The Marx Brothers made their Broadway debut in a 1924 revue called I'll Say She Is. They did two other Broadway shows — The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers — which were made into movies and otherwise had lives after they closed in New York…but I'll Say She Is disappeared, never to be seen again. Well, not until recently when a gent named Noah Diamond led the way to bring it back, first in a 2014 workshop production and now in a fully-staged off-Broadway production which opens tonight.
Since I'm in Los Angeles and it's at the Connelly Theater on East 4th Street in New York, I won't be seeing it any time soon…but of course, we're quite intrigued by the whole project. This article by Adam Gopnik makes it sound pretty wonderful but it also makes it sound like the folks behind it only found a few pieces of the original script and score and so have had to make up a lot of it anew. That doesn't mean it isn't a good show. It just makes us wonder how much of what they present is what the Brothers Marx did back in '24.
(One error in the article: Gopnik writes of the search for pieces of the material and discusses "…a version of the Napoleon scene that had, improbably, been made into a rather mediocre episode in a long-forgotten, cheaply made cartoon special in 1970, with the very elderly Groucho supplying his lines and Hans Conried doing the other brother's voices." That was The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians produced by Rankin-Bass back then and while Groucho did supply his own voice, the other guy wasn't Hans Conried. It was Paul Frees. Paul did a better Chico Marx than Chico Marx. I linked to a copy of the show back here.)
Anyway, I hope the show's terrific. I also hope that the publicity about it causes someone someplace to think, "Hey, I think I have an old, complete script called I'll Say She Is in my attic…"