OUT OF THIS WORLD

By ​Didier C. Deutsch (October 1991)

While Kiss Me, Kate was still playing to standing-room-only crowds at the Shubert Theatre, its producers Arnold Saint Subber and Lemuel Ayers booked the New Century Theatre — original scene of that earlier triumph — for a new Cole Porter show, Out of This World, which opened there on Thursday, December 21, 1950. 

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Based on Titus Maccius Plautus’ ancient comedy Amphitryon, the book for the new musical, by Dwight Taylor and Reginald Lawrence, was a free and giddy adaptation of the legend in which Jupiter, the most lecherous of all gods, adopts a human form, the better to seduce the wife of a mortal. The tale inspired Molière in 1668 to write Amphitryon, one of his most amusing comedies about mistaken identities, and, in 1929, sparked Jean Giraudoux to pen Amphitryon 38, so titled because the playwright claimed his was the 38th adaptation of the Greek legend. Initially, Porter's show had been called Amphitryon, after Plautus’ original, but, as the work progressed, it became known as Heaven on Earth and then Cloudburst, before Out of This World was finally adopted. 

 

In the new treatment, the mortals were two young Americans whose honeymoon was thoroughly disrupted when Jupiter interfered, bringing along with him a lusty team of Olympian divinities, including his temperamental wife, Juno; his faithful messenger, Mercury; Night and Vulcania. Adding a new twist to the old story, the authors even contrived to have, as an extra protagonist, a Chicago gangster on the run. 

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According to George Eells, in his biography of the composer The Life That Late He Led (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972), Porter had hoped the cast would include Carol Channing, David Wayne, Patricia Morison and Anne Jeffreys, respectively as Juno, Jupiter, Helen and Chloe. Cole had even gone to New York to play the score for Carol Channing, who rejected the part to appear instead as Lorelei Lee in another Broadway musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. 

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Early on, problems began to plague the production. At first, the adaptation of the Amphitryon legend into the libretto of a Broadway musical had been handed over to Dwight Taylor, who had written Porter's 1932 hit Gay Divorce (filmed in 1934 as The Gay Divorcée). Soon, however, it became apparent that Taylor's adaptation was too literal and too serious for a Broadway musical. As Porter described it, it was “underwritten, lacking love interest, and, above all, two great comedy scenes.” He suggested that Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who had authored On the Town on Broadway and The Barkleys of Broadway in Hollywood and who were known to be particularly witty, be brought in to rewrite the show. Understandably, Taylor was miffed about this idea, but perhaps he should not have been, for, when Comden and Green turned in their treatment of the libretto, it bore only a passing resemblance to the original: the premise of a god's affair with a mortal had changed overnight into a baseball story. 

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Reginald Lawrence, who had written an anti-war play, If This Be Treason, was recruited to help rewrite Taylor’s script. By then, however, Porter had seemingly lost patience with the show and could not be convinced to hold even one conference with his new collaborator. Worried about the health of his wife, Linda, who was afflicted with pleurisy, and faced with his own physical problems—following a horseback riding accident thirteen years earlier, when both his legs had been broken, he was in constant pain and forced to walk with the aid of braces and a cane—Porter obviously was not at the peak of condition. As a result, he often passed through deep periods of depression and irritability. 

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Meanwhile Judy Holliday had been approached to play Juno, but, like Carol Channing before her, she declined the offer. Eventually, the production team signed Charlotte Greenwood, who had delighted Broadway audiences since 1914, when she introduced the character of Letitia Proudfoot in Pretty Mrs. Smith (thus starting a long series of “Letty” shows, among which the most memorable was So Long, Letty in 1916), but who had not appeared in New York since Le Maire's Affairs in 1927. As Miss Greenwood, wealthy and certainly not in need of a job, confided to the columnist Hedda Hopper, “When Cole Porter asks you, that's a request from the top, and I hope the combination of C and C (Charlotte and Cole) will be as bubbly as my favorite drink—ginger ale.” 

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Then others quickly were signed including David Burns, William Redfield, Priscilla Gillette, Janet Collins, William Eythe, Barbara Ashley and George Jongeyans—perhaps not the ideal cast Porter had dreamed of, but a highly competent one nonetheless. On the creative side, choreographer Agnes de Mille was hired to stage the entire production, while dancer Hanya Holm, fresh from her success in Kiss Me, Kate was retained to do the choreography; Lemuel Ayers designed the costumes and scenery, as he had previously done in Kate; and Robert Russell Bennett wrote the orchestrations. Money was no object: Broadway angels, who had been reluctant to invest in Kiss Me, Kate, didn't need to be coaxed to provide financing for the new show. 

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Although Porter composed what is now considered in theatrical circles to be one of his best scores, he had become so convinced that the show would be a disaster that he began to detach himself from the production. When the producers started to remove one song after another in a frantic last-minute effort to put the show into shape before its New York premiere, Porter eventually stepped in and forbade them to touch the score further. 

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Only once after that did he relent: the producers had asked George Abbott to come and see the show, which was already playing to sellout business in Philadelphia. Mr. Abbott thought one number in particular was detrimental to the flow of the evening, and at his suggestion Porter agreed to remove it. It was called “From This Moment On,” and when it resurfaced in the film version of Kiss Me, Kate, in 1953, it became an instant hit. 

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In Boston, where the production had moved following its three-week run in Philadelphia, a censor in the city's Licensing Division objected to the scanty costumes worn by some of the characters; as for the lyrics written by Porter, they were, in that lady’s opinion, unsuitable even for "better-class gin mills." Her comments, which resulted in hasty cuts and rewrites to conform to the city’s laws at the time, proved a bonanza at the box office. Wisely, the producers informed the New York press that the cuts they had been forced to make would be reinstated once the show hit New York. 

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Against this background of controversy, compromises and criticisms, Out of This World finally arrived on Broadway. It seemed primed to be a disaster, and, even though Porter might have agreed, he gallantly spoke favorably about it in an article that ran in the New York Telegram: “I’m a pushover for anything that has to do with magic and a magician’s craft,” he was quoted as saying. “That’s why I love this new show; there are so many tricks in it.” The “tricks” he was referring to consisted primarily of the dazzling array of visual effects contrived for the occasion by Lemuel Ayers, which enabled Jupiter and Juno to appear on stage as if floating on pink clouds and, in the words of Gerald Bordman in his chronicle American Musical Theatre (Oxford University Press, 1978), “gave Mount Olympus a star-spangled grandeur the ancient gods might have envied.” What New York audiences saw then on opening night was pure theatrical magic. The stage was set for a classical romp in the grand tradition of Broadway, with all that that means in terms of professional excellence. 

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On the morning following the premiere, the reviews were decidedly mixed: The New York Times and the Herald Tribune panned the show; the World Telegram was neither pro nor con; though the other papers were generally more favorable, only the Daily Mirror expressed unreserved enthusiasm. Even though Porter's score was diverse and melodic, it invited comparisons with Kiss Me, Kate, something most pundits inevitably stressed in their comments. 

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“Some of Mr. Porter's songs are among the finest he has written, and he has the singers who can do justice to them,” stressed Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times. “‘I Am Loved’ is a rapturous lyric as Priscilla Gillette sings it. ‘Where, Oh, Where?’ is beautiful on Barbara Ashley’s lips. Everything George Jongeyans sings is worth a little rejoicing…. But," he added, “the enchanting things in Out of This World are beside the point. For the authors have in mind one of those sex pranks that used to set the customers to giggling nervously many long years ago before the world got out of knee-britches and when spicy operettas were thought to be hot stuff….” And he concluded with these devastating words: “Out of This World does not get far outside the Broadway library of second rate operettas.” 

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Particularly detrimental to the success of the show—and no doubt to the egos of its creators—because it was one of the only things the critics seemed to agree on was Charlotte Greenwood’s swinging her legs in the familiar cart-wheel fashion she had originated in 1916. That, many said, was the high point of the evening. As John McClain wrote in the Journal-American: “There is a gangling and engaging lady named Charlotte Greenwood, whose legs apparently emerge from her shoulder blades and whose arms hang to her ankles. She made quite a career of these eccentricities as a dancer in various musicals 20-odd years ago, and more recently in a series of Hollywood movie extravaganzas, and so last night everybody waited patiently for the nostalgic number to reappear. Well, everybody waited through the entire show and until the spot next-to-closing. And then Miss Greenwood got out and did something called ‘Nobody’s Chasing Me,’ winding up with the incredible kicks, and of course the balcony buckled and the roof came off the theatre….” 

 

The critics also agreed on the production itself, singling out the costumes and sets designed by Lemuel Ayers. “For the investiture of Out of This World, Mr. Ayers has traveled to ancient Greece and beyond the summit of Mount Olympus, where the old gods dwelt. You will not see again for some time so many lovely sets, costumes, curtains and drops,” wrote John Chapman in the Daily News. 

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“The parade of Lemuel Ayers’ sets and costumes, singers, comedians and dancers fills the stage and the eye with color and glitter,” opined Otis L. Guernsey Jr. in the Herald Tribune. “There is not so much wit, nor as much melody lurking here as the decor and enthusiasm would pretend, but the production goes a long way toward filling in with a ton of raucous antics…. Out of This World does not ascend very far into the empyrean, but the pink clouds and purple passions create a minor diversion.” 

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The old saying that you can hardly leave the theater whistling the scenery proved correct in this case. Despite Cole Porter having written what was incontestably an outstanding score (probably his third best after Kiss Me, Kate and Anything Goes) even his name did not prove much of a lure. After struggling for a while at the box office, Out of This World called it quits after a mere 157 performances. 

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For many years, the original cast album recorded by Columbia Records perpetuated the memory of the musical and gave theater buffs an opportunity to reassess the merits of its score. Today, Out of This World continues to exert its hold on Broadway show collectors. As Broadway historian Stanley Green once detailed it in his study The World of Musical Comedy (Grosset & Dunlap, 1962), “the now standard ‘From This Moment On’ was dropped from the score before the musical opened in New York, but there were still many superb songs among those left — ‘Where, Oh, Where?’ with its sweet, lilting melody mated to a coldly calculating lyric; the ever-present beguine, ‘I Am Loved’ (with a release almost identical to that of the earlier ‘I Love You’ [from Mexican Hayride]); the forthright stand of the contented wife called ‘No Lover’; and the paean to the satisfactions of old age, ‘I Sleep Easier Now,’ which Miss Greenwood sang with particular relish. There were also some delightful Cole Porter incongruities: ‘I Jupiter, I Rex’ (‘Reek-eck-o-weck-o-wex!’) brought the spirit of the Yale cheering section to Mount Olympus, while ‘Climb Up the Mountain’ turned a quasi-Negro spiritual into the perfect musical expression for gods and goddesses. Two bright sagas of itemization were ‘Cherry Pies Ought to Be You’ (in the ‘You're the Top’ [from Anything Goes] vein) and the Rabelaisian, rapid-fire account of Mercury’s romantic conquests, ‘They Couldn't Compare to You.’” As for ‘From This Moment On,’ it became one of Cole Porter's most often performed and recorded songs. 

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The composer returned to the stage three years later with Can-Can, for which he composed such memorable songs as “I Love Paris” and “C’est magnifique”; in 1955, he created his last Broadway score for Silk Stockings, which included “All of You.” The following year, he wrote the songs for the screen musical High Society, in which could be heard the million-selling “True Love.” By then, the Out of This World disaster seemed eons away.