George and Ira Gershwin: Girl Crazy (Nonesuch Records: 1990 studio recording)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I played for my husband Charles and I a recording of the complete score for the 1930 George and Ira Gershwin stage musical Girl Crazy, a simple tale of a young rich scapegrace named Danny Churchill whose dad ships him off to a ranch in Arizona to make a man of him. While there, he falls in love with the local postmaster, Molly Gray. Predictably, she has no interest or desire in him at first, but he gradually wears down her resistance. There are also several supporting cast members, including a man named Sam whom Danny knew in New York and whom Molly uses to date in order to make Danny jealous. The original Broadway cast featured Allan Kearns as Danny, Ginger Rogers as Molly, and Ethel Merman as local girl Katie, who stopped the show with the score’s big hit, “I Got Rhythm.” (For the Columbia compilation CD From Gershwin’s Time, released in 1999 to commemorate the centennial of George Gershwin’s birth, “I Got Rhythm” was sung by Kate Smith, whose voice was just as loud as Merman’s and whose musicianship – especially her intonation – was far superior.)

The record we were listening to was a 1990 CD on the Nonesuch label conducted by John Mauceri, with David Carroll as Danny, Judy Blazer as Molly, and Lorna Luft, Judy Garland’s other daughter, as Katie. Judy Garland got to sing the big “I Got Rhythm” finale in the 1943 MGM film version (Mickey Rooney starred as Danny and Judy played a mix of Molly and Katie) and so Lorna was following in her mother’s footsteps –– and the family resemblance in their voices is unmistakable. (When Judy shot the number, director Busby Berkeley had cannon shots going off over her voice, and both Judy and her musical director, Roger Edens – who’d also coached Ethel Merman on stage – insisted that he be fired from the rest of the film. So Norman Taurog, a specialist in working with child stars, directed the rest of the 1943 Girl Crazy and, rather than pay him his contract salary for doing nothing, MGM loaned Berkeley out to 20th Century-Fox for The Gang’s All Here.)

Though written only a year or two before Of Thee I Sing, Girl Crazy is a far more conventional show, with far fewer choral numbers and a lot of songs to showcase the stars. And unlike Of Thee I Sing and Let ‘Em Eat Cake, Girl Crazy is full of songs that have become standards, not only “I Got Rhythm” but “Embraceable You” and “But Not for Me.” There are also songs that hung out on the netherworld of standard-dom, including “Could You Use Me?” (the opening duet for Danny and Molly in which she insists she could not possibly use him), “Bidin’ My Time” (written for a barbershop quartet called the Fourmost who played toy instruments – a harmonica and three ocarinas – as part of their act), “Sam and Delilah” (memorably covered by Duke Ellington at the time on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r9G_ed9IUY) and “Boy, What Love Has Done to Me.” Another piece of trivia about the 1930 Girl Crazy: producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley wanted a romantic dance duet to “Embraceable You” for Ginger Rogers and Allan Kearns, and to design it they called in a young man named Fred Astaire when he was still doing a novelty act with his sister Adele. It was the first time Astaire and Rogers worked together, three years before they actually danced together in a show or film. And the pit orchestra on opening night was led by Red Nichols and featured such future swing stars as Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Glenn Miller and Gene Krupa – alluded to in the long trumpet solo on “I Got Rhythm” in the 1990 recording even though it was hardly played with the panache Nichols undoubtedly brought to it.