Book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie RyskindMusic and Lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby
The scene is the Long Island estate of Mrs. Rittenhouse, a wealthy patroness of the arts with a marriageable daughter. Her celebrity weekend guest is the renowned Captain Jeffrey Spaulding, the African Explorer (Groucho). He arrives (“Hooray, hooray, hooray!”) with his secretary, Horatio Jameson (Zeppo), followed by a pair of “musicians”: Ravelli (Chico) and the Professor (Harpo). What follows is typical Marxian lunacy, involving a stolen painting, a surreal bridge game, a Broadway gossip columnist named Wally Winston, a financial wizard formerly known as Abie the Fish Peddler, and a climatic burlesque of Marie Antoinette and the Three Musketeers. What transcends this errant nonsense are the verbal arabesques of Captain Spaulding (“Last night, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”) and the first-rate slapstick of Ravelli and the Professor.
Details
Bert Kalmar (1884-1947) and Harry Ruby’s collaboration spanned from the 1920s to 1940s, and took them from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway and eventually to Hollywood. Born in New York in 1884, Kalmar performed as a magician in tent shows and in vaudeville before founding a music p ...
George S. Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh in 1889. During his early career as a reporter and drama critic , he began to write for the theatre. For 40 years, beginning in 1921 with the production of Dulcy, there was rarely a year without a Kaufman play — usually written in coll ...
Harry Ruby (1895-1974) and Bert Kalmar’s collaboration spanned from the 1920s to 1940s, and took them from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway and eventually to Hollywood. Born in New York in 1884, Kalmar performed as a magician in tent shows and in vaudeville before founding a music p ...
Morrie Ryskind, the librettist of Louisiana Purchase, was born in New York City in 1895 and graduated from the Columbia University School of Journalism. His principal collaborator in the theater was George S. Kaufman, with whom he wrote the Marx Brothers musical Animal Cracke ...
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