100 Years Ago Today: The Marx Brothers Crash into Broadway with “I’ll Say She Is”

100 years ago today: the official Broadway opening of the Marx Brothers’ first Broadway show, I’ll Say She Is. An excerpt from my new bookThe Marx Brothers Miscellany:

I’ll Say She Is, a revue of comedy sketches and songs by Will B. Johnstone, previewed at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia before moving to the Casino Theatre in New York on May 19, 1924. The exact contents have been lost to time, but my friend and colleague Noah Diamond did a bang-up job of collecting the remaining fragments, stitching them together, and filling in remaining gaps with very well-educated guesses. The most exciting extant bits of the show consisted of two blackout sketches, the Napoleon sketch and the Theatrical Agency sketch.

The Napoleon sketch was written by Johnstone and Groucho and is sure fire, although not in the only version that ever made it to celluloid, which was a 1970 animated special called The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians(1970). This hard-to-stomach concoction stars an elderly Groucho, voice over actor Paul Frees as Chico and Zeppo, and Joan Gardner of Santa Claus is Coming to Town as Josephine. This canned and stilted version doesn’t convey the madcap nature of the skit, which among other things was the source of the hilarious “iceman” business with Thelma Todd in Horse Feathers.

The Theatrical Agency sketch was originally written by vaudeville scribe Herman Timberg for the Marx Brothers vaudeville tab show On the Balcony in 1921. It was a delightful little calling card for the act, in which the four of them burst into an agent’s office and vie for a job. The hook of the sketch is that it is done entirely in rhyming couplets and delivered at a brisk pace. It’s quite irresistible. In 1923-24, it was interpolated into I’ll Say She Is. Finally in 1931 to promote their upcoming movie Monkey Business, they filmed a version of the sketch as part of a Paramount promotional film called The House That Shadows Built and thus we now have it to watch and enjoy. The existence of the film makes it one of the few parts of I’ll Say She Is that people have already seen. And truth to tell, a PART of the sketch has been seen by an even wider audience, for they adapted one of the routines in the sketch for Monkey Business (the bit where they all do their Chevalier imitation has its roots in the Theatrical Agency sketch).

Anyway…I had the great honor of directing and producing the first live presentations of Noah’s exhumed take on I’ll Say She Is in 2014, prior to the full off-Broadway revival two years later. You can read about the whole process, and about the original show as well, in Noah’s 2016 Gimme a Thrill: The Story of “I’ll Say She Is”, The Lost Broadway Musical and How It was Found.And…in this terrific presentation made by Noah at Marxfest in 2024: