Leave It to Jane

Leave It to Jane is a musical in two acts, with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, based on the 1904 play The College Widow, by George Ade. The story concerns the football rivalry between Atwater College and Bingham College, and satirizes college life in a Midwestern U.S. town. A star halfback, Billy, forsakes his father's alma mater, Bingham, to play at Atwater, to be near the seductive Jane, the daughter of Atwater's president.

The musical was created for the Princess Theatre, but another of the "Princess Theatre Shows", Oh, Boy!, was a long-running hit at the Princess at the same time; so Leave It to Jane premiered instead at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway in 1917. and had a long-running Off-Broadway revival in 1959. Some of the best-known songs are "A Peach of a Life", "Leave It to Jane", "The Crickets Are Calling", "The Siren’s Song", "Sir Galahad" and "Cleopatterer".

Early in the 20th century, American musical theatre consisted of a mix of elaborate European operettas, like The Merry Widow (1907), British musical comedy imports, like The Arcadians (1910), George M. Cohan's shows, American operettas, like those of Victor Herbert, ragtime-infused American musicals, and the spectacular revues of Florenz Ziegfeld and others. As Cohan's and Herbert's creative output waned, new creative talent on Broadway included composer Jerome Kern, who began by revising British musicals to suit American audiences, adding songs that "have a timeless, distinctly American sound that redefined the Broadway showtune."

In 1914, Theatre agent Elisabeth Marbury asked Kern and a new playwright, Guy Bolton, to write a series of musicals specifically tailored to the small Princess Theatre with an intimate style and modest budgets, that would provide an alternative to the Ziegfeld reviews, elaborate operettas and imported shows. Kern and Bolton's first Princess Theatre musical was Nobody Home (1915), an adaptation of a London show called Mr. Popple of Ippleton. Their second was an original musical called Very Good Eddie (1915). This little show ran for 314 performances on a modest budget. British humorist and lyricist/playwright P. G. Wodehouse had supplied some lyrics for Very Good Eddie and joined the team at the Princess for Oh, Boy!, which opened in February 1917, becoming a hit. In their collaborations, Bolton wrote most of the book, with Wodehouse writing the lyrics. According to Bloom and Vlastnik, Oh, Boy! represents "the transition from the haphazard musicals of the past to the newer, more methodical modern musical comedy ... remarkably pun-free [with plots that were] natural and unforced. Charm was uppermost in the creators' minds ... the audience could relax, have a few laughs, feel slightly superior to the silly undertakings on stage, and smile along with the simple, melodic, lyrically witty but undemanding songs".

With Oh, Boy! playing at the Princess, Leave It to Jane had to open at another Broadway house, the Longacre Theatre, on March 29, 1917. Like the Princess Theatre shows, it featured modern American settings, eschewing operetta traditions of foreign locales and elaborate scenery. The authors sought to have the humor flow from the plot situations, rather than from musical set pieces. In 1918, Dorothy Parker described in Vanity Fair how the team's shows integrated story and music: "Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern are my favorite indoor sport. I like the way they go about a musical comedy. ... I like the way the action slides casually into the songs. ... I like the deft rhyming of the song that is always sung in the last act by two comedians and a comedienne. And oh, how I do like Jerome Kern's music."

Leave It to Jane ran for a modestly successful 167 performances, directed by Edward Royce and choreographed by David Bennett. Though the critics liked the music and lyrics, as well as the cast generally, they were most impressed by Georgia O'Ramey in the comedy role of Flora.

An Off-Broadway revival opened on May 25, 1959 at the Sheridan Square Playhouse and ran for more than two years (958 performances), and the cast recorded the show's first cast album, starring Kathleen Murray (later Kathleen Hallor) as Jane. A young George Segal had a small part. The show is occasionally still staged, including a 1985 production at Goodspeed Opera House starring Rebecca Luker.

On the first day of the new school term, at "Good Old Atwater" College in Indiana is having difficulty assembling a first-rate football team to pit against its arch-rival school, Bingham. Matty McGowan, the team's coach, is discouraged. "Stub" Talmadge returns from vacation with news of a prospect, "Silent" Murphy, a muscular ex-piano mover who will be a great center; they just need to convince the President that Murphy is a real student. Bessie, Stub's girlfriend, is the local golf champ; the two wonder about married life ("A Peach of a Life"). Stub is trying to avoid Flora Wiggins and her mother, to whom he owes $18 in back rent for the room at their boarding house.