Word: porters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Flops, No Hits. For all its likeness to other Porter openings, Kiss Me, Kate was a special milestone. For several years Composer Porter had not been regarded as a sure-fire Broadway investment, in spite of the fact that five of his songs (Begin the Beguine, Just One of Those Things, What Is This Thing Called Love?, Night and Day and I Get a Kick Out of You) ranked last year among the 35 all-time U.S. popular favorites. (The record is matched only by Irving Berlin, and was not equaled by such Tin Pan Alley titans as Jerome Kern...
Broadway had been saying gloomily that Porter had written two flops (Seven Lively Arts and Around the World) and had not turned out a hit since Mexican Hayride. Socially, Cole Porter has always had more invitations than he could possibly accept. Professionally, he had become a wallflower, waiting around for a producer to ask him to do a show. When the right invitation finally came, it was from a pair of new producers, Arnold Saint Subber and Lemuel Ayers, who had to find financial backing the hard way. Porter did his work on Kiss Me, Kate in three months. Then...
...song score for the new musical gleams with the gilt-edged Porter signet. The author of You're the Top-which inspired a sort of national cult of memorizers and parodists in 1934-always turns out lyrics that are distinctly his own. They brim with stylish grace and colloquial impudence, real comic invention, multisyllabic rhymes, innuendoes about I'amour, digs at social foibles, and easy allusions to famous people and far-off places...
...that old reliable musicomedy subject -love-Lyricist Porter is more often cynical than sweet...
From Broadway to Padua. Porter's music is just as distinctively his. Many of his songs, like Night and Day, favor a long melodic line that breaks out of the traditional four-measure bounds of the popular ballad. He can write gaily, in complicated rhythms (as in Anything Goes). He can match a pointedly off-color lyric with an insinuating tune (as in My Heart Belongs to Daddy). But the true Porter hallmark is cut in the bittersweet lament of What Is This Thing Called Love? and in the sultry, Latin fervor of Begin the Beguine...