You Can't Keep a Good Girl Down: Sally Goes Up on Broadway

Today we present our third guest post by Roger Kimmel Smith (see full bio below)

One hundred years ago today, the musical comedy Sally opened to great acclaim at the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street. The hit show tallied up 561 performances in its initial production, closing in April of 1922 and returning for its first revival a mere eighteen months later, with much of the same cast. Sally represented a significant landmark in the history of American musical theater and in the careers of its composer, Jerome Kern; its star, Marilyn Miller; and its producer, Florenz Ziegfeld.

Sally was conceived as a vehicle for Miller, the talented dancer and comedienne who rose to fame in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918 and 1919. In her first musical comedy role, she played the title character, the plucky orphan Sally of the Alley. The show also featured two comic players known for their work in the Follies, Leon Errol and Walter Catlett.

By 1920, Jerome Kern was a seasoned songwriter who had already done a great deal to develop a modern American form of narrative-based musical theater. Between 1915 and 1918, Kern and his creative partners Guy Bolton and the British novelist P.G. Wodehouse had mounted seven musicals in an intimate Broadway venue called the Princess Theatre. These shows, including Very Good Eddie (1915) and Oh, Boy! (1917), were considered exemplary models of the book musical for their time, containing relatively coherent (albeit harebrained) plots with musical numbers placed logically within the storyline. Although his work was strongly influenced by the operetta tradition, Kern composed in the idiom of popular song, making light and judicious use of syncopation.

The story goes that Bolton and Wodehouse happened to meet up with Ziegfeld in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1919. The celebrated producer was enjoying the success of that year's Follies, widely hailed as the most memorable edition of his annual revue. The showman had fallen hard for the dainty blonde Miller, who dazzled Follies audiences while singing Irving Berlin's hits "Mandy" and "A Syncopated Cocktail," and wanted to place her in a leading role for her musical comedy debut. The pair of writers interested Ziegfeld in The Little Thing, a title they had worked on but not produced at the Princess: the story of a poor, ambitious orphan girl in a Greenwich Village boarding house. By the time the great impresario had signed off on the project, the plot had been revised to reach its climax with the heroine achieving starhood in—what else?—the Ziegfeld Follies.

This kind of modern Cinderella story was in vogue at the time. One prominent influence was the musical Irene (1919), starring Edith Day as an Irish working girl; this show was directed by Edward Royce, who also helmed Sally, and it was still running on the night Sally opened. The character of Sally represents her era's liberated, upwardly mobile New Woman. Early in Act I, after gaining employment as a dishwasher, she reveals her boundless drive in the song "You Can't Keep a Good Girl Down" (lyrics by Wodehouse), also known as "I Wish I Could Be Like Joan of Arc": 

        She had no stairs to wash

        with soap suds and a pail;

        She just cut out domestic bosh,

        and bought a suit of mail.

Such a role suited the irrepressible Miller, whose business sense was so formidable that she demanded, and received, a percentage of Sally's box office receipts—a first for any female performer on Broadway. She surely made a windfall, since the show earned more than five million dollars. Miller's reign as the most celebrated stage comedienne of the 1920s would include a second turn in the title role of a hit Kern musical, Sunny (1925).

The unique achievement of Sally was to combine the sensibility and stagecraft elements of the Princess shows with the opulent production values of Ziegfeld. This was Ziegfeld's first major success producing a book musical; he would go on to produce several landmark musicals including Kern's masterwork, Show Boat (1927). Reviewers were bowled over by the scenic designs produced by the Viennese immigrant Joseph Urban, one of the forerunners of Art Deco (who would, a few years later, design the gaudy interiors of the Mar-a-Lago mansion–yes, that one–for Marjorie Merriweather Post). Alice O'Neill headed a team of five costume designers credited in the program. 

Some of those costumes were designed for the statuesque Ziegfeld fashion model known as Dolores, who played the settlement worker Mrs. Ten Broek in the first speaking role of her stage career. Early in the play, Mrs. Ten Broek brings several of her settlement girls to the Elm Alley Inn, "a garden restaurant of the Bohemian variety," to place one of them in a dishwashing job. She introduces them with names such as Miss Schuyler, Miss Audubon, and Miss Plaza, then explains they were named for the telephone exchanges where they were found. The one on the end is named Miss Green—short for Bowling Green. One of these diamonds in the rough, dressed in rags, is the tart-tongued Sally, who swiftly makes a deep impression upon the shallow socialite Blair Farquar. As the plot unfolds, Sally is revealed to be a talented dancer and is induced to impersonate the famous Russian ballerina, Madame Nockerova.

The score of Sally—which included numerous songs originally written for other shows—yielded one sublime Kern melody of lasting popularity, "Look for the Silver Lining," with lyrics by B.G. DeSylva that have come to represent the unvarnished optimism and grace at the essence of Kern's songwriting style. Other notable tunes include "Whip-poor-will" (lyrics by DeSylva), "The Lorelei" (lyrics by Anne Caldwell), and "Wild Rose" (lyrics by Clifford Grey, sung by Sally in the guise of Mme. Nockerova). Act III of Sally featured "The Butterfly Ballet" sequence composed by the operetta master Victor Herbert.

Sally was filmed twice during the 1920s, first as a 1925 silent starring Colleen Moore, then in 1929 as a Vitaphone talkie starring Miller. This version was one of the very first feature films shot in color; while the entire film was preserved in black and white, only about two minutes of the Technicolor footage, a portion of the "Wild Rose" number, remain extant. Watch it here.

References/Further reading:

Cantu, Maya. Musical of the Month, New York Public Library.

Hischak, Thomas S. The Jerome Kern Encyclopedia. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.

Inside the Playbill: Sally - Opening Night at the New Amsterdam Theatre.

Sally. Guide to Musical Theater. 

– Roger Kimmel Smith, December 21, 2020

Roger Kimmel Smith is a freelance wordsmith based in Ithaca, New York. He recently published the essay “1920: The Year Broadway Learned to Syncopate” in the independent newspaper The Syncopated Times. He hosts a weekly program on music and popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s, "Crazy Words, Crazy Tune," on WRFI Community Radio (Fridays noon to 2pm eastern time, www.wrfi.org). Website: www.smithmeaword.com.

TAGS: musical theater, entertainment, cinema, dance, standards, composers