No, No, Nanette: History and Key Facts

No, No, Nanette is a musical with a book by Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel based on Mandel's 1919 Broadway play My Lady Friends; lyrics by Irving Caesar and Harbach; and music by Vincent Youmans. The farcical story centers on three couples who find themselves together at a cottage in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the midst of a blackmail scheme focusing on a fun-loving Manhattan heiress who has run off, leaving an unhappy fiancé. Its songs include the well-known "Tea for Two" and "I Want to Be Happy".

After a pre-Broadway tour in 1924, the musical was revised for a production later 1924 in Chicago, where it became a hit and ran for more than a year. In 1925 No, No, Nanette opened both on Broadway and in London's West End, running for 321 and 665 performances, respectively. Film versions (1930 and 1940) and revivals followed. A Broadway revival in 1971, with the book adapted by Burt Shevelove, was a success, running for 861 performances.

A popular myth holds that the show was financed by selling baseball's Boston Red Sox superstar Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, resulting in the "Curse of the Bambino". However, it was Mandel's original play, My Lady Friends, rather than No, No, Nanette, that was directly financed by the Ruth sale.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from No, No, Nanette 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.