie. I have heard myself say, "Now, if you had seen A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway ... ," forgetting for the moment that I had not only seen Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando as Blanche and Stan, but Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn in the same roles, and that they were two different plays. What with cast changes,· script changes, theater changes, and the varying quality of performances from night to night, the historical re-creation of any production is almost impossible. The best that we can hope for, I suppose, is a little fact and a lot of fancy. These thoughts-the recurrent doubts of anyone involved in any kind of history-came into my mind recently when I was reading Revue (1962), a book by Robert Baral, subtitled era nostalgic reprise of the great Broadway period." Baral, a man with an enthusiasm and a gushy style, is apparently a program saver; his book is a queer hybrid-half picture book for Christmas giving, half reference volume . As I read description after description of the revues that had played on Broadway, I was struck by how little they communicated, how nearly impossible it was for a reader to get the feel of what was going on in anyone of them. The musical theater in general, the revue in particular, seems to me to offer even greater problems to the theatrical historian than does the dramatic theater. I decided to choose one revue and to consider the obstacles that stand between it and the man of 1965 who might want to know what it was like. I chose The Garrick Gaieties, the 1925 edition, for two reasons. First, it is supposed to be a landmark of sorts. Second, it opened within a month of the day I was born, so it cannot be considered ancient history . A few facts-or what pass for facts-about The Garrick Gaieties. It was conceived originally by a group of young performers, members of the Theatre Guild's junior group, as an inside spoof of their more famous elders. At some point, Benjamin M. Kaye, the lawyer-playwright who contributed several of the sketches, brought Richard (198) 1965 WHAT Garrick Gaieties? 199 Rodgers and Lorenz Hart into the operation to provide some of the songs. The revue was scheduled for two performances at the Garrick. Theatre on Sunday, May 17, 19:'% a benefit occasion to raise money for tapestries for the Guild's new theater. The reception was warm enough to convince the Guild to schedule four more performances, or six, depending on whom you read; finally, after the closing of the Lunt-Fontanne The Guardsman, which was one of the shows kidded in the Gaieties, the revue began a regular run at the Garrick on June 8. It played ~ 11 performances (if Stanley Green is to be believed) and 174 performances (if you believe Robert Baral). There was a second edition in 1926, another in 1930. What Garrick Gaieties? I don't ask for a choice among 1925, 1926, and 1930. What 1925 Garrick Gaieties? That's the real question. We might begin, I suppose, with the reference books. Baral's appendix gives a cast list; his description tells us nothing except that the show contained two lasting Rodgers and Hart songs, "Manhattan" and "Sentimental Me." Stanley Green in The World of Musical Comedy (1960) assures us that the show was "fresh, youthful, impudent, seemingly spontaneous" and that "its satirical barbs [were} aimed at the Theatre Guild itself"; specifically, he mentions only the two songs cited by Baral in his later volume and the first-act finale number, The Joy Spreader, "an attempt at a jazz opera." David Ewen, in Richard Rodgers (1957), calls The Joy Spreader "a one-act burlesque on opera in the jazz idiom." There seems to me to be a difference between an attempt at an opera...