From Broadway To 52nd Street
In the same year, on Sunday, May 15, 1925 the Theatre Guild Revue presented the first of three editions of Garrick Gaities that was mounted for only two performances in an effort to raise funds for new tapestries. The song that stood out to become a jazz favorite was Manhattan, composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.
Comprised of a series of sketches, the opening number, “Soliciting Subscriptions” was a spoof of the Theatre Guild’s “serious pretensions”, Ryskind wrote skits including a satire of President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, and a parody of the Scopes Trial, which was dropped from the show after William Jennings Bryant died. Sterling Holloway and June Cochrane introduced the song “Manhattan”, as its easygoing strolling melody and ingeniously rhymed lyric related all of the everyday pleasures to be found in New York.
Jazz History: The first two decades of the twentieth century saw 52nd Street as a quiet, expensive residential thoroughfare with its five-story brown stones that served as town houses for the city’s well-to-do families and social elite. Prohibition was slow to affect this area and by 1925, six years after it’s passage, the Street had its first speakeasy established by Jean Billia in a converted millionaire brownstone to a multiple dwelling.
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