Leave It to Jane
Leave It to Jane is a musical in two acts, with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, based on the 1904 play The College Widow, by George Ade. The story concerns the football rivalry between Atwater College and Bingham College, and satirizes college life in a Midwestern U.S. town. A star halfback, Billy, forsakes his father's alma mater, Bingham, to play at Atwater, to be near the seductive Jane, the daughter of Atwater's president.
Leave it to Jane
1917 Broadway production
1959 Off-Broadway production
The musical was created for the Princess Theatre, but another of the "Princess Theatre Shows", Oh, Boy!, was a long-running hit at the Princess at the same time; so Leave It to Jane premiered instead at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway in 1917.[1][2] and had a long-running Off-Broadway revival in 1959. Some of the best-known songs are "A Peach of a Life", "Leave It to Jane", "The Crickets Are Calling", "The Siren’s Song", "Sir Galahad" and "Cleopatterer".
Productions[edit]
With Oh, Boy! playing at the Princess, Leave It to Jane had to open at another Broadway house, the Longacre Theatre, on March 29, 1917.[1][2] Like the Princess Theatre shows, it featured modern American settings, eschewing operetta traditions of foreign locales and elaborate scenery.[3] The authors sought to have the humor flow from the plot situations, rather than from musical set pieces.[7] In 1918, Dorothy Parker described in Vanity Fair how the team's shows integrated story and music: "Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern are my favorite indoor sport. I like the way they go about a musical comedy. ... I like the way the action slides casually into the songs. ... I like the deft rhyming of the song that is always sung in the last act by two comedians and a comedienne. And oh, how I do like Jerome Kern's music."[8]
Leave It to Jane ran for a modestly successful 167 performances, directed by Edward Royce and choreographed by David Bennett.[9] Though the critics liked the music and lyrics, as well as the cast generally, they were most impressed by Georgia O'Ramey in the comedy role of Flora.[10]
An Off-Broadway revival opened on May 25, 1959 at the Sheridan Square Playhouse and ran for more than two years (958 performances),[11][12] and the cast recorded the show's first cast album, starring Kathleen Murray (later Kathleen Hallor) as Jane. A young George Segal had a small part.[13][14] The show is occasionally still staged, including a 1985 production at Goodspeed Opera House starring Rebecca Luker.[15]
Critical reception[edit]
The musical received good notices. The critic Gilbert Seldes commented that Wodehouse's lyrics "had the great virtue which Gilbert's lyrics had and which, I am told, the comic verses of Molière and Aristophanes also have: they say things as simply as you would say them in common speech, yet they sing perfectly."[16] In The New York Evening World, Charles Darnton praised "Mr. Kern's sprightly tunes and ... verses that added to the joy of song. You are sure to like Leave It to Jane."[16] The New York Times praised the cast generally, but the paper was most impressed by Georgia O'Ramey in the comedy role of Flora.[10]
In other media[edit]
Excerpts from the musical are featured in the 1946 MGM Jerome Kern tribute Till the Clouds Roll By, in which June Allyson plays Jane and sings the title song and "Cleopatterer".[17]