HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY WITH MINNIE’S BOYS (1970) THE NEGLECTED MARX BROTHERS STAGE SHOW

MINNIE’S BOYS (1970) – HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! This year Balladeer’s Blog looks at the musical comedy Minnie’s Boys, about Minnie Marx, the mother – and show-biz manager – of the five Marx Brothers (Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo). Actors portraying her sons co-starred and conjured up the kind of hilarious chaos you’d expect.

If you removed all the songs, the show would still hold up as a show business biopic done in the style of a 1930s Marx Brothers movie. Some snobbish critics seemed bothered by the lack of a straightforward approach, but I think they were being silly.

Let’s face it, trying to do a straight drama about the most anarchic comedians since Edward Lear and Eugene Ionesco would have been foolish, even if their mother is the lead character, not them. The storyline in Minnie’s Boys takes Minnie and her sons from their teenage years in vaudeville to their achievement of stardom.

The broad strokes of the story are reasonably close to reality but obviously to keep the boys in character enormous liberties are taken along the way. Groucho Marx’s son Arthur was a co-writer and his father served as a consultant. Sadly, when it came down to a choice between Totie Fields and Shelley Winters, Groucho rejected Fields and pushed for the big-name star Winters.   

Winters couldn’t sing on her best day and critics said she “screamed” her songs, which strained her throat and caused laryngitis a few times. Shelley also wasn’t known for great comedy performances either, unlike Totie Fields, who could sing AND worked professionally as a comedienne for years. Winters’ miscasting was pointed to as a large reason for Minnie’s Boys only running for 80 performances on Broadway (and that was after 64 previews that prompted endless rewriting of scenes and songs).

The soundtrack album from Minnie’s Boys, though not hailed as a masterpiece, was far more popular than the comedy bits. Another bad sign in a show that should have had the funny zing of the Marx Brothers’ early Broadway hits of the 1920s, not to mention their films.     

I’ll have more to add about backstage details below, but first, let’s cover the actual show.

ACT ONE

The music and songs can still be listened to online, and after the enjoyable Overture, the first scene is set in the Upper East Side of New York, the poor neighborhood in which our main characters lived for years. Women gossiping out on their stoops talk about the mischievous to scandalous (bordering on criminal) behavior of the five Marx boys.

Minnie enters and agrees with her neighbors that her sons are quite a handful and tries to pass the teens off as just “five growing boys” – the title of the show’s first song. And look, I’m no expert on show-tunes but to this layman the songs are pretty good and have a kind of Annie meets Gypsy feel to them.

Inside the Marx apartment we meet Sam “Frenchie” Marx, the father of our boys. His passion for pinochle always makes me smile during the card game scene in the Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers.

Minnie and Frenchie are furious with their son Chico for gambling away the family’s rent money in a game of craps. After some jokes among Groucho and his parents about that, young Zeppo comes home and says he’s been sent home early from school for punching the principal. Frenchie says “That’s no way to get out of school!” and Zeppo replies “Oh yes, it is! I’ve been expelled!”

Harpo (who could talk in real life) comes home and announces he’s lost his job just as the landlord shows up for the rent. After some Marx Brothers style attempts to make the landlord go away, Minnie gives the boys three dollars she hid from them. The rent is nine bucks, but in vaudeville-level stage gags the brothers recycle the same three dollars over and over again amidst much fast-talking to make the landlord think he got paid the full nine.

Soon, Minnie’s real-life brother – Al Shean of the showbiz team of Gallagher & Shean – drops by to brag about his new big-money gig playing the Palace Theater in New York City. That leads into another one of the songs – Rich Is. 

Minnie wants Uncle Al to get Groucho a job in show business, despite his objections that he wants to be a doctor instead. Minnie dismisses a career like that as far too distant to help the family’s money needs in the here and now. The mother guilts her brother until he agrees to have Groucho work as a singer for a guy he knows at Coney Island.

Groucho is often booed but sticks with it and on the home front Zeppo loses a job as a plumber’s helper for hitting his boss with a wrench. Minnie forces Zeppo to join Groucho on the road as a vaudeville singer, hushing his arguments by saying “With the way your brother sings, he’ll need a bodyguard if nothing else.” So, Groucho’s Singing Nightingale act becomes the Two Nightingales.

Groucho and Zeppo together get mostly boos, too, but a paycheck is a paycheck. Soon Minnie informs the pair that she is sending Harpo to them to join the act because he is facing 30 days of hard labor if he is caught for his recent theft of a harp. So, the Three Nightingales hit the stage.

Back at home, Chico gets brought home by the cops following his apprehension during a raid of the brothel where he works. He had always told Minnie he worked at a boardinghouse so he’s in extra trouble. Soon, the FOUR Nightingales are performing in Texas.     

Gummo has been drafted, so Minnie informs Frenchie she is going to go on the road as the boys’s manager. In Nacogdoches, TX, where Groucho said he really did yell “Nacogdoches is full of roaches” to the booing audience, Minnie is trying to calm down the theater owner.

The man feels he was robbed of one nightingale because Chico failed to show up for that night’s performance. Minnie does a Grouchoesque fast-talking turn to convince the owner that for Chico to miss a show there must be a perfectly innocent reason. Next, the owner discovers that “reason” when he catches Chico playing a game of Strip Poker with his daughter.   

NOTE: I will ask again what critics were expecting. To me this may be broad comedy at times, but it seems to be succeeding in its intent as a quasi-Marx Brothers movie in the form of a biographical stage show, and as an embellishment of their roguish legend. A similar stage show could have been a musical comedy about the courtship and wedding of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz but done in the style of an episode of I Love Lucy.

At any rate, the Strip Poker revelation is followed by Marx Brothers-ish scenes of the gun-wielding theater owner chasing the boys around the theater like the ship chase bits in Monkey Business while other performances hit the stage. All of this results in the boys being fired and their pay withheld. Minnie sends a telegram back east to Frenchie asking for train fare home. This crosses paths with a telegram from Frenchie asking for money to pay the rent.

The other brothers go off to con some food out of people but Harpo stays behind and sees that the telegram from their father also said “Happy birthday.” Yes, the boys forgot Minnie’s birthday. Harpo makes up for it by singing the show’s schmaltzy standout song Mama, a Rainbow to her.

More scenes go by as a different theater owner signs the boys to do comedy since singing clearly is not where their talents lie. The Marx Brothers are shown performing on stage in a variation on the classroom scene from Horse Feathers.

A few more scenes cover their father and Uncle Al Shean eventually catching their act and Al trying to talk “Mr. Vaudeville” – E.F. Albee – into hiring the boys for the Palace Theater. Albee considers the boys too raw but is willing to give them some seasoning by first putting them on the road.

Minnie tries big-shotting Albee and tells him he takes her boys to the Palace NOW or NEVER! Albee says never and leaves. The brothers are furious and tell their mother they have had it with her interfering in their careers and she goes away sad.

The song Where Was I When They Passed out Luck is sung by the brothers, ending Act One (of Two). I refrained from mentioning every song and their setups to avoid making this review far too long.

ACT TWO

The story picks up a little later in the vaudeville careers of the Marx Brothers. The boys have been staying at the Perth Amboy, NJ boarding house of Mrs. McNish, who is depicted as a bit of a Margaret Dumont type because, again, this show is going for nostalgic Marx Brothers appeal, not hardcore realism.

It’s Christmas time, but the manager they hired to replace Minnie has just made off with all of their recent earnings. Mrs. McNish has had all of their luggage locked away until she gets paid for all the expenses the brothers ran up while performing in the New Jersey area. 

Minnie arrives with a scheme involving the boys standing in for their Uncle Al at the Palace Theater in New York while he is laid up with appendicitis. Minnie drags out the scene, passive-aggressively making the boys practically beg her to let them in on the plan. 

With Minnie back in the brothers’ good graces she admits she only has enough money for train fare for all of them to New York City but not pay for what they owe Mrs. McNish. They need their props and costumes from the luggage McNish is withholding. Groucho is forced to do a figurative “romancing Margaret Dumont scene” with Mrs. McNish so Chico, Harpo and Zeppo can steal the luggage.

He also sings the song You Remind Me of You, which adds to the Groucho-Margaret feel. The luggage is stolen, Groucho slips away, and the boys get back to New York and play the Palace, where they’re a hit. E.F. Albee lets bygones be bygones and signs the brothers.

Their careers go higher and higher as they become some of the biggest names in vaudeville, as celebrated with the title song Minnie’s Boys. Even the people from the old neighborhood are impressed.

Unfortunately, the success of our heroes has swelled their egos, and they give full rein to their chaotic personalities and destructive vices behind the scenes, infuriating all of the other performers at the Palace Theater. The boys go so far as to prank the others during their acts, too. 

Minnie and her boys want more money from Albee but he chews them out for all the madness they’re causing behind the scenes for all of his other acts and refuses, citing their five-year-no-raises contract. He also tells them they will be fined for any further misconduct interrupting or distracting from the other performances at the Palace.   

We get more comedy in the form of the boys doing their Contract Negotiations sketch from A Night at the Opera, and though they promised to behave, their anarchic natures eventually win out. Harpo chases a secretary around like in the many, many Harpo chase scenes in Marx Brothers movies. Zeppo lights a fire in a barrel inside the Palace Theater and holds a marshmallow roast.

Albee is outraged and tells the boys he is ending their contract. They are fired. The brothers, still thinking they can big-shot it, tell Albee fine, they’ll just sign on at the Shubert Theater, Albee’s competitors.

Minnie and her sons get a shock when Albee shows them a newspaper headline saying he has bought out the Shuberts. His is now THE butt to kiss in vaudeville and he tells the brothers they will never work again.

Albee’s influence is such that no vaudeville theaters anywhere in the U.S. will sign the boys out of fear of making an enemy of Albee. The usually unconquerable Minnie is ready to throw in the towel and leave show business along with her sons.

Chico saves the day. He has beaten a man named Gates so badly in a poker game that he will let the man pay off some of his debt by having the boys work in his Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. His luck has been so bad lately that he hasn’t even been able to mount a show there for about a year.

The catch is that he can’t afford to buy new materials so the boys will have to slap together a show based purely on the cast-offs and raggedy costumes, props and sets he has on hand. Minnie is thrilled and is convinced that her sons can pull it off and make a hit.

The story gets stretched out a little too long now with the needless complication of Groucho deciding to quit show-biz and abandon Minnie and his brothers. She, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo try their best to whip up a show, but they realize how much they’ve benefited from Groucho’s brilliance being what holds the whole act together.

This cul de sac is cleared up when Groucho changes his mind and comes back to rejoin the family business after all. Okay, I get that it’s necessary to emphasize how Groucho’s once-in-a-century talent was vital to the success of the Marx Brothers but to save time in this stage show maybe they should have just had Groucho quit right after Albee throws them out, not when they’ve just gotten renewed hope from the Walnut Theater turn of events.  

At any rate, the odd, mismatched costumes, sets and props set up the audience to enjoy full frontal Marx Brothers in all the glory we’ve been waiting for. Everyone has refined their schtick throughout the play and we now see these polished professionals in well-oiled machine mode.

The Act is the big finish and leads to a proto-Beatlemania closing bit as the titles of the big Marx Brothers hits of stage and screen rotate through the marquee. The End. 

While it’s true that Minnie’s Boys has its flaws I think some critics were too persnickety in panning it. Yes, the lead being a pushy show-biz mother is reminiscent of Gypsy but so what? The story is entirely different.

I’ll buy that Shelley Winters was the biggest problem because after this flopped on Broadway it went on to reasonably successful revivals in smaller venues over the decades, including one in 1975 with Charlotte Rae starring as Minnie. 

At any rate, Happy Mother’s Day once again! I feel that Minnie’s Boys can help capture the times that many of us have been happy or infuriated or exasperated with our mothers while also acknowledging the undeniable influence they had on us.     

FOR HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! LOVE, GEORGE, A WEIRD MOTHER’S DAY HORROR FILM WITH RON HOWARD AND CLORIS LEACHMAN, CLICK HERE.

FOR MOMMA THE DETECTIVE, A TELEFILM STARRING ESTHER ROLLE AS A MOTHER WHO JUMPS IN TO SOLVE MURDERS THAT STUMP HER POLICE DETECTIVE SON, CLICK HERE.