Very Good Eddie–Kern Babes in Wood

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In A Walkthrough Shows, Songs and More
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Here we are again; how did Tuesday arrive so quickly? There were a string of revivals on Broadway of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas early in the season; they always do well at the box office for about a week. As we said in our last post, Kern returned with a new show called Nobody Home in April 1915, with orchestrations by Frank Saddler. The show was produced by Elizabeth Marbury and F. Ray Comstock. You can read more about Marbury and Comstock on our website under production personnel, but the Cliff Notes version is that they were instrumental in developing the intimate shows that Kern wrote with P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton for the Princess Theatre. This show started an outpouring of truly remarkable scores from Kern. When we look back, it is hard to believe that he was that prolific. But he was.

In September, Victor Herbert opened his next major show, Princess Pat. The music is uniformly good, but there is no one song worth posting. The next night Ray Hubbell opened Hip-Hip-Hooray. There is nothing in the score that would lead us to believe that it ran for over a year, but it did. In early October, Kern’s Miss Information opened on Broadway, then came Friml’s Katinka in December. What is special about 1915 came just before Christmas on December 23, 1915; Jerome Kern’s Very Good Eddie opened on Broadway, using the same team as was used with Nobody Home. However, the score had one standout number in it. Very Good Eddie went through a restoration process at the Goodspeed Opera House in CT in 1975–which led to a new Broadway run. Goodspeed revived the show again in 2003.

The one song is called “Babes in the Wood.” We are going to provide you with two versions. The first is the John McGlinn restoration of the song, sung by Hugh Panero and Rebecca Luker. It gives you the original Frank Saddler orchestrations and provides the style and tempo of the original. The second version, which will be posted shortly, is sung by Irene Dunne. We think you will like it, too. Besides, the video version by Irene has a montage of some of her best roles in the movies.