The Gershwin brothers' musical Funny Face is the Pygmalion story done up to date for the jazz age. In the show, a fashion photographer transforms a bookstore employee into a model and, needless to say, they fall in love. The song He Loves and She Loves is sung by the photographer (a role created by Fred Astaire) to the bookstore employee (a role created by Betty Compton). The song is a snappy lament, a yearning melody over a descending chromatic bass over sighing suspensions that resolve in an idealized perfect cadence. The 1957 film version of the musical kept Astaire but added Audrey Hepburn and Paris. The 1983 musical My One and Only dropped Astaire (who was 84), Hepburn (who was retired), and Paris (which refused to make the transatlantic journey); kept He Loves and She Loves; and added Tommy Tune, Twiggy, a completely different plot, and more great Gershwin songs.

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After their success in the Gershwins' 1924 Lady, Be Good! just winding up its English tour with Fred and Adele Astaire, producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley signed the brother-and-sister team in mid-1927 for another Gershwin musical which, after a major ordeal on its way to Broadway, became Funny Face. Now nearly forgotten, ingenuous, charming Adele Astaire was paired with Allen Kearns on Broadway, and the reedy Bernard Clifton in the London production, in 'S Wonderful. The latter pair, in fact, left a contemporary, classic studio recording of the number with orchestra, while the composer himself recorded it with the title number in a sizzling piano improvisation for Columbia. He also made a blithesomely lilting but all-too-brief transcription of 'S Wonderful for his 1932 Gershwin Song-Book. Despite the dated, telegraphic camp of Ira's verse—

Don't mind telling you

In my humble fash

That you thrill me through

With a tender pash

— its engaging élan and the sheer exhilaration of the chorus —

'S wonderful! 'S marvelous!

You should care for me!

'S awful nice, 's paradise,

'S what I love to see...

— have proven irresistible, a standard.

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Composed for Fred Astaire as part of the 1927 musical comedy confection Funny Face, "My One and Only" is permeated with a Jazz-Age crackle calculated for crisp delivery. "My one and only, what am I gonna do if you turn me down/When I'm so crazy over you?/I'd be so lonely, what am I gonna do if you turn me down/Why blacken all my skies of blue?/I'm not asking any miracle; it can be done! It can be done!/I know a clergyman who will grow lyrical, and make us one...."

The verse of this disarming proposal was sung as a duet on stage, though Astaire's classic contemporary recording with an uncredited pianist (almost certainly Gershwin himself) and an extended tap dancing sequence is a vocal solo. Gershwin did, indeed, record an effervescent piano improvisation on "My One and Only" for Columbia in London, in June 1928, which makes scintillant play of its tricky rhythm.

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The failure of Strike Up the Band at its Philadelphia tryout in September 1927 left the Gershwins wary of ambitious stage projects. Its brilliant satire and elaborate score, after all, had coalesced into one of the very few products of the American stage which could bear comparison with Gilbert and Sullivan. Yet it flopped. At the invitation of producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley, they returned to the tried-and-true with another confection—a flimsy book, dance routines for Fred and Adele Astaire, and a bewildering shuffle during tryout. Ira Gershwin recalled that "We were on the road six weeks, and everybody concerned with the show worked day and night, recasting, rewriting, rehearsing, recriminating—of rejoicing there was none." Though Robert Benchley's name remained on the sheet music, he had decamped long before Funny Face took its final form. Among the many changes, "He Loves and She Loves" replaced "How Long Has This Been Going On?"—both of which have become standards. "The Babbitt and the Bromide"—to one of Ira's cleverest lyrics—was added at the last minute. To everyone's amazement, Funny Face was a hit, opening at Broadway's Alvin Theater, November 22, 1927, to run for 244 performances, leaving in a perpetual afterglow the title number, "S'Wonderful," "My One and Only," and the items already mentioned, as imperishables of American song.

Because basic musicological spadework remains to be done on Funny Face, only an approximate notion of the score is available. But in the upshot of the London production, which opened November 8, 1928, and ran even longer than it had on Broadway, the Astaires, with Leslie Henson, recorded a classic handful of its hit songs which loom with titillating tang to suggest the irresistible exuberance which made Funny Face a success on both sides of the Atlantic.

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