Keep Off the Grass: History and Key Facts

Keep Off the Grass is a musical revue with sketches by Mort Lewis, Parke Levy, Alan Lipscott, S. Jay Kaufman, and Panama & Frank, lyrics by Al Dubin and Howard Dietz, and music by Jimmy McHugh. The choreography was by George Balanchine.

Produced by Lee Shubert and J. J. Shubert, the Broadway production, opened on May 23, 1940, at the Broadhurst Theatre and ran for a total of 44 performances. The cast included Jimmy Durante, Ray Bolger, Jane Froman, Virginia O'Brien, Emmett Kelly, Jackie Gleason and Ilka Chase. O'Brien recorded four of the songs for Columbia Records in 1940 and they are included as bonus tracks on her CD "Virginia O'Brien Salutes the Great MGM Musicals".

Despite the star power of Durante and Bolger, Keep Off the Grass did not receive good notices. The only positive review came from the Time critic who wrote: "...and there's a bum, Emmett Kelly, who would leisurely proceed to eat a ham sandwich out of a paper poke while a bunch of other bums sang a park bench song; then he would lazily brush his teeth with the dry stub of a toothbrush, which provides the one moment of an otherwise uninspired show."

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Keep Off the Grass by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.