Oh, Lady! Lady!

Oh, Lady! Lady!!
Segal and Randall as Mollie and Bill
Music	Jerome Kern
Lyrics	P.G. Wodehouse
Book	Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse
Productions	1918 Broadway

Oh, Lady! Lady!! is a musical with music by Jerome Kern, a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse and lyrics by Wodehouse. It was written for the Princess Theatre on Broadway, where it played in 1918 and ran for 219 performances. The story concerns an engaged young man, Bill, whose ex-fiancée arrives unexpectedly on his wedding day. Bill works to convince his old flame that he was not worthy to marry her, but his clumsy efforts do not make him look good to his new fiancée, whose mother already dislikes Bill. A couple of crooks cause further complications.

The original cast starred Vivienne Segal as Mollie Farringdon. The songs include "Not Yet", "When Ships Come Home", "Greenwich Village", the innovative "Moon Song" and "Our Little Nest". The song "Bill", later famous in Show Boat, was cut before the production opened.

The Princess Theatre was a small Broadway house that seated only 299 people. Theatre agent Elisabeth Marbury urged composer Jerome Kern and librettist Guy Bolton, later joined by British humorist and lyricist/playwright P. G. Wodehouse to write a series of musicals tailored to the theatre, with an intimate style and modest budgets. These "Princess Theatre shows" had coherent, clever plots that provided an alternative to the other musical entertainments that then dominated Broadway: star-studded revues and extravaganzas of Florenz Ziegfeld, thinly-plotted, musical comedies, Gilbert and Sullivan revivals and gaudy adaptations of European operettas.