Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

I find it fascinating that so many of my favorite show tunes – songs I’ve known and loved my whole life – came from Broadway musicals I’ve never even heard of, much less seen. I’m not likely to ever get the chance to see most of them, either. Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach wrote “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” for their musical Roberta in 1933. Two years later the play was adapted for the silver screen, with Irene Dunn, Fred Astaire, and western film star Randolph Scott (as in “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott”). In 1952 they revamped the musical score and rewrote most of the script for Lovely to Look At with Red Skelton, Howard Keel and Zsa Zsa Gabor. If you’re curious you can watch Roberta on Amazon Prime Video for three bucks. If you want to see Lovely to Look At, you’ll have to spend considerably more for the DVD.