NOTES: MasterVoices’ “Let ‘Em Eat Cake” at Carnegie Hall

Last evening at Carnegie Hall, MasterVoices—a 100+ member chorus under the helm of Tony Award-winning artistic director Ted Sperling—presented a one-night-only concert adaptation of the rarely-seen 1933 flop musical “Let ‘Em Eat Cake”, music and lyrics by none other than George and Ira Gershwin, with a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. 

An otherwise obscure entry in the annals of musical comedy history, “Let ‘Em Eat Cake” is important for the milestone it marked as the first-ever sequel to another musical.  That would be 1931’s “Of Thee I Sing”, a much celebrated show that was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1932) and the first Gershwin musical to run more than a year on Broadway (441 performances to be exact). 

Following the runaway success of “Of Thee I Sing”, the same creative team re-assembled to continue the fanciful story of President Wintergreen, a nobody who assumes the most powerful office in the land after running on a message of love and conducting a nation-wide beauty contest to find his First Lady.  A biting satire of then-contemporary political and social mores, “Of Thee I Sing” remains lauded today for its beloved score and prescient politics.  

“Let ‘Em Eat Cake”, on the other hand, has become not much more than a footnote. 

To underscore just how rarely performed this show is, prior to last night, it had not been seen or heard on the island of Manhattan since closing on January 6, 1934 after only 90 performances on Broadway.  A concert production was produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987, in rep with “Of Thee I Sing”, which received its own MasterVoices concert in 2017 (read my review).

For this delicious treat of a concert presentation of “Let ‘Em Eat Cake”, with a book newly adapted by Laurence Maslon, Ted Sperling conducted the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to perform the Gershwin brothers’ score in full.  

Following a rousing overture, President John P. Wintergreen (Bryce Pinkham, repeating his duties from 2017), loses re-election to John P. Tweedledee (Christopher Fitzgerald).  After an unsuccessful appeal for the Supreme Court to overthrow the results, Wintergreen and his gorgeously-voiced wife, Mary (Mikaela Bennett), go into business in Union Square making blue dress shirts.

Inspired by the musings of Kruger (David Pittu), an activist who is “against whoever is in”, Wintergreen, aided by his mass of blue shirts in cahoots with General Snookfield (Bill Buell), stages a bloodless coup of the U.S. government becoming “dictator of the proletariat” on the promise of settling the war debts of World War I. 

When the League of Nations fails to pay up, Wintergreen concocts the gambit of a baseball game between nine member nations and the Supreme Court (nine members = nine players!), with the loser left holding the bag.  However, as umpire, the oft-forgotten former vice president Alexander Throttlebottom (Kevin Chamberlin) makes a game-deciding bad call that results in a trial and his sentencing to death.  

Following a fashion show staged by Mary, President Tweedledee is restored to power only to resign and be replaced by Throttlebottom who is saved from the gallows.  If this all sounds silly, that’s because it is.   

With a few exceptions, musicals of the 1930s were not serious affairs, devised more as vehicles to get from song-to-song than purveyors of meaningful (or logical) stories.  The very next show the Gershwins would write would be their landmark folk opera, “Porgy and Bess”.  Still, Kaufman and Ryskind’s script for “Let ‘Em Eat Cake” glimmers with political satire that remains eerily on point in 2019.  Politics hasn’t changed all that much, after all. 

While the assembled songs are a pale shadow of those from “Of Thee I Sing”, containing several reprises from that much more successful score alongside new and rather unremarkable songs, they do reflect a more sophisticated composition, particularly notable for the use of counterpoint and plot-advancing lyrics, and some early shades of George Gershwin’s work in “Porgy and Bess”.  

In the end, “Let ‘Em Eat Cake” is a postcard from a bygone era of musical comedy.  MasterVoices provided not only a delightful evening of reverie and the chance to hear a long-forgotten score, but also serves a vital and noble role in preserving and celebrating the history of this overlooked musical milestone.