Knickerbocker Holiday

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Knickerbocker Holiday
Broadway Show

Theatre	Ethel Barrymore Theatre (1938 - 1939) and 46th Street Theatre (1939)
Opening Night	19 October 1938
Author(s)	Music by Kurt Weill; book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson
Director	Joshua Logan
Leading Original Cast Members	Walter Huston
Closing Night	1 March 1939

Knickerbocker Holiday was a Broadway musical written by Kurt Weill (music) and Maxwell Anderson (book and lyrics); it was directed by Joshua Logan. It opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on October 19, 1938 and closed on March 11, 1939 after 168 performances. The original production starred Walter Huston, Jeanne Madden, and Ray Middleton. Among the songs introduced in the show was the "September Song", now considered a pop standard. Knickerbocker Holiday is both a romantic comedy and a thinly veiled allegory equating the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose ancestor is one of the characters on the corrupt town council) with fascism. As is apparent from the preface he wrote for the play, as well as the play and the songs themselves, Maxwell Anderson was a pacifist and an individualist anarchist. He saw the New Deal as another example of the corporatism and concentration of political power which had given rise to Nazism and Stalinism. His animus toward the state is more soberly revealed in one of his two tragedies about the Sacco and Vanzetti execution, Winterset. This play, coincidentally, starred Burgess Meredith, the same actor who was originally to star in Knickerbocker Holiday (Burgess, a friend of Weill's, who was to play the romantic young lead Brom Broek, left when he saw the villainous Stuyvessant character growing into a more a more lovable and important role, upstaging him). The setting of the musical is New Amsterdam. It is narrated by character Washington Irving, who wrote the source material for the musical, FATHER KNICKERBOCKER'S STORIES. It begins shortly before the arrival of the new Governor, Peter Stuyvessant (played by Walter Huston in the Broadway show). Broek, an American individualist, can't take orders because of the wild corn he ate in the forest. If ever anyone gives him an order, he assaults them. This has made it difficult to court his beloved, Tina Tienhoven, the daughter of the head of the town council.

Stuyvessant arrives just in time to rescue Broek from a hanging engineered by his beloved's father, in order to get the impoverished ne'er do well to make way for. . . the wealthy and powerful Stuyvessant himself as a suitor for the fair Tina. Naturally Broek is grateful: until Stuyvessant quickly asserts what is for all intents and purposes a fascist dictatorship. I don't want to spoil the ending, which is a happy one, but in between, there are some wonderful songs, including The September Song, It Never Was You, All Hail the Political Honeymoon and One Touch of Alchemy, Will You Remember Me, We are Cut in Twain, Young People Think About Love, and the One Indispensable Man. There is now a cd of an original Broadway recording (with Huston, Madden, et alia). A movie version starred Nelson Eddy as Broek: it is rarely if ever played, even on Turner Classic Movies.