It is a heady experience embodying your comedy idol. Johnstone’s great-granddaughter, Margaret Farrell, a musicologist, helped with the adaptation. Groucho: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?Ĭhico: That wasn’t last night it was the night before last night.įrom Chicagoan Ira Dolnick, with whom Diamond connected on the Internet a decade ago, he received sheet music for five songs from the show. “In parentheses at one point, it said, ‘business with hats.’ But it provided a clothesline I could hang other fragments on.”įrom Groucho’s scrapbooks housed in the Smithsonian, Diamond unearthed this bit of quintessential Marx Brothers wordplay: Johnstone, who later co-wrote "Monkey Business" and "Horse Feathers." Vexing to Diamond were “very obscure notes,” he said. The template was a 30-page treatment-type rehearsal script written by Will B. It just gradually became clear that maybe this thing could be put back together.” I kept finding little fragments of the show’s content a joke quoted in a column, a couple of songs that hadn’t been heard in almost a century but existed as sheet music. “I started to seriously research it in 2009. “I’m attracted to what is just out of reach,” Diamond said. Unlike "The Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers," which originated on Broadway, "I’ll Say She Is" was missing in action. The fact that the Marx Brothers were musical theatre figures doesn’t get commented on a lot.”
I’m a theatre kid, and I love New York and the culture of the 1920s. The team’s Broadway period, he said, “hits my sweet spot. The more he read about the team, the more “interested and haunted” he became by "I’ll Say She Is." It’s the first thing he would check in the index of any new book on the Marx Bros. His parents owned a copy of Joe Adamson’s seminal, “Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo.” “Just the faces and the pictures (from their films) were enough to get me interested in these guys,” he said. As a boy, he discovered the Marx Brothers in books.
#MARX BROTHERS MOVIES MOVIE#
“I started saying “Ahhhh” and then about six months later, I went, ‘Ha.’”ĭiamond, 39, missed the late ‘60s and early 1970s Marx Brothers revival and the heyday of repertory movie theatres that screened their films in the era before home video and cable. Another is a talent agency sketch in which the brothers take turns trying to impress a talent agent with their (horrible) impersonations of a star of the day (Al Jolsen in Diamond’s “I’ll Say She Is.” This sketch was later recreated on film to promote Monkey Business with the team impersonating Maurice Chevalier and was also restaged in that film).īut the rest of the revue’s songs and sketches were scattered to the winds.ĭiamond’s quest to rescue “I’ll Say She Is” from obscurity was “a very gradual a-ha moment,” he said in a phone interview from his dressing room at the Connelly. Its most lasting legacy is a sketch featuring Groucho as Napoleon bidding farewell to Josephine, who is being romanced under his nose by Chico, Harpo and Zeppo. “I’ll Say She Is” made the vaudeville-headlining Marx Brothers full-fledged Broadway stars and darlings of New York’s smart set (literally Harpo, in particular, was taken under the wing of influential New Yorker critic Alexander Wollcott and introduced to the wits of the Algonquin Round Table).
#MARX BROTHERS MOVIES SERIES#
This newest incarnation is directed by Amanda Sisk, Diamond’s wife, with whom he has collaborated on a series of political shows under the banner Nero Fiddled. Today, the graphic designer by day and Groucho by night, is starring in a full-fledged off-Broadway production of “I’ll Say She Is” at the Connelly Theatre. That changed in 2014 when Diamond, starring as Groucho (thus becoming only the second actor ever to star in the role in this revue) mounted sold-out and well-received “re-premieres” of “I’ll Say She Is,” first at Marxfest in New York City, and then at the New York International Fringe Festival. But through seven years of painstaking research, the cooperation of surviving family members of the original creators, and the kindness of kindred-spirited strangers, Diamond was able to reconstruct “I’ll Say She Is,” which had not been performed in almost a century. The second is a pristine and unexpurgated print of "Horse Feathers" (this, sadly, eluded Universal’s restoration team). The first is "Humor Risk," the Marx Brothers’ first foray into film, a 1921 silent that one and all deemed unreleasable and is presumed lost. “I’ll Say She Is,” which debuted in 1924, is one of three Marx Brothers holy grails for fans. The subtitle says it all: “The Story of ‘I’ll Say She Is': The Lost Marx Brothers Musical and How It Was Found.” It is both a detective story and one of the great “let’s put on a show” show business sagas But Noah Diamond’s book, “Gimme a Thrill,” is a particularly heroic piece of Marx scholarship.
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