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The now long-obscured team of Pandolf Schnickelheimer (music), Sygmoid Pycklefritz (book) and Artie J. Schlockmeister (producer) once vied on a level playing field with the likes of Rudolf Friml, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and other giants of the Broadway musical. They are known today—if at all—for their fatal inability to vary their concept of the ideal musical. They developed a formula as rigid and unbending as a Euclidean theorem, but much less useful. Stubbornly, this trio of musical pioneers trudged to oblivion.
Beginning in 1921, the team evolved a strategy to exploit fads, trends and news items as themes for full-scale musicals. They pored over all of American culture in a search for the perfect story to allure the public. First, they tackled the then-current rage for all things Egyptian in the wake of the sensational discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb (1922). The resulting farrago of mummies, pharaohs and painted backdrops of pyramids, sphinxes, palms and camels—Tut, Tut Tutty!—failed to overcome a pathetically weak book and insipid, tuneless music. The only song to survive the 6-day run was a novelty item, “Howdah do, Mr. Elephant,” a minor player in the short-lived ostrich-walk craze.
Undaunted, the troika of musical-makers quickly came up with a tribute to documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s epochal study, Nanook of the North (1922). Milking the slender narrative for everything it was worth, they created a musicalized version, using a crude system of phonograph-record-synchronized sound—No, No Nanook! (1923). This film musical was booed out of every major cinema palace, because the sound was wholly unintelligible, and the experimental color process used in the location shooting (northern Alaska) revealed (of course!) only black and white. No score for the film has survived.
The doughty team slogged on, now in the depths of the Great Depression (1930), alighting on the theme of unlimited gold and riches, in Yes, Yes Yreka, a stage musical demanding the use of mules, dynamite explosions, an authentic-seeming landslide, cataracts, hydraulic mining hoses and forest fires. It was withdrawn by order of the State Fire Marshall after 2 ½ performances. Reviews were, at best, fitful.
Finally, chewing the bitter aloes of desperation, Schnickelheimer, Pycklefritz and Schlockmeister in 1939 hit on the story of diminutive artist Footloose Latex and the fin de siècle atmosphere of decadent Paris for Do, Do Can-Can, the ancestor of dozens of awful plays, films and stage musicals on the same dreary subject. All augured well for the production until the first-night performance, when it became clear that none of the chorines could even approximate the super-athletic French dance, and the Little Person hired as Latex proved to be taller than his co-star Eulalia Veech, as Edith Peef. The production effectively collapsed after the first 25 minutes, when the theater was completely emptied.
The team of Schnickelheimer, Pycklefritz and Schlockmeister relentlessly cannibalized and recycled their ideas and materials, as their posters graphically reveal. Comments like “Get a new plot!” or “Oh, no, oh, yes—not again!” rang out from the stalls and orchestra seats alike. Little or nothing remains of their herculean efforts to receive cursory attention and approbation from fans of the Great American Musical. Their feeble story is one of feckless stubbornness, errant judgment and musico-theatrical ineptitude on an epic scale. Let S, P & S rest in peace. ###
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