Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business by Ethan Mordden

Author:Ethan Mordden [Mordden, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2008-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

1 A few playhouses did dare the side streets above, say, Forty-Sixth Street, but Broadway proper lay empty of theatres except for the cinema built in 1924 that, some years later, became today’s Broadway Theatre.

1 McCoy introduced one of the biggest song hits of the early-twentieth-century musical, “Yama Yama Man,” in Karl Hoschna’s Three Twins (1908). Dressed in harlequin pajamas with gigantic fluffy buttons and a clown’s cone hat, McCoy pranced her way through this ragtime novelty about a bogeyman who terrifies “ev’ry little tot at night.” The verse creeps about in the minor key, then flares into the major for the exuberant chorus—an outstanding newfangle where most songs came off the assembly line. McCoy’s performance became one of the sights of the age, and she greatly saddened her public when she retired to marry the intrepid war correspondent Richard Harding Davis. After his death, in the spring of 1916, she returned as Bessie McCoy Davis, making her first reappearance on Broadway in this very show for the Kern-Wodehouse “The Old Man in the Moon.” Marked “light and shimmering,” this dainty piece tells how the sly old dog came down to monitor the hostilities in Europe and side with the U.S., which had been over there for seven months. Later in Act One, when McCoy reprised “Yama Yama Man” in exact re-creation, one critic wrote, “The house literally rose to her.” Ginger Rogers revives the number, pajamas and all, in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.

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