E-Mail This Article to a Friend War efforts Strike Up the Band and Johnny Johnson BY STEVE VINEBERG
	Strike Up the Band Book by George S. Kaufman. Music by George Gershwin. Lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Directed by David Frieze. Musical direction by Margaret Ulmer. Presented by American Classics at Longy School of Music. Closed. Johnny Johnson Music by Kurt Weill. Lyrics by Paul Green. Presented by the Boston Camerata at Sanders Theatre. Musical direction by Joel Cohen. Closed.

Two forgotten anti-war musicals from America’s most experimental theatrical era — the period between the World Wars — received revivals last weekend: the American Classics series at the Longy School of Music mounted a staged reading of Strike Up the Band (1927) and the Boston Camerata produced Johnny Johnson (1936) in concert at the Sanders Theatre. The coincidence of subject matter aside (both came out of a strongly isolationist time in American history), the two works are sharply different in tone. Strike Up the Band, with a book by George S. Kaufman and a score by the Gershwins, is a Yankee variation on a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, a satirical farce in which a cheese magnate manipulates the US into declaring war on Switzerland to protect his product from foreign competitors. By contrast, though it has comic elements — the title hero attempts to end the war (clearly, if not officially, WWI) by exposing the Allied high command to a canister of laughing gas — Paul Green’s libretto for Johnny Johnson veers toward the tragic, and the magnificent Kurt Weill score, his first for Broadway after he’d fled Hitler, is more often poignant.

It’s fascinating to note, however, that Strike Up the Band closed out of town, in Philadelphia, and when the Gershwins reconstituted it three years later, Morrie Ryskind wrote a new book that muted its satirical sting by relegating the war to a dream by the main character. The show was finally a hit, though it’s the 1927 version — the one to which American Classics returned — that musical-theater historians recognize as the authentic one. It’s been performed in the Encores! series at City Center in New York, and its ingenious and largely unknown score has been fully restored on CD by Tommy Krasker in the marvelous Gershwin series on Electra Nonesuch. That score is still the show’s raison d’être, and it was performed vigorously at Longy by a fine complement of voices, most memorably Valerie Anastasio and Brian Robinson, who handled the two romantic ballads, "Hoping That Someday You’d Care" and "The Man I Love." (Although it’s one of the most beloved of Gershwin standards, "The Man I Love" never found a permanent home in any show. It had already been cut from the Gershwins’ 1924 Lady, Be Good!, where Adele Astaire was supposed to sing it, and it didn’t make its way into the 1930 remounting of Strike Up the Band. It was retooled for Marilyn Miller in the 1928 Rosalie but then dropped once again.) Unfortunately, the extended vaudeville book scenes aren’t among Kaufman’s most scintillating, and the earnest, amateurish overacting of the Longy cast — always excepting Anastasio, a witty actress in addition to being a superb singer — didn’t make the case for them. (To be fair: neither did the far more seasoned cast of the 1998 Encores! performance.)

I have nothing but praise for the Boston Camerata’s Johnny Johnson, which was presented by musical director Joel Cohen in a pared-down version that preserved all of Weill’s music but relegated most of Green’s book to snippets of narration read by Christopher Lydon. Although the play was given an elaborate Broadway production by the Group Theatre, the strengths of Johnny Johnson — like those of Strike Up the Band — are firmly in its score, which is plaintive and stirring and shows Weill incorporating the joyous strains of swing into the elements he brought with him from his Berlin kabarett days, the embittered yet still heartfelt resetting of Viennese musical traditions. In Johnny Johnson, you can hear Richard Strauss embrace Benny Goodman, and some of the songs — "Song of the Guns" and the tender, ironic ballad "Mon Ami, My Friend" and the finale, "Johnny’s Song," with its hobbled fairground beat — are among Weill’s very best. The Boston Camerata cast — 11 singers and 11 musicians — performed the score with full attention to its emotional richness and its playfulness, both of which I’ve cherished since I was lucky enough, as a teenager, to come upon a copy of the 1957 recording Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, supervised. Cohen and his ensemble paid the work a sweet and memorable tribute.