Column: The Great American Songbook is the Brits’ pièce de résistance

The British are filching our crown jewels.

They’ve taken the best of our culture and left us bereft. And we’re not even paying attention. We’re clueless.

We might as well cede them Fort McHenry, Valley Forge and Yankee Stadium (the “House that Ruth Built,” not that new spun-sugar castle in the Bronx).

Who on this side of the pond listens to George Gershwin anymore, or Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, or Johnny Mercer? Practically no one.

Not the case in the U.K.

And those stealthy redcoats don’t play fair. They no longer march stoically by rank into the teeth of musket fire. They’ve learned the value of the backsides of trees.

The insufferable royalists have drawn a bead on the music of Americans — and they know the music better than we do.

Brits routinely fill London’s cavernous Royal Albert Hall to hear the John Wilson Orchestra celebrate American exceptionalism. The joint jumps … without an authentic Yank for kilometers.

It’s equivalent to the Japanese drubbing us in baseball.

The John Wilson Orchestra sells to the Brits albums filled with OUR music. And the Brits gobble those albums up like so many bags of greasy chips.

Tortured faux American accents and phrasing notwithstanding, I love the music that the Wilson Orchestra produces. So much so that I’m willing to sit among blokes named Alistair, Neville and Reggie just to watch Wilson’s orchestra offer a rollicking version of “June is Bustin’ Out All Over.”

Brits appreciate genius when they see it and they probably appreciate American genius more than most. Eight hundred years of history hasn’t dulled their appetite for the preservation of precious “relics.” For us Yanks, anything older than last Thursday is a candidate for the trash bin.

John Wilson, a British conductor, arranger and musicologist, has a passion for the preservation of American stage music. He’s personally rescued much of our stage music archive, which was lost last century due to unmitigated folly and neglect.

Wilson is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on music of Hollywood and Broadway’s “Golden Age.” He’s so comfortable with the genre that he gets — totally gets! — Curly’s Oklahoma drawl in “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” and the sailors’ New York cadences in “There is Nothin’ Like a Dame.”

If you’re an American under age 40, I’m betting you’ve never heard of Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Johnny Mercer, et al.

Wilson’s orchestra has been serving up America’s stage gems for over two decades. Many critics say the music being played by Wilson today is better than ever before. I agree.

Wilson argues that he’s not nostalgic over the music because he’s not American, and, at 46, was born after the music’s heyday. He appreciates it for what it is: great music. Period.

His orchestra has performed music from “Oklahoma!” “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “The Sound of Music” and much more. Concerts include semi-staged productions of entire shows or music from a collection of shows.

The orchestra maintains a repertoire of tunes from such films as “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “High Society,” “The Band Wagon,” “Gigi,” “An American in Paris,” “Crazy Girl,” “Easter Parade,” “Show Boat” and more.

And they’re performed before — not American, but — ardently enthusiastic Brits. Not on 42nd Street, but Shaftesbury Avenue.

“Wilson’s concerts are the American musical as you have never heard it before,” exudes the Financial Times of London. “These classic musicals fairly explode back to life.”

This year’s 2018 John Wilson Orchestra tour includes 15 stops from June through December. You’ll have to book a flight to London to see them, however. There isn’t an American venue in the lot.

So I offer this suggestion: Let’s give the Brits access to our Broadway and Hollywood music vaults. They appreciate the music; they preserve it; and they do justice to it.

Besides, I don’t see the Italians, Germans or French making passionate declamations for it.

For the world, The Great American Songbook may be an acquired taste.

For the Brits, it’s the pièce de résistance.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.