Song Lyric of the Day (Cole Porter, on Why You Should ‘Be a Clown’)

“If you become a doctor, folks'll face you with dread,
If you become a dentist, they'll be glad when you're dead,
You'll get a bigger hand if you can stand on your head.”—American lyricist and composer Cole Porter (1891-1964), “Be a Clown,” performed by Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in the movie musical The Pirate (1948)

This Day in Jazz History (Ella Fitzgerald Sets Standards Canon With First ‘Song Book’)

May 15, 1956—Two decades after starting a highly diverse career in which she moved from big-band jazz singer to popular music headliner in her own right, Ella Fitzgerald began to create a Valhalla for classic American songwriters in her first LP at the Verve record label: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.

Some years ago, I heard the musical term “standard” defined as “any song that Ella and Frank would sing.” An inexact definition, maybe, but it comes as close as any other I can think of.

To start with, the two singers launched Cole Porter into the songwriter firmament. Just before the composer-lyricist was about to enter a final lonely, agonizing physical decline nearly two decades after a devastating equestrian accident, he experienced a last burst of popularity as Sinatra (with some help from Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly) propelled the soundtrack for his musical High Society up the Billboard chart, and turned “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” into a major hit 20 years after it was introduced to the public.

But Ella got there first, with her 32-track double-album devoted to the Indiana native who came to personify international sophistication and cheeky wit.

It was not entirely coincidental that 1956 was the year when Fitzgerald and Sinatra made their landmark Porter recordings, as the two singers reached artistic maturity virtually simultaneously through the help of new musical mentors and new technology. 

Sinatra’s musical game-changer was arranger Nelson Riddle, who recorded “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” for their second collaboration, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Fitzgerald’s was jazz record producer and concert promoter Norman Granz, who had persuaded her to leave her two-decade musical home, Decca Records.

Though it had produced early hits such as her novelty song, “A-tisket, A-tasket,” the label, noted musical critic Dan Morgenstern, was “never quite sure how to present a singer of such versatility….From a positive angle, this made it impossible to typecast Ella; but on the other hand, it prevented her from developing a strong identity.”

Once Granz moved Fitzgerald to Verve (a label founded originally to record her), they embarked on an extraordinary eight-year skein of discs that paid tribute to the finest American lyricists and composers: Porter, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer.

The recordings, which often brought new prominence to little-known gems, made even the honorees take notice. Ira Gershwin once declared, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” After hearing the collection devoted to Rodgers and Hart, Berlin requested—and was granted—inclusion in the series.

“Armstrong and Crosby and Astaire and Holiday and Sinatra each had an incalculable impact on the canon of modern song,” jazz critic Gary Giddins observed in Visions of Jazz: The First Century. “But Fitzgerald erected the pantheon.”

The still-new technology that benefited Sinatra and Fitzgerald was the long-playing record. Introduced in 1947, it had become, by the mid-1950s, the go-to musical format for audiophiles who appreciated its fidelity to recorded sound and to musicians who enjoyed the increased freedom provided by works of longer duration.

The qualities exhibited by Fitzgerald in her LPs—and especially those in the “Song Book” series—were perhaps best summarized by British critic Henry Pleasants in The Great American Popular Singers (1974):

“She has a lovely voice, one of the warmest and most radiant in its natural range that I have heard in a lifetime of listening to singers in every category. She has an impeccable and ultimately sophisticated rhythmic sense, and flawless intonation. Her harmonic sensibility is extraordinary. She is endlessly inventive.”

By the end of 1956, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook had reached No. 18 on the list of Billboard Best Sellers for the whole year. When the Songbook series concluded with the Johnny Mercer disk in 1964, Fitzgerald was cajoled into trying artists and genres for which she had little affinity, such as The Beatles and country music.

But Fitzgerald, with a falsetto much-admired but seldom matched in popular song, had already created her legacy: virtually institutionalizing the jazz and popular songs created primarily for Broadway and Hollywood musicals from the Twenties to the Fifties. The scat-singer extraordinaire from earlier in her career had become, quite simply, The First Lady of Song.

Theater Review: Cole Porter’s ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

All hail Kelli O'Hara. With Bernadette Peters and Donna Murphy now aging out of the leading female roles of Broadway musicals of the Golden Age, she is now the reigning queen of the genre. The best way to appreciate Her Majesty is to catch her Tony-nominated performance in Kiss Me, Kate, the glorious production of Cole Porter’s 1948 musical that finished its run this past weekend at Studio 54.

The Roundabout Theatre Co. had to preserve a delicate balance in this “revisal”: how to mitigate or delete the obvious sexism in that original show without losing the sense of fun that has made it an audience favorite over the years. Some changes might make purists break out in hives (e.g., the late-show number “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” has been retitled to “I Am Ashamed That People Are So Simple”).

But for the most point, the changes worked, because the bickering but bewitched pair at the heart of the show—egocentric actor/director/producer Fred Graham and his temperamental star and estranged wife, Lilli Vanessi—gave as good as they get, fully an off-stage match William Shakespeare’s quintessential battle-of-the-sexes couple, Petruchio and Kate from The Taming of the Shrew.

Ms. O’Hara took a while to find her footing as temperamental Lilli, but found her groove midway through Act I, as William Shakespeare’s fictional counterpart to Lilli, Kate of The Taming of the Shrew. In “I Hate Men,” she displays the full extent of her considerable vocal prowess—and a comic ferocity to match.

This production also featured the smooth hand of Scott Ellis, who has directed some of the best musicals of the Roundabout, including Holiday Inn, She Loves Me, and Anything Goes. Even for someone with a great track record, this past season was particularly stellar for him, as he also directed the new Tony-nominated adaptation of Tootsie. One sure touch of his clever hand comes in the scene that sets Kate roaring—when she finds not one, but a whole group of peeping toms hidden in a room, leering at her.

Will Chase, though perfectly serviceable in the double role of strutting Petruchio and egotistical producer Fred Graham, was no match for Brian Stokes Mitchell’s Tony-winning turn in the part. On the other hand, Corbin Bleu, who triumphed in the Roundabout’s well-received Holiday Inn a few years ago, is back to perform similar dance magic as Shakespeare’s Lucentio and Bill Calhoun, the hoofer and gambler who draws the unwelcome attention of the underworld.  And Stephanie Styles shines sweetly, whether as Shakespeare’s Bianca and Porter’s somewhat less innocent Lois Lane/Bianca, in “Always True to You in My Fashion.”

I couldn’t let this opportunity pass behind without expressing my appreciation for the brio exhibited by John Pankow and Tom McGowan in one of the wittiest songs in the Porter catalog, “Brush Up Yer Shakespeare.” It is hard to imagine the mix of iambic pentameter and swinging gangster patois rendered more winningly.

I never saw the 1953 screen adaptation starring Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson in its entirety, so the only point of reference I have for this production is the 1999 revival starring Mitchell and the late, marvelous Marin Mazzie. Despite the fact that Amanda Green was brought in this time to revise the Spewacks’ dialogue, no radical differences exist between the two productions like, say, earlier bouncy versions of Oklahoma and the far darker current one.

Longtime fans of the Roundabout have gotten used to its stagecraft marvels, and this production was no exception. Set designer David Rockwell and his crew conjured up efficiently such varying locales as a hotel, a dressing room, as well as the Padua of Fred’s Bard.

As a Roundabout subscriber, I enjoy their “Celebrity” series of post-performance talk-backs. The series title is a bit exaggerated. (I have seldom seen real celebrity leads come up afterward—indeed, I wonder if their contracts stipulate they’re too big to be obligated to do so!). But from performers who have shown up—along with the Roundabout’s Education Dramaturge, Ted Sod—I have learned a great deal about particular productions and the challenges and exhilaration associated with them, and this talk was very much in that tradition.

For instance, I found out that:

*Bella and Sam Spevack were the husband-and-wife team who wrote the “book”—i.e., a musical’s “libretto” or narrative structure—for Kiss Me, Kate, becoming the first Tony Award winners in this category. Though they based the backstage shenanigans of this musical-within-a-musical on a real theatrical “royal couple,” Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, it also mirrored their own situation: though separated as they began work, working on the show brought them together again. (For more on that original production, see my blog post from 11 years ago.)

*The placement of the musicians differed in this production from most other musicals. Music director Paul Gemignani had definite ideas about where the musicians should play. For instance, by being split in two boxes over the stage, they faced the players without being (literally) looked down on. Second, clarinetist Greg Thymius actually appeared onstage with the company as part of the rousing second-half opener, “Too Darn Hot.”

*Bleu spoke candidly but without self-pity about the physical toll the action can take on players—and what they do to counter this. In his case, it involved ice packs, ibuprofen and eating regularly. The night before this performance, he had tweaked his neck, so he and choreographer Warren Carlyle had to work out what he could and couldn’t do this time. The best thing for him, Bleu noted, was, simply, sleep, with Mondays sacrosanct as rest days, not even involving talking, let alone strenuous moving.

'This Day in Film History (Porter’s 'Under My Skin,' 'Easy to Love' Debut)

November 27, 1936—Given a three-year contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Cole Porter proceeded to prove he was worth every penny of his $3,000-a-week salary with his first original Hollywood score, Born to Dance. The musical yielded two standards, “Easy to Love” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”--the latter being, in my opinion, what Frank Sinatra memorably called “Cole Porter’s shining hour.”

Born to Dance is known to pop music and film aficionados for a nifty bit of trivia: It’s the only one of James Stewart’s nearly 100 films, TV programs and short in which he sang. (The great star joked in That’s Entertainment that his tune, “Easy to Love,” somehow became a hit despite his rendition, but he was being unduly modest: Porter himself thought Stewart had a perfectly fine voice and, when given the opportunity to have someone else in the film sing this song, affirmed that the 27-year-old MGM contract player would do just fine.)

More crucially, Stewart was at the receiving end of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” as female lead Virginia Bruce sang it to him in an attempt to convince his character of the sincerity of her love. For those who think the classic Hollywood musical should exploit the medium’s great asset—motion—and that dance is indispensable in this regard, the film also offers an instrumental reprise of the tune, with husband-and-wife team Georges and Jalna (seen in this YouTube scene) attempting to catch some of the magic emitted by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

In his breezy recap of the Great American Songbook, The House That George Built, Wilfred Sheed broke down how the gay songwriter was able to translate his own experiences into tunes that a broader heterosexual public could experience: “He had the formula down cold for alchemizing lust into romance, and for selling the customer on a lifetime of bliss in exchange for a few trifling minutes of hoop-di-do; but mainly because, like the greatest seducers, he meant what he was saying. More than anyone, he craved the happy ending he was selling, and was even more heartbroken when he didn’t get it. For the time being, anyway.”

Porter was part of a massive exodus of Broadway tunesmiths who, when the Great Depression left one musical after another dying on the vine, decamped for Hollywood. For all the lovely weather and cushy salaries they enjoyed, however, it wasn’t easy for composers in Tinseltown. They were at the beck and call of producers who could torpedo their best work for the most idiotic of reasons. (“Over the Rainbow,” written for an even greater MGM musical than Born to Dance, The Wizard of Oz, almost suffered this indignity before wiser heads prevailed.) They might have been kings of Broadway, but in Hollywood they represented just another set of hired hands, even having to submit to auditioning their songs for producers--a prospect filling Porter, for one, with deep unease.

Richard Whiting had made the long trek out West early in the decade; the Gershwin brothers did so, like Porter, in 1936 (“They Can’t Take That Away From Me” was a product of their collaboration there); and Johnny Mercer would follow a year later. Among the few musical craftsmen to bridle at their time in the sun were Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who, despite creating two of their greatest hits in Hollywood (“Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Blue Moon”), could not wait to get back to Broadway by mid-decade.

In a prior post on Dinah Washington, I discussed why her cover version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” was especially memorable. But, in truth, the song has proven adaptable to many different musicians, many of whom have managed to leave their own distinctive interpretations of it. Frank Sinatra, in the 1956 hit that thrust this work forever into the Great American Songbook, lent a quality of confidence overriding all obstacles; Katharine McPhee, in a performance with Chris Botti, endowed it with flirtatiousness; and Diane Krall slowed it down to emphasize the pain and vulnerability of the lyrics (“This affair never will go so well”).

On the Web site Jazz Standards, musicologist K. J. McElrath cites several reasons for its great adaptability by jazz musicians in particular, including the number of intermediate steps that allow singers to traverse its wide Bb to the F range, and the lack of “color tones” that allow musicians to, in effect, fill in the gaps.

Quote of the Day (Wilfred Sheed, on Cole Porter)

"New celebrities whiz by so quickly these days that even the real ones seem to last only fifteen minutes. Yet all the while, Cole Porter still sits up there high and dry on the ninetieth floor, untouched by time or fashion, like a cast-iron statue of a basic joke. Whatever else the culture may be up to this year, there always seems to be room for Cole at the top. His wit still clicks, his tunes lilt, and the mere mention of his name makes people smile in both anticipation and memory.”—Wilfred Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty (2007)

Like novelist Dawn Powell, Cole Porter—born on this date in 1891—can be thought of as what Powell called a “permanent visitor” to New York. Both were Midwestern implants who came to Gotham during the 1920s. Although each hobnobbed among the intelligentsia and glitterati, they became, once the Jazz Age was over, all too familiar with depression and sorrow.

In the late Wilfred Sheed’s collective biography of the creators of the Great American Songbook, his chapter on Porter recounts a pivotal meeting in 1926, when the native of Peru, Ind., and graduate of Yale told a startled Richard Rodgers that he wanted to write “Jewish songs.” Five decades later, the still-surprised collaborator of Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II admitted that it was the WASP bon vivant—not himself and his partners, nor the Gershwins, nor Irving Berlin, nor Harold Arlen—who created “the most enduring Jewish music” of them all.

The facilitator of that 1926 encounter between the two future giants of the American musical comedy was Noel Coward. In his recent book of collected lyrics and reminiscences, Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim, comparing Porter and the British king-of-all-entertainment, noticed the usually discussed commonalities between the two (notably, homosexuality and fascination with the rich), but also a major difference between the two, one detrimental to Coward’s art. While Porter was born rich, Sondheim observes, Coward, born in poverty, “was an intruder and covered his desperation to be part of it by sneering at it. It’s the difference between affection and affectation.”

So brilliant are Porter’s lyrics that the melodies are often forgotten--not unlike Sondheim’s. But, as Sheed writes, Porter’s “words might have made it to Broadway at any time, but not by themselves, and it would take him the best part of a decade to get the tunes he waned, that’s to say tunes that could ‘touch your heart’ or tickle your funny bone.”

My own first intense exposure to Porter came via the melodies, sans lyrics, in the form of an unjustly neglected LP by two classical guitarists: In the Still of the Night, by John Holmquist and Dan Estrem. You gain an even greater appreciation of songs such as "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Night and Day," and "Love for Sale" when you can only experience them through sounds rather than words.

Two more thoughts, sparked by reminiscences of people who knew Porter:

1) I chose the image accompanying this post because it shows Porter as an indefatigable craftsman. Indeed, Sheed takes issue with the thought that it was Porter’s wife Linda who dragged him away from parties so he could write. In fact, Porter had a strong, abiding work ethic. Another person who felt the same way about the composer was Moss Hart, Porter’s collaborator on the musical Jubilee. In a 1959 essay in Harper’s Magazine on his friend, Hart recalled how, on a round-the-world cruise, Porter tore himself away from everyone when he heard a native dance and, struck by one particular word, composed “Begin the Beguine.”

2) I chose the following quote, from Frank Sinatra, because it mentions my hometown: “Many, many years ago when I was a young man, I was working in a roadhouse in Englewood, New Jersey, just across the river from New York." [This would be The Rustic Cabin--which would actually have been just the next town up from me, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.] "One Sunday evening, when there were about thirty or forty people present in the club, I was singing with the six-piece orchestra. I was also the head waiter, answered telephones, and made out the radio programs…. A party of people arrived. I recognized Mr. Porter. Of course, I was absolutely astounded that he’d be in the same room. I had been singing only about a year-and-a-half or two years and I always tried to do as much Cole Porter material as I could because, as I said, I enjoyed his lyrics. Another reason: Mr. Porter, unlike Mr. Rodgers, let’s say, didn’t go out and get loaded because of an arrangement somebody else made of his music. Mr. Porter was a very liberal man in that sense. He really didn’t care how you arranged it as long as you did the song in its entirety. Even if you changed the tempo from a slow four to a twelve-eight, it made no difference to him.”

This Day in Pop Music History (Cole Porter Exits Into “Still of the Night”)

October 15, 1964—The bon vivant spirit and workaholism that sustained Cole Porter through two decades of unrelenting pain had vanished six years before, after his right leg was amputated. 

When the end finally came for the composer-lyricist of more than 800 songs, many of which were pop standards, it was in as dreary a setting as he could imagine: a Santa Monica hospital, where he had undergone kidney surgery, at age 72.

A horseback riding accident in the summer of 1937 abruptly altered the pattern of Porter’s life.

 The seemingly endless round of high-society parties halted because of his two shattered legs, not to mention the more than 30 operations required to deal with the resulting bone disease chronic osteomyelitis. 

His relationship with wife Linda had been on the rocks because of his affairs with gay lovers, but she saw him through his nightmarish medical rounds until she herself died in 1954.

In contrast to his early, life-of-the-party image, Porter’s last years were spent in reclusion. In The House That George Built, his history of the Great American Songbook, Wilfred Sheed memorably summarized the composer’s post-amputation period: 

“Most of the time the host just mutely stares at his dinner guests, of which he never invites more than two at a time. Any bright conversation has to come from them.”

There was, for anyone who cared to peek beneath the surface, more to Porter than charm and insouciance. You can catch glimpses of this in the wistful longing of one of his classics, “In the Still of the Night,” hinting at a lonely ending:

“Do you love me, as I love you
Are you my life to be, my dream come true
Or will this dream of mine fade out of sight
Like the moon growing dim, on the rim of the hill
In the chill, still, of the night.”

Song Lyric of the Day (Cole Porter’s “Under My Skin,” As Sung by “Queen” Dinah Washington)

" ‘Don't you know you fool, you never can win!
Use your mentality, wake up to reality.’

But each time I do, just the thought of you

Makes me stop before I begin

'Cause I’ve got you under my skin.”—Cole Porter, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” composed for the 1936 film Born to Dance

How many covers of the Cole Porter standard exist, anyway? Frank Sinatra’s swinging 1956 hit put the song on the map, though it had been introduced by Virginia Bruce two decades before in Born to Dance. Since then, the likes of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Katherine McPhee, Diana Krall, and Jamie Cullum, to name just a few, have taken a crack at it.

But for my money, when I’m looking for a version that lays down its own marker for distinction from the first note; that features jazz musicians in the best kind of “can-you-top-this?” contest; that fills you with the sheer joy of being alive—the one to go with is Dinah Washington’s, recorded on this date in 1954 in a series of live sessions, then released as Dinah Jams.

What a handful she was! They called her “The Queen”—as much a testament to her tempestuous temperament as to her brilliance in front of a microphone. She achieved her greatest success as a pop singer, recording “What a Diff’rence a Day Made,” but in her relatively short life she’d tried it all: gospel (where she started), R&B, pop ballads, jazz—almost as many styles as she had husbands (at least seven, before she died at 39 in 1963).

Fans of “The Queen” are much taken by other songs on Dinah Jams, such as “Lover Come Back to Me” and “There Is No Greater Love.” But I’m a partisan of her inspired, full-throated take on the Porter classic, recorded two years before Ol’ Blue Eyes scaled the mountain.

Right away, drummer Max Roach’s rhumba beat clues you in that you’re in entirely different territory here. Just as quickly, Queen Dinah jumps into the fray, not just keeping pace with the persistent beat but passing it, barely able to control the emotions inside her—and loving every minute of it.

But about a third of the way through, the song assumes a near-stratospheric level of competition and skill. In turn, trumpeters Clark Terry, Maynard Ferguson, and Clifford Brown conduct a thrilling duel that in the end becomes a three-way standoff.

But you can’t ignore the singer who ignited them. In a 1976 profile, later collected in his collection Living With Jazz, critic Dan Morgenstern noted that she “functions as a horn among horns, trading improvisatory skills with some of the best players in the field.”

When the horn players cease, Dinah returns, concluding five and a half minutes of supercharged joy.

This Day in Theater History (Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate” Becomes Toast of the Town)

December 31, 1948—Once again, Broadway discovered that it was “So In Love” with Cole Porter, as the veteran tunesmith rebounded from a pair of flops and devastating health problems with Kiss Me, Kate.

New Yorkers picked up their newspapers on New Year’s Eve to find that the critics were hailing the musical, which had opened the night before at the New Century Theatre, as a witty send-up of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew—except that this time, the Bard’s knockdown battle-of-the-sexes became a play-within-a-play featuring divorced and feuding co-stars. Brooks Atkinson’s review in The New York Times, for instance—then, as now, the paper with the make-or-break authority on a production’s chances—pronounced it “a blissfully enjoyable musical show.”

Porter had not had a bona fide hit since Mexican Hayride in 1944. His next two, Seven Lively Arts and Around the World, led some to wonder if his heyday was over.

Far worse than these blows to his ego were the blows to his body and spirit he’d sustained after an accident in 1937. In the 1950s, a distant cousin of mine, an accomplished Irish soccer player and equestrian, died after being thrown from an unruly horse.

Tragic as it was, his death might have been a blessing compared with the hell that Porter went through following his similar catastrophe. By the time of his death in 1964, Porter had become a recluse following amputation of a leg and electroshock therapy that only temporarily relieved his depression. In all, he endured 30 operations in the quarter century following the riding accident that left him crippled for life.

Far more than the undeniable wit and sophistication of his lyrics, I find the most compelling part of Porter’s life to be the gallantry he displayed after the accident. I can only shake my head, in wonder and awe, when I think that he wrote Kiss Me, Kate while recuperating after the 21st of his post-accident operations.

Maybe the challenge of writing the musical diverted him, if only momentarily, from his mounting depression. The story of Kiss Me, Kate can be likened to a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting yet a third. The book was written by the husband-and-wife team of Sam and Bella Spewack. If Porter had hoped for an experience working with the pair as pleasurable as it had been during Leave It to Me 10 years before, however, he was quickly disabused of the notion.

At the time they were contacted about doing the show, the couple had been separated for a few years. How on earth they managed to turn out one of the great musicals of the postwar period, I’ll never know.

In those days, the workshop method of ironing out problems with a production, conceived by Michael Bennett for A Chorus Line, was not the norm. Instead, productions would be drastically reworked out of town before a Broadway opening, in places like New Haven and Boston. Sometimes, such out-of-town reworkings led to triumph, the kind recounted in Moss Hart’s marvelous memoir Act One about his first collaboration with George S. Kaufman, Once in a Lifetime. In other instances, such unrelenting, concentrated pressure could only have led to nervous breakdowns.

Incredibly, in a case of life imitating art (imitating, of course, more art), the battling Spewacks decided they were still “So In Love,” and reunited.

Kiss Me, Kate was a triumph for all concerned, going on for 1,077 performances—the only one Porter musical ever to go over 1,000. Yes, the quartet of stars—Alfred Drake, Patricia Morrison, Lisa Kirk, and Harold Lang—was top-notch. And yes, the Spewacks provided Porter plenty of great material in their libretto.

But the real star of the show was Porter’s score. It simultaneously combined songs so specific to the show that they can’t be wrenched out of their original context (e.g., “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua”) with others that have entered the Great American Songbook, such as “So In Love,” “Always True to You in My Fashion,” and “Too Darn Hot.”

My favorite song of the bunch, however—one that has made it onto my iPod, as a matter of fact—is “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” The script lists the two characters who sing this as “First Man” and “Second Man,” but, we soon learn, they are two gentlemen from the underworld who offer, in Porter’s hilarious parody of mob patois, advice on how to woo a woman through culture (“If she says your behavior is heinous/Kick her right in the Coriolanus”).

The original male lead of Kiss Me, Kate, Alfred Drake, is reputed to have been blessed with an incredible voice and comic talent to go along with his matinee-idol looks. If so, he had a very worthy successor in his role as the egomaniacal Fred Graham/Petruchio in Brian Stokes Mitchell, who co-starred with Marin Mazzie in a 1999 revival that I was lucky to see.

But my favorite part of the show came after the cast took their final bows, and it involved not so much the estimable Mitchell but the two actors playing the gangsters, Michael Mulheren and Lee Wilkof. Mitchell came out, just before the audience was ready to leave, to urge us to contribute to one of Broadway’s traditional charities (I believe that this one involved AIDS).

“When you leave the theater, we’ll have two members of the cast collecting”—whereupon Mulheren and Wilkof stepped forward, with their hands noticeably thrust forward in their characters’ dark suit pockets—“and, as you can see, they can be very convincing and I’m afraid won’t take no for an answer!” Mitchell chuckled.

Song Lyric of the Day (Porter)

“Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it Even lazy jellyfish do it Let's do it, let's fall in love.”—Cole Porter, “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love”

(This Porter standard was written for the musical Paris, which premiered on this date in 1928 at the Music Box Theatre in New York City. The “comedy with music” ran for 195 performances. The insouciant “Let’s Do It” has had far greater staying power, of course.)