Of course it is a little rough in spots, but you know what Percy MacKaye is when he gets loose on a folk-opera. It is good, clean Rabelaisian fun, such as was in “Washington, the Man Who Made Us.” I always felt that it was very prudish of the police to stop that play just as it was commencing its run. Or maybe it wasn’t the police that stopped it. Something did, I remember.
But “Rip Van Winkle” has much more zip to it than “Washington” had. In the first place, the lyrics are better. They have more of a lilt to them than the lines of the earlier work had. Here is the song hit of the first act, sung by the Goose Girl. Try this over on your piano:
Kaaterskill, Kaaterskill,
Cloud on the Kaaterskill!
Will it be fair, or lower?
Silver rings
On my pond I see;
And my gander he
Shook both his white wings
Like a sunshine shower.
I venture to say that Irving Berlin himself couldn’t have done anything catchier than that by way of a lyric. Or this little snatch of a refrain sung by the old women of the town:
Nay, nay, nay!
A sunshine shower
Won’t last a half an hour.
The trouble with most lyrics is that they are written by song-writers who have had no education. Mr. MacKaye’s college training shows itself in every line of the opera. There is a subtlety of rhyme-scheme, a delicacy of meter, and, above all, an originality of thought and expression which promises much for the school of university-bred lyricists. Here, for instance, is a lyric which Joe McCarthy could never have written:
Up spoke Nancy, spanking Nancy,
Says, “My feet are far too dancy, Dancy O!
So foot-on-the-grass,
Foot-on-the-grass,
Foot-on-the-grass is my fancy, O!”
Of course this is a folk-opera. And you can get away with a great deal of that “dancy-o” stuff when you call it a folk-opera. You can throw it all back on the old folk at home and they can’t say a word.
But even the local wits of Rip Van Winkle’s time would have repudiated the comedy lines which Mr. MacKaye gives Rip to say in which “Katy-did” and “Katy-didn’t” figure prominently as the nub, followed, before you have time to stop laughing, by one about “whip poor Will” (whippoorwill—get it?). If “Rip Van Winkle” is ever produced again, Ed Wynn should be cast as Rip. He would eat that line alive.
