I'll Say She Is
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I'll Say She Is was a stage revue written by brothers Will B. Johnstone (book) and Tom Johnstone (music) and starring the Marx Brothers and Lotta Miles which led to their rise out of Vaudeville into stardom in the Broadway theatre and later in motion pictures. It came at a time when the Marxes had gotten themselves effectively banned from the major vaudeville circuits owing to a dispute with E.F. Albee, and had failed in an attempt to produce their own shows on the alternate Shubert circuit. The show was a hodgepodge of old Marx routines and musical numbers, loosely tied together by the theme of a rich girl looking for a thrill. The climax was a long sketch featuring Groucho as Napoleon, which the Brothers themselves regarded as the funniest thing they ever did.
The show opened in Philadelphia in May of 1923 and played around the country for a year before opening at the Casino Theatre in New York on May 19, 1924. Legend has it that the first-string critics for the New York papers were slated to see a different show premiering at the Winter Garden Theatre the same night, and only came to I'll Say She Is when the other show was postponed at the last moment; however, as both the Winter Garden and the Casino were part of the Shubert chain, it seems more likely that the openings were deliberate set for different dates, to avoid competing with each other. In any case, the critics, most notably Alexander Woollcott, raved about the show, and the Marx Brothers became first-rank stars virtually overnight.
They went on to star in two more hit Broadway shows, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers; unlike those shows, however, I'll Say She Is was never made into a film, presumably because it was a revue rather than a play. A version of its opening scene, however, was made into a short for Paramount Pictures as part of a feature called The House That Shadows Built, as a promotion for the then-upcoming Marx film Monkey Business; and an animated version of the Napoleon scene was incorporated into a 1970 ABC-TV special called The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians.
