MasterVoices Presents: OF THEE I SING - New York City Article

Quick: what factor most makes the 1931 Of Thee I Sing into one of the great works of the American theater? If you said the score by George & Ira Gershwin, almost unbelievably, you’d be wrong. (By Gershwin standards, this particular batch of songs is far from one of their greatest. In fact, where most Gershwin shows have at least a dozen classic songs, a mere three tunes here became standards: the title number, “Love is Sweeping the Country,” and “Who Cares?”) In a way that’s still surprising, this is virtually the only classic musical of its era that became immortal by virtue of its book. The line “Satire is what closes on Saturday night” became one of the legendary George S. Kaufman’s most famous encomiums, but he broke his own rule with this brilliant work of political and musical satire, which played many, many Saturday nights and matinees during the Great Depression, and since. It's the book which makes this one of the few book musicals of the pre-Oklahoma! era that’s regularly revived, although for some mysterious reason, New Yorkers always seem to bring it back during moments of Republican ascendency - shortly before the election of Eisenhower in 1952, then during the Bush II administration in 2006, and now in the days of POTUS #45. (No conspiracy there, of course.) But no matter what your politics are, this is a blissfully funny and tuneful show with the power to unite us all, red and blue alike. It’s satire seems more on target than ever, almost 90 years after it was first written - even though the idea that the fate of a nation can hang on something as trivial as corn muffins somehow doesn’t seem quite as preposterous as it once did.