"My Ship" is a popular song written for the 1941 Broadway musical Lady in the Dark , with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin.
The music is marked "Andante espressivo"; Gershwin describes it as "orchestrated by Kurt to sound sweet and simple at times, mysterious and menacing at other". [1]
It was premiered by Gertrude Lawrence in the role of Liza Elliott, the editor of a fashion magazine. In the context of the show, the song comes in a sequence in which Elliott, in psychoanalysis, recalls a turn-of-the-century song she knew in her childhood. [2]
The song was not included in the 1944 Hollywood film Lady in the Dark , a fact which Ira Gershwin found inexplicable:
Later, when Lady in the Dark was filmed, the script necessarily had many references to the song. But for some unfathomable reason the song itself—as essential to this musical drama as a stolen necklace or a missing will to a melodrama—was omitted. Although the film was successful financially, audiences evidently were puzzled or felt thwarted or something, because items began to appear in movie-news columns mentioning that the song frequently referred to in Lady in the Dark was 'My Ship'. I hold a brief for Hollywood, having been more or less a movie-goer since I was nine; but there are times ...
— Ira Gershwin [1]
In 2003, Herbie Hancock won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo for a version of this song released on the album Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall .
Artists who have recorded the song include (in alphabetical order):
A few notes of the song are sung in a Sesame Street cartoon sequence promoting the letter R from the show's premiere 1969–70 season. [6]
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Lady in the Dark is a musical with music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and book and direction by Moss Hart. It was produced by Sam Harris. The protagonist, Liza Elliott, is the unhappy editor of a fashion magazine who is undergoing psychoanalysis. The musical ran on Broadway in 1941, and in the United Kingdom in 1981. A film version was released in 1944, and a live television special followed in 1954.
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