ANN ARBOR, MI – It’s been almost 100 years since the last recorded production of composer George Gershwin’s musical “La La Lucille.”
After opening on Broadway in 1919 and touring for a few years, its last known production was in Massachusetts in May 1926. It’s since been seen as a lost work of one of the great American musicians.
But, thanks to a University of Michigan researcher, what once was lost now is found. And, thanks to a pair of the university’s vocal students, you can now hear the historic music for yourself.
UM Researcher Jacob Kerzner found a box of the musical’s material in the Samuel French Collection at Amherst College in summer 2023, university officials said.
The approximately 800 pages of material included the musical’s complete orchestration, with parts for flute, cello, trumpet, trombone, percussion, violin, bass and piano.
In a concert this February, students from UM’s School of Music, Theatre and Dance performed some of the long-lost songs. This included junior Aquila Sol’s rendition of “Somehow It Seldom Comes True” and junior Keyon Pickett singing “From Now On,” with both conducted by professor Jayce Ogren.
The musical depicts a couple that’s struggling financially until the husband inherits $2 million (about $35 million today) from his late aunt. The catch is that they must got divorced, so the plot involves the couple trying to trick everyone into thinking the divorce is legitimate before they remarry and hold onto the money.
Hearing the orchestrations was a thrill for Kerzner, as the public had only been able to hear piano renditions until his discovery.
“We get to hear these fun flute lines that we hadn’t noticed,” he said. “We get to warm up some of these ballads with strings and we get to even see some of the changes in harmony that may not have been published in the piano-vocal, but that George Gershwin or Frank Saddler may have adjusted as they developed this show for Broadway.”
Unearthing Gershwin’s work is “to study the words and music that shaped and soon defined American popular culture,” said Mark Clague, editor-in-chief of the university’s Gershwin Critical Edition project.
Clague’s team, with Kerzner as associate editor, is working with the musical theater school to create a “critical edition” publication that comprehensively reexamines Gershwin’s work, officials said. This includes access to handwritten musical scores, letters and compositional drafts to create a multi-volume “Gershwin Critical Edition” publication, officials said.
The focus on Gershwin has already produced “critical editions” of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in 2023, and will later produce works on “An American in Paris,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Of Thee I Sing” and eventually “La La Lucille,” officials said.
Through this work, university researchers now have an attitude that “anything lost is merely misplaced until we can find it,” Clague said.
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