In 1931, this Broadway revue was considered the last word in sophistication. It starred Fred and Adele Astaire, boasted satirical sketches by George S Kaufman and Howard Dietz and haunting songs by Arthur Schwartz. Revived now as part of Ian Marshall Fisher's Lost Musicals season, it may have lost some of its chic, but it still possesses a quality that has disappeared from American popular entertainment: a seductive charm.
The original intention was clearly to send up revue conventions. So we get an opening number about the audience's arrival, snapshot parodies of the genre's cliches including a torch singer who throatily warbles, "Can't help moanin' about my man," and even an item about deleted sketches that tartly reminds us "the author of a revue has his work cut out for him". But far and away the best of the comedy items is a pastiche of a deep south drama. All the ingredients are there, from the mint juleps and shuffling servants to the fake lyricism. But the shock comes with the revelation, on the eve of the wedding of the colonel's daughter, that the future bride is a virgin. "It's the younger generation," someone laments, "they ain't got no use for the old-fashioned ways."
Even if some of the other sketches drag on a bit, the Schwartz songs have a satirical edge. The veteran Vivienne Martin is pleasantly mischievous as a doughty survivor who confesses, "I always went to bed at 10 – but I went home at four," and is equally sprightly in a parodic hymn to a romantic siren called Nanette, whom no one has ever actually met. Even if you have to imagine what the show must have been like with the Astaire siblings, a strong company, in which James Vaughan and Clare Rickard shine, do a more-than-decent job and it's salutary to be reminded that, even at the height of the Great Depression, American audiences craved elegance and wit.
