Show Girl

This show night have been fun to see. It was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, the score was by Gershwin, the Duke Ellington band played the music (it had beaten out Louis Armstrong's band for the honor) and it starred Ruby Keeler, Jimmy Durante and Harriet Hoctor. (Hoctor dances with Fred Astaire in Shall We Dance). The score featured the song "Liza" and Hoctor danced in a ballet sequence featuring music from An American in Paris which was choreographed by Albertina Rasch. Gershwin was given just two weeks to write the score so he evidently decided to recycle this piece. On several nights, Al Jolson sang "Liza" from the audience in an effort to calm down Ruby Keeler - whom he had recently married.

Nonetheless, according to Gerald Bordman , the show was "heavy and slow" and closed after 111 performances. In its review Time liked several aspects of the show. It praised Keeler and Durante:

Dixie Dugan is played by pert, agile Ruby Keeler ("Mrs. Al") Jolson, whose reedy little voice blends naturally with familiar Broadway trebles. . . .

[W]ith happy frequency there does reappear a property man, impersonated by Jimmie Durante (pronounce the final e), who is one of the funniest things that ever happened in Manhattan. Night-club experts have been Durante-conscious for many a season. He is a tousled, electric fellow whose frothing utterances combine lunacy with bad grammar. His nose ("Schnoz-zola") puts Cyrano's to shame. His history includes private entertaining in his father's barber shop and at East Side parties and weddings; public appearances in Harlem, at Coney Island, circuit vaudeville.

Among the numbers Durante performed were "Who Will Be with You When I'm Far Away (Far Out in Far Rockaway)". Time even liked (at least in part) the Hoctor ballet:

Best of the new Gershwiniana are "Liza" and "So Are You"; most ambitious is the new Gershwin ballet, "An American in Paris." [Gershwin had composed the piece in 1928 and performed it at Lewisohn stadium in the summer of 1929 with the New York Philharmonic. It was his debut as a conductor]. The latter, embellished by the grace of Danseuse Harriet Hoctor, is marred by patriotic excitement at the finish in which a picture of President Hoover is momentarily expected to appear. Chief motif of the music is the shrill bark of Paris taxicab horns.

However, Time conceded that the show "inclines at intervals to be burdensome." The New Yorker called it "an uninspired stage-Cinderella story." But the magazine conceded that audiences would probably enjoy it because of Keeler, Jolson and the "Ziegfeld trimmings."

Despite its flaws, the show well illustrates the magnitude of talent at work in New York in 1929: Gershwin, Ellington, Keeler, Durante and Rasch. Remember this was a show with so much talent at its disposal that it could afford to turn Louis Armstrong down! Who knows, though, maybe Louis would have provided the spark the show clearly needed.