Gay Divorce
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| Gay Divorce | |
| Music | Cole Porter |
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| Lyrics | Cole Porter |
| Book | Dwight Taylor Adapted by: Kenneth Webb Samuel Hoffenstein |
| Based upon | An unproduced play by J. Hartley Manners |
| Productions | 1932 Broadway 1933 West End 1934 Film |
Gay Divorce (1932) is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and book by Kenneth Webb and Samuel Hoffenstein. It was Fred Astaire's last Broadway show and featured the hit "Night and Day."
It was made into a Hollywood musical film in (1934) starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and renamed The Gay Divorcee.
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[edit] Plot
Guy Holden, an American writer traveling in England, falls madly in love with a woman named Mimi, who disappears after their first encounter. To take his mind off his lost love, his friend Teddy Egbert, a British attorney, takes him to Brighton Beach, where Egbert has arranged for a "paid corespondent" to assist his client in obtaining a divorce from her boring, aging, geologist husband. What Holden does not know is that the client is none other than Mimi, who in turn mistakes him (because he is too ashamed of his occupation to say what it is, namely pseudonymously writing cheap "bodice-ripper" romances) for the paid corespondent.
At the end, when her husband appears, he is unconvinced by the faked adultery -- but is then unwittingly revealed, by the waiter at the resort, to have been genuinely adulterous himself.
[edit] Songs
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[edit] Broadway production
The show opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on November 29, 1932 and transferred to the Shubert Theatre on January 16, 1933 for a total run of 248 performances. It was directed by Howard Lindsay.
Cast:
- Fred Astaire as Guy Holden
- Claire Luce as Mimi
- Luella Gear as Hortense
- G. P. Huntley Jr as Teddy
- Betty Starbuck as Barbara Wray
- Erik Rhodes as Tonetti
- Eric Blore as Waiter
- Roland Bottomley as Pratt
[edit] London production
The show opened at the Palace Theatre on November 2, 1933 and ran for 180 performances. It was directed by Felix Edwardes and starred the original leads of Fred Astaire and Claire Luce. They were joined by Olive Blakeney as Gertrude Howard, Claud Allister as Teddy, Joan Gardner as Barbara Wray, Erik Rhodes as Tonetti, Eric Blore as Waiter, and Fred Hearne as Octavius Mann.
[edit] External links
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