Oh, Kay!
1926 musical with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse.
Oh, Kay! is a musical with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse. It is based on the play La Présidente by Maurice Hennequin and Pierre Veber. The plot revolves around the adventures of the Duke of Durham and his sister, Lady Kay, English bootleggers in Prohibition Era America. Kay finds herself falling in love with a man who seems unavailable. The show is remembered for its enduring song, "Someone to Watch Over Me".
The musical opened on Broadway in 1926, starring Gertrude Lawrence and Victor Moore, and ran for 256 performances. The musical then opened in London's West End in 1927, starring Lawrence and John Kirby, where it ran for 213 performances.
Background
Producers Alex A. Aarons and Vinton Freedley imagined Oh, Kay! as a Princess Theatre-style show, with a contemporary setting, simple sets, and a farcical story.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Oh, Kay!” is 1926 musical with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through musical, music and George, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1926 musical with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1517784. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1926 and 1927.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oh, Kay!” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.