The initial production premiered in June 1923 at Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before its national tour.

[2][3][4] The show included some Marx Brothers routines and musical specialties from their years in vaudeville, incorporated into a thin narrative about a rich girl looking for thrills, as presented to her by a succession of male suitors.

The comedic high point was a long sketch featuring Groucho as Napoleon, which the Brothers regarded as the funniest thing they ever did.

The show was a roaring success, and it catapulted the Marx Brothers to superstardom, accepted by the New York smart set of the Algonquin Round Table.

Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley were among the theatre critics who made I'll Say She Is a smash, and George S. Kaufman would co-write their next two Broadway musicals, The Cocoanuts (1925) and Animal Crackers (1928).

At its conclusion, the setting changes to the office of a talent agent, wherein Zeppo bursts through the door, proclaiming to be a great musical actor.

He then asks if they recall "the old fable of the Richman, Poorman, Beggarman, Thief, Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief."

He accuses her of stabbing the "Chinaman" with a revolver, but she proclaims innocence, and counterattacks by telling the Brothers that after they left her reception room earlier, all her silverware had gone missing.

Thinking that this may be the thrill she's seeking, The Beauty tries her hand at gambling as well, and eventually, The Richman tells her the biggest gamblers play the stock market.

At the conclusion of the Wall Street sequence, which ends the first act, an elaborate costumed ballet performs a dance interpretation of gambling.

Photographs from the performance show dancers dressed as dice, coins, a roulette wheel, and a gold statue, not unlike the extravagant Busby Berkeley dance numbers seen in 1930s film.

He does so by giving her the thrill of clothing and jewels from foreign lands, each carried onstage by a chorus girl, with The Beauty trying on a plethora of the risque garments.

This does nothing to thrill The Beauty, and Zeppo walks off, telling her: Groucho, dressed in a tutu and long underwear and smoking a pipe, enters from behind the curtain—an intentionally bad Fairy Godmother impersonation.

Each time he leaves, the other Brothers attempt to violently woo The Beauty, with Groucho alternately suspicious and oblivious to his advisors' advances to his wife.

However, as both the Winter Garden and the Casino were part of the Shubert chain, it seems more likely that the openings were deliberately set for different dates to avoid competing with each other.

The opening "Theatrical Agency" scene was later filmed for the Paramount Pictures release The House That Shadows Built almost in its entirety.

The Marx Brothers' last Paramount film, Duck Soup, contains a courtroom scene largely inspired by the one in I'll Say She Is, although there are significant differences.

The silverware gag in this scene was recycled for the stage performance of Animal Crackers and is also featured in the film of the same name.

Harpo was billed as Adolph Arthur, Zeppo as Herbert, Groucho as Julius Henry, and Chico as Leonard.

With the closing of Animal Crackers, their third and final Broadway show, the Marx Brothers moved to Hollywood, and enjoyed long careers in film and television.

In 2009, writer and performer Noah Diamond began to research and restore I'll Say She Is, working from Johnstone's 30-page rehearsal typescript and numerous other sources to reconstruct the show.

In May 2014, coinciding with the ninetieth anniversary of the show's Broadway opening, I'll Say She Is received two staged readings, in a new "reconstruction" and adaptation by Diamond, who had by then spent five years researching and expanding the work.

[8] A fuller staging was seen in August 2014 at the New York International Fringe Festival,[9] featuring Melody Jane as Beauty, Noah Diamond as Groucho, Seth Shelden as Harpo, Robert Pinnock as Chico, Aristotle Stamat as Zeppo, and Kathy Biehl as Ruby.

[13] Having observed a rehearsal session of the famed 'Napoleon' sketch at New York's Pearl Studios, Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker: "One sees at once why the Napoleon scene became legendary overnight—apart from still being extremely funny, it has the edge of randomness, the pure absurdity, that made the Marx Brothers seem, on that opening night as ever after, so modern.

Of the great movie comedians, Chaplin is rooted in Dickens and the nineteenth-century stage; Keaton, more cinematic, in a kind of melancholic Civil War stoicism.

All of Monty Python’s non sequiturs and sudden stoppages—"the sketch is now over"—begin here, as does most of the pure burlesque aggression of a Mel Brooks, whose historical kidding, as in the “2000 Year Old Man” skits, starts here, too.

"[12] A book Gimme a Thrill: The Story of I'll Say She Is, the Lost Marx Brothers Musical, and How it Was Found was published by BearManor Media in 2016.