Strike Up the Band

Strike Up the Band is a 1927 musical with a book by Morrie Ryskind, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by George Gershwin. It first ran as a satirical show in Philadelphia that year, unsuccessfully, and on Broadway in 1930 after the original book by George S. Kaufman was revised by Ryskind. The show concerned a cheese manufacturer who sponsors a war against Switzerland because it will be named after him. Much of the satire of the 1927 version was replaced in the new version by silliness, leading Ryskind to recall, "What I had to do, in a sense, was to rewrite War and Peace for the Three Stooges." In the 1930 version the opening of Act I of the musical was reset from a cheese factory to a chocolate factory, and much of the work was a re-imagined as occurring during a dream sequence. Aside from the title tune, the 1940 Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musical film Strike Up the Band had no relation to the stage production. The overture is often performed as a stand-alone concert work. Libretto The original book by George S. Kaufman centered on Horace J. Fletcher, a Babbitt-like cheese tycoon who tries to maintain his monopoly on the American market by convincing the United States government to declare war on Switzerland. The story ended darkly.