In the original Broadway play, all the principal characters were Jewish. (In the early and mid 20th century, Catskill Mountain resorts like the one depicted in the story were vacation hot spots for East Coast Jews.) Because of anti-Semitism in America at the time, all references to Jewish-American culture (including the last names of many of the characters) were either removed or altered. For instance, in the adaptation process, the play's lead characters, Teddy Stern and Chick Kessler, were among a half dozen or so characters who were given names that were more Christian-sounding - Teddy Shaw and Chick Kirkland. As Leonard Maltin puts it in his yearly movie guide: "[T]he original's satiric depiction of Jewish New Yorkers is completely homogenized."
This film flopped at the box office, resulting in a loss to RKO of $267,000 ($4.7M in 2018) according to studio records.
This film was a #1 hit at the box office - but nevertheless ended up losing money.
In an interview from 1995, leading man Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. recalled:
"It was lovely working with Ginger, she was wonderful to work with, a grand gal and very professional... but the film had to be done twice, because we did it as originally written with a sort of New York/Brooklyn accent, and outside of New York when we previewed it in Oklahoma or Nevada, or Texas, they didn't know what we were talking about. So we had to go back and re-dub.. and re-do entire scenes with a MidWest accent." So it was that even though the film was quite successful with the public, soaring costs took their toll.
This was the only non-Astaire movie that Ginger Rogers made which lost money between 1934 and 1957, one of only 3 A-list films to do so in her entire career (the other two were 'Carefree', and 'Story of Vernon & Irene Castle') and all 3 were box office gold but had exorbitant cost overruns.