The Gershwins in Britain

Abstract

Overwhelmingly, the British reputation of George Gershwin is as a ‘serious’ composer: but this is liable to obscure not only the contributions he and his brother Ira made to the popular music theatre in Britain, but also, conversely, the British influences upon this seemingly all-American pair. George was profoundly influenced by that pre-eminent American Anglophile of his time, Jerome Kern, while British influences upon the semi-scholarly Ira extended far beyond W. S. Gilbert and P. G. Wodehouse. After ‘Swanee’ swept Britain in 1920, and George had honed his art and craft by writing the score for the West End revue, The Rainbow (1923), came the musical comedy, Primrose (1924) – its score his first to be published, and including some of his earliest orchestrations. A prototype of the frivolous comedies of the era, Primrose marked the first time the brothers were billed together as the Gershwins, since Ira had earlier written as ‘Arthur Francis’: it was also the immediate precursor of their first great Broadway hit, Lady, Be Good! Finally, in 1928, Ira collaborated, without George, on the London show That's a Good Girl – though Damsel in Distress, the brothers' last film musical, was a valedictory to the British-American musical comedy of the era. James Moore's earlier transatlantic study, of Cole Porter in Britain, appeared in NTQ30 (1992), and his Radio Two programme on the revue producer André Charlot was broadcast in October 1993.