MY INTRODUCTION TO STRIKE UP THE BAND was a harmless Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland flick on Turner Classic Movies. By the time my research completed, I learned of an entirely different origin, a tycoon interested in tariffs, a quip about satire, and a one-night New York revival performed October 29, 2024.
Talk about legs.
The 1927 Political Satire. Strike Up The Band, 1927, was the first of George and Ira Gershwins’ three political satire musicals. The second one, Of Thee I Sing, 1931, was the first to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize (though “the musical contributions of George Gershwin were ignored by the committee,” notes “The Gershwins and Political Satire.”
This same article observes that the third musical, Let ’Em Eat Cake, 1933, “brought the characters of Of Thee I Sing face-to-face with the implications of international fascism with a shrillness that intimidated audiences.”
The Plot. Notes Wikipedia, in the 1927 version written by George S. Kaufman, cheese tycoon Horace J. Fletcher is delighted when the President signs a bill imposing a 50-percent tariff on imported cheese. When Fletcher receives news that “someplace called ‘Switzerland’ ” has sent a telegram protesting the tariff, he convinces the United States government to declare war on Switzerland, at least in part because the war will be named after him.
Wikipedia notes, “The story ended darkly.”
What’s worse theatrically, it ended in short term: During its pre-Broadway tryouts, it closed in Philadelphia, thus prompting Kaufman to quip “political satire is what closes on Saturday night.”
Ouch.
The 1930 Version. Morrie Ryskind revised the show into a Strike Up the Band that made it to Broadway for what Wikipedia termed a moderately successful run of 191 performances. “Much of the satire of the 1927 version,” Wikipedia notes, “was replaced in the new version by silliness, leading Ryskind to recall, ‘What I had to do, in a sense, was to rewrite War and Peace for The Three Stooges.’ “
“In the 1930 version,” Wikipedia continues, “the opening of Act I of the musical was reset from a cheese factory to a chocolate factory, and much of the work [especially its anti-war message] was a re-imagined as occurring during a dream sequence.”
Wikipedia also observes, “The pit band was the Red Nichols Orchestra, which included Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa, Jimmy Dorsey, and Jack Teagarden.” Quite a band up with which to strike.
Familiar Ditties. Together with the title’s “Strike Up The Band,” other familiar songs included “The Man I Love” in the 1927 song list; “Soon” and “I’ve Got a Crush on You” in the 1930 version.
The UCLA Version: Wikipedia recounts, “In 1936, UCLA students were looking for a new rally tune. George and Ira Gershwin had moved from New York to Beverly Hills to work in Los Angeles on the Fred Astaire movie Shall We Dance. Maxson Judell, a music industry contact, approached them about contributing a song to UCLA.”
Signed score. Image from Heritage Auctions.
“The Gershwins,” Wikipedia continues, “made a gift of the song to the University of California, Los Angeles. Ira Gershwin revised the lyrics and called the new version ‘Strike Up the Band for UCLA.’ The UCLA Band currently plays an arrangement of ‘Strike Up the Band for UCLA’ as part of each UCLA Bruins football pregame show and previously played the song at home basketball games.”
Strike Up The Band, the 1940 Flick. MGM cribbed the title and its song for a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland flick directed by Busby Berkeley. It has nothing to do with the real Strikes; it’s the second of the Rooney/Garland “hey, kids, let’s form a band” genre.
Wait through it long enough, and you’ll see Paul Whiteman and his band. There are a few modest attempts at Busby Berkeley’s fanciful dance images, though it’s said that Berkeley and Garland didn’t hit it off.
A Strike Up The Band One-Nighter, October 2024. Opera With Opera News, the members’ magazine of The Metropolitan Opera, describes “Now revived only rarely, Strike Up The Band had a one-night-only concert performance by MasterVoices at Carnegie Hall on October 29, with restored orchestration by Tommy Krasker and a new book by Laurence Maslon and Ted Sperlind that was based on both versions of the show. The score contained elements from the two versions as well.”
Strike Up the Band at Carnegie Hall, with Lissa de Guzman as Miss Meade and Phillip Attmore as Timothy Harper. Image from Opera News.
“In classic comic-opera fashion,” Opera News describes, “Strike Up The Band includes a war and bumbling soldiers, with a silly yet undeniably prescient plot about a grandiose, self-serving cheese manufacturer who manages to get the U.S. into a war with Switzerland over tariffs.”
Hmm… And how about Greenland and the Panama Canal? I surely hope these close by Saturday night. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025