The Girl Behind the Gun opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Monday, 16 September 1918 under the management of Klaw & Erlanger. It was directed by Edgar MacGregor, with choreography by Julian Mitchell and musical direction by Charles Previn. Scenic designs were provided by Clifford Pember. Costumes were designed by the Schneider-Anderson Company. Men’s clothes were by Croydon Ltd.
The action was divided into three acts:
Act 1 Garden of Georgette’s villa. Fontainebleau
Act II Porch of Georgette’s house
Act III Interior of Pavilion
The cast for the first performance was as follows:
The star of the show was John E. Hazzard, who had played the lead in Bolton’s first successful play The Rule of Three and had also been one of the stars in Very Good Eddie. The other male lead was Donald Brian, who had created a name for himself in 1907 playing Prince Danilo in The Merry Widow. Since that time, he had appeared in a string of Broadway hits including The Dollar Princess (1909), The Marriage Market (1913), The Girl from Utah (1914) (in which he introduced the Jerome Kern classic ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’) and Sybil (1916). The two female leads were Wilda Bennett and Ada Meade. Wilda had appeared in the trios’ The Riviera Girl (1917), while Ada’s Broadway highlights included High Jinks (1913), The Red Canary (1914) and Rambler Rose (1917).
The Songs
The score featured eleven original songs written by P.G. Wodehouse with music by Ivan Caryll. All of the songs plus the dance music for a waltz by Caryll and the fox-trot ‘No Conversation’ composed by the show’s musical director, Charles Previn, were published by Chappell & Co., New York; while an interpolated song by George M. Cohan, ‘I’m True to Them All (And They’re Just As True to Me)’ was published by M. Witmark & Sons, New York.
Act 1
Opening Chorus
‘Godsons and Godmothers’ (Ada Meade & Chorus)
‘I’m True to Them All (And They’re Just As True to Me)’ (John E. Young & Chorus)
‘A Happy Family’ (Frank Doane, Ada Meade & Donald Brian)
‘Some Day Waiting Will End’ (Wilda Bennett)
‘I Like It’ (Ada Meade, Frank Doane, Donald Brian & John E. Hazzard)
Ensemble
Act 2
Opening Chorus
‘How Warm It is To-day’ (Donald Brian, Frank Doane & Ada Meade)
‘The Girl Behind the Gun’ (Wilda Bennett & Chorus)
‘Women Haven’t Any Mercy on a Man’ (John E. Hazzard)
‘Life in the Old Dog Yet’ (Donald Brian & Wilda Bennett)
Finale—‘Flags of Allies’ (Tout Ensemble)
Act 3
Opening Chorus
‘Back to the Dear Old Trenches’ (Donald Brian, John E. Hazzard & John E. Young)
‘There’s a Light in Your Eyes’ (Donald Brian & Wilda Bennett)
Finale
Reactions to the songs were summarised in The Music Trades (21 September 1918, p.36):
Some of the songs promise to be heard many times on Broadway and off. “I Like It”, “Some Day Waiting Will End”, sung by Miss Bennett and chorus, and “There’s a Light in Your Eyes”, by Donald Brian and Miss Bennett, seemed especially to delight the audience, but in its way not more than Jack Hazzard’s pathetic plaint, “Women Haven’t Any Mercy on a Man”. There were two trios, “A Happy Family” and “How Warm It is To-day”, that had the quality of the Gilbert and Sullivan things.
‘The Girl Behind the Gun’
Ev’ry day new tales we read,
Telling of some gallant deed
Wrought by soldiers fighting to defend their native land
But there’s someone I could name,
Who, tho’ all unknown to Fame,
Ought to be considered just as wonderful and grand …
Far away from the battle whirl
There is work to be done
And that’s where you will find the girl
Behind the man behind the gun …
‘Women Haven’t Any Mercy on a Man’
Gosh! Women are the hardest propositions!
You plead with them for hours and they don’t care,
They listen to the silv’ry voice of reason
With nothing stirring underneath the hair.
I flirted with the smallest girl in Paris
But now at home we suffer grief and pain
As if I’d been and gone and overdone it
And flirted with a Violet Loraine.*
For women haven’t any sense of justice
They never make allowances at all;
They never think it makes it any better
If the girl they catch their husband with is small.
When we dined I had to sit her on a cushion!
But my wife is making all the fuss she can.
I could hardly do her homage,
This ‘petite’ piece of fromage;
Women haven’t any mercy on a man!
*[A British leading lady of the musical theatre of the period, best remembered for The Bing Boys Are Here (1916) in which she introduced the song ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ with George Robey. She had also performed as principal boy in the pantomime Puss in Boots for JCW in Australia in 1913 and appeared on Broadway in The Merry Countess in 1912.]
The Reviews
In reviewing the opening night, the New York Times, 17 September 1918, observed:
Military musical comedy up to the minute, with situations suggested from the other side, properly deprived of all of war’s grim realities, and dressed up in frivolity for Broadway, describes ‘The Girl Behind the Gun’, which had its first showing at the New Amsterdam Theatre last night. The godmother craze among the soldiers the godson craze among the girls behind the guns, as popularly conceived, provide the material for the plot of the piece—and the plot really sustains itself most of the time throughout the three acts.
Donald Brian appears as Robert Lambrissac, a romantic playwright serving as a soldier, who takes the place of one Brichoux, an army cook (John E. Young), because Georgette Breval, an actress (Ada Meade), has adopted the cook as her godson, and Lambrissac wants to get her to produce his play. Georgette’s rich uncle, Colonel Servan (Frank Doane) discovers her kissing Lambrissac, and assumes that they are married. They pretend that they are because Georgette fears her uncle’s ire if he knows the truth. So when the lady’s real husband appears, played by Jack Hazzard, he is forced to play the role of Brichoux, the cook. He accepts the part because his wife has discovered a letter to him from another woman—and with this merry mix-up the play goes on. To add to the jumble Lambrissac’s real wife appears. Brichoux returns to claim his identity – and everything is every way except the right way until in the capacious last minute before the final curtain, when it is all straightened out.
There is opportunity for comedy in the succeeding scenes, and Jack Hazzard leads in stirring up the laughter, with Frank Doane supporting him well. Donald Brian, of course, is good looking, agreeable, and full of dance. Ada Meade and Wilda Bennett are there to be pretty and sing—and do both pleasingly.
Some of the songs promise to be heard many times on Broadway and off. ‘I like It’, a quartet by Jack Hazzard, Donald Brian, Frank Doane, and Miss Meade, ‘Some Day Waiting Will End’, sung by Miss Bennett and the chorus. And ‘There’s a Light in Your Eyes’, by Donald Brian and Miss Bennett, seemed especially to delight the audience. But in its way, not more than Jack Hazzard’s pathetic plaint, ‘Women Haven’t Any Mercy on a Man’.
The stage settings won applause for themselves.
A few days later, the New York Times of 22 September 1918 added:
It is no doubt inevitable that even musical comedy today should take its atmosphere and color from the war. Certainly no more harmless—and, indeed, no more enjoyable—use could be made of flags and uniforms than in ‘The Girl Behind the Gun’, with which the New Amsterdam opens its present season. No American uniform is seen, and it is only in a single moment that the flags are waved—and then we are spared the ineptitude of any patriotic word or note from chorus girls. The plot centres in the joys of French soldiers on ‘permission’ in Paris, and the only reference to the more serious business of war is a trio in which the much perplexed principals of amorous intrigue voice their relief at the prospect of going ‘back to the dear old trenches’—a song which has at once the true soldierly ring and touch of the profoundly humorous. The book and lyrics, by Bolton and Wodehouse, are in their best vein; the music by Ivan Caryll, is unfailingly gay and often inspiringly fresh; while Donald Brian, Jack Hazzard, Ada Meade, and Frank Doane make up on of the most genuinely diverting quartet of principals lately seen on our musical stage.
The Girl Behind the Gun romped along at the New Amsterdam Theatre, when in February 1919 it was displaced by a new edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. Nevertheless, it achieved a run of 160 performances, and enjoyed a short out-of-town tour with its original cast still in place.