#Groucho marx brothers archive
(Diamond also points out that the show’s revival is as much as product of YouTube as of Broadway-only in the digital age did the whole archive of the past become available.) A disappointing delivery, but a delivery all the same. There was also a single, soiled molar to build around: a version of the Napoleon scene that had, improbably, been made into a rather mediocre episode in a long-forgotten, cheaply made cartoon special in 1970, with the very elderly Groucho supplying his lines and Hans Conried doing the other brother’s voices. Another key scene, the Napoleon sketch, survived as well, in a script that had remained in Groucho’s archives. Diamond also knew that a short film made by the Marxes in the early thirties, as a kind of teaser for their feature “Monkey Business,” reproduced, in only very slightly different form, one of the lost musical’s key scenes. It was not really a script but more what a contemporary screenwriter would call a treatment. The dinosaur shinbone, in this case, was a typescript of Johnstone’s, a well-thumbed old draft outlining the show’s scenes. (Diamond also makes the interesting point that, while the original Groucho had to project his lines unamplified into a large Broadway theatre, we are now so used to hearing Groucho exclusively through his miked performances, in movies and on television, that he only sounds fully “Groucho” when miked onstage.) Diamond’s Groucho, which he has worked on for almost thirty years and showcased on many occasions, is genuinely uncanny, capturing the subtle truth that Groucho’s voice, far from being a machine-gun wise guy’s, is essentially soft and grainy, rising to its trebly heights only in feigned indignation. “Your eyes shine like the pants of my blue serge suit,” he would say to some winsome Thelma Todd of the eighties, a doubly baffling come-on: the girl had no idea what a blue serge suit was, and neither did he. “Groucho was my God.” His worship extended to trying to woo girls with borrowed Grouchoisms. The hunt to find “I’ll Say She Is” began when Diamond, as an adolescent growing up in the New York suburbs in the nineteen-eighties, fell in love, as awkward young men often do, with the mystique of the Marxes.
(For all the clichés of ascent from the tenements, that neighborhood was not really the Marxes’ haunt they were strictly Yorkville boys, raised around 93rd and Lexington.) Their windmill, for much of the past ten years, has been a full-scale stage revival, which they’ve now finally achieved, at the Connelly Theatre, on the Lower East Side, where the will open at last on Thursday evening. The Quixotes who fought for its return are the New York writer and performer Noah Diamond and his wife, the director Amanda Sisk, accompanied by a gang of twenty- and thirty-something friends. In truth, it was simply gone-gone into the same netherworld of fading programs and yellowing clippings that most other revues of the time have fallen into. To call the musical “lost” implies that someone was looking for it. One of the legendary late débuts of American theatrical history (the Marxes were well into their thirties when they finally escaped vaudeville for the stage), “I’ll Say She Is!” contained-nice chance to use the tendentious form of “arguably” here-arguably the most influential of all twentieth-century comic sketches, the legendary “Napoleon” scene that, more than any other five minutes in comedy, began the line of absurdist pop humor that continued on directly from the Marxes to Ernie Kovacs and right through to Monty Python. The need to have a group of dancers who resemble their own great-grandmothers comes about because the enterprise at hand is a revival of a twenties musical-and not even so much a revival, in the manner of the current “Shuffle Along,” as a full-scale, quixotic reconstruction, as improbable in ambition as the remaking of a Giganotosaurus skeleton from two shin bones and a tooth worn down by time, of the lost 1924 Marx Brothers musical “I’ll Say She Is.” Having opened in May of that high Jazz Age year at the Moorish Revival-style Casino Theatre, to rapturous reviews-one in particular, from Alexander Woollcott, more or less made the brothers’ reputation-the show closed the following February (a fine run for the time), never to be seen onstage again. Matt Walters, Matt Roper, Noah Diamond, and Seth Shelden are Zeppo, Chico, Groucho, and Harpo in a new revival of the Marx Brothers’ lost musical, “I’ll Say She Is.” Photograph by Mark X.