#6b: Cast Recordings: "Leave It to Jane"

Leave It to Jane

AEI, AEI-CD 038, 1997

Original Broadway production:

Opened at the Longacre Theatre on 28 August 1917 and played 167 performances

Music: Jerome Kern

Book and Lyrics: Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse

Leave It to Jane was the fourth of the Princess shows. But because Oh, Boy! was still running at the Princess Theatre, Leave It to Jane opened at the Longacre. That version did not get a cast recording. But on 25 May 1959, a revival opened at the Off-Broadway Sheridan Square Playhouse. This cast recording is from that production.

The Sheridan Theatre in Greenwich Village had only 182 seats, making it even smaller than the Princess Theatre. But what the theater lacked in size the production made up for by running 928 performances.

It’s curious that they chose to revive this Princess show rather than, say, Oh, Boy!, which originally ran longer. I wonder if it was because a scene from Leave It to Jane was included in Till the Clouds Roll By, the 1946 biopic of Jerome Kern’s life, and that piqued people’s interest. Of course it might instead have been because the producers liked the score and the book. I don’t know. In any case, the Off-Broadway revival was a big hit, and the cast recording is wonderful.

The hit song of the show was the “Cleopatterer,” in which Wodehouse gives his typically fractured view of history:

In days of old beside the Nile

A famous queen there dwelt;

Her clothes were few but full of style;

Her figure slim and svelte.

But my favorite is “Sir Galahad” in which Wodehouse again fractures history:

Some night when they sat down to dine,

Sir Claude would say: “That girl of mine

Makes ev’ry woman jealous when she sees her.”

Then someone else would yell, “Behave!

Thou malapert and scurvy knave!

Or I will smite thee one upon the beezer.”

But all the songs on the disk are lovely and the performances are wonderful.LikeVery Good Eddie (Blog Post No. 6a), this is a cast recording that makes me happy every time I listen to it.