Abie's Irish Rose


Abie's Irish Rose is a popular comedy by Anne Nichols familiar from stage productions, films and radio programs. The basic premise involves an Irish Catholic girl and a young Jewish man who marry despite the objections of their families.

Theater and films

Although initially receiving poor reviews, the Broadway play was a commercial hit, running for 2,327 performances between May 23, 1922, and October 1, 1927, at the time the longest run in Broadway theater history, surpassing the record 1,291 performances set by the Winchell Smith and Frank Bacon 1918 play, Lightnin'. The show's touring company had a similarly long run and held the record for longest running touring company for nearly 40 years until the record was broken by Hello, Dolly! in the 1960s. The touring company's male lead was played by a young George Brent, the future Hollywood actor's first major role, and the female lead was played by .
Abie's Irish Rose was revived on Broadway in 1937 and again in an updated version in 1954.
The play was twice the inspiration for films: in 1928 with Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Nancy Carroll, directed by Victor Fleming, and in 1946 with Richard Norris and Joanne Dru, directed by A. Edward Sutherland. The 1946 version, produced by Bing Crosby, met with considerable published controversy.

Radio

It inspired the weekly NBC radio series, Abie's Irish Rose, which replaced Knickerbocker Playhouse and ran from January 24, 1942, through September 2, 1944. Faced with listener protests about its stereotyped ethnic portrayals, the radio series was cancelled in 1945. Nichols wrote the scripts. Axel Gruenbert and Joe Rines directed the cast that starred Richard Bond, Sydney Smith, Richard Coogan and Clayton "Bud" Collyer as Abie Levy. Betty Winkler, Mercedes McCambridge, Julie Stevens, Bernard Gorcey, and Marion Shockley portrayed Rosemary Levy. Solomon Levy was played by Alfred White, Charlie Cantor and Alan Reed.
Others in the radio cast: Walter Kinsella, Menasha Skulnik, Anna Appel, Ann Thomas, Bill Adams, Amanda Randolph and Dolores Gillenas. The announcer was Howard Petrie, and Joe Stopak provided the music. The opening theme music was "My Wild Irish Rose" by Chauncey Olcott.
The basic premise was extensively copied, and Anne Nichols sued one imitator, Universal Pictures, which produced The Cohens and Kellys, a motion picture play about an Irish boy who marries a Jewish girl from feuding families. However, in Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found for the defendant, holding that copyright protection cannot be extended to the characteristics of stock characters in a story, whether it be a book, play or film.

Plot

Nichols' original Broadway play had the couple meeting in France during World War I, with the young man having been a soldier and the girl a nurse who had tended to him. In Nichols’ version, the priest and the rabbi from the wedding are also veterans of the same war, and recognize one another from their time in the service.
The rest of the plot was summarized by Judge Learned Hand, in his opinion in the copyright lawsuit filed by Nichols:
There have been some variations of the plot, as to setting, or how the characters meet, in later versions of the play or in adaptations for film.

Critical response

Although the play was a tremendous popular success, it was universally loathed by the critics. Robert Benchley, then the theatre critic for Life magazine, nursed a particular hatred for it. Part of Benchley's job was to write capsule reviews each week. Abie's Irish Rose he described variously as "Something Awful", "Just about as low as good clean fun can get", "Showing that the Jews and the Irish crack equally old jokes", "The comic spirit of 1876", "People laugh at this every night, which explains why democracy can never be a success", "Will the Marines never come?" and finally "Hebrews 13:8," a Biblical passage that reads, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” He also held a contest for an outsider to contribute the capsule review, which Harpo Marx won with "No worse than a bad cold."
Writing in The New Yorker of its 1937 revival, Wolcott Gibbs said that "it had, in fact, the rather eerie quality of a repeated nightmare; the one, perhaps, in which I always find myself in an old well, thick with bats, and can't get out."
The Anti-Defamation League protested the use of Jewish stereotypes in the 1946 film version, claiming it "will reinforce, if it does not actually create, greater doubt and keener misconceptions, as well as outright prejudice."
Reflecting on the play's message of social tolerance, Brooks Atkinson wrote about the 1954 revival, "What was a comic strip joke in 1922 is a serious problem today. Every now and then Abie's Irish Rose strikes a sensitive chord. For good will is in shorter supply now than it was thirty-two years ago."
Contemporary scholar Jordan Schildcrout reads Abie's Irish Rose in relation to rising anxieties about immigration during the 1920s, as well as to current events such as the establishment of the Irish Free State, the British Mandate for Palestine, and the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. He writes, "In an era when anti-Jewish and anti-Irish sentiments were prominent, the play's representation of ethnic pride might have empowered audiences, while also offering them a happy fantasy of belonging and becoming increasingly 'American,' and therefore not subject to the old prejudices and ethnic rivalries."

Cultural references

expressed the feeling of many in the theater world in these lines for "Manhattan": "Our future babies we'll take to Abie's Irish Rose -- I hope they'll live to see it close."
The play was popular enough for its title to be referenced in a pun in the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers, in the lyrics of the Cole Porter song "Ace in the Hole", the Stephen Sondheim song "I'm Still Here", and the song "The Legacy" from the musical On the Twentieth Century.

Thematic legacy

Abie's Irish Rose prefigured the comedy of Stiller and Meara, a husband-and-wife team, who often spiked their routines with references to their differing backgrounds.
The play also provided the central premise for the 1972–73 television series Bridget Loves Bernie, which starred Meredith Baxter and David Birney in a kind-of reversal of Abie's Irish Rose in that Birney played struggling young Jewish cab driver/aspiring playwright Bernie Steinberg, whose parents ran a modest family delicatessen, and Baxter played Irish Catholic daughter of wealthy parents, Bridget Fitzgerald, who falls in love with and elopes with Steinberg to the disappointment of both sets of parents. The show was attacked by a broad range of Jewish groups for allegedly promoting inter-faith marriage, and it was cancelled at the end of its first season, despite being the fifth-highest-rated serial of the 1972–1973 year on USA broadcast television.
But two decades later, with social attitudes changing in the USA, CBS would run another television series, Brooklyn Bridge, the quasi-autobiographical childhood memoir of its Jewish series creator, Gary David Goldberg, which featured a continuing romance between two main characters, a Jewish boy and an Irish Catholic girl. It ran two seasons, with the sixth episode of the first season, titled War of the Worlds, exploring the tensions of this inter-faith relationship in its mid-1950s Brooklyn fictional setting.