Let's Misbehave at John G Shedd Institute for the Arts

The grandson of "the richest man in Indiana", coal and timber magnate J. O. Cole, Cole Porter came to his love of music and composition as a child and developed his love for musical theatre while at Yale, where he wrote over 300 songs. In 1913, he gave up his law studies at Harvard to further his study of music, and in 1917 he moved to France, which became his primary home for 20 years. He joined the French Foreign Legion, married divorcée Linda Lee Thomas (in 1919), hosted wild parties at his luxurious homes in Paris and Venice, cultivated the career of nightclub hostess Bricktop, and wrote lots of songs...and one extended composition, Within The Quota, a 16 minute ballet that premiered in October, 1923 on the same program as Darius Milhaud's La création du monde before enjoying a 69 performance tour in the United States. The Porters quit Europe in 1937 after Cole's serious riding accident followed by the commencement of WWII. Linda died in 1954, Cole a decade later....

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The grandson of "the richest man in Indiana", coal and timber magnate J. O. Cole, Cole Porter came to his love of music and composition as a child and developed his love for musical theatre while at Yale, where he wrote over 300 songs. In 1913, he gave up his law studies at Harvard to further his study of music, and in 1917 he moved to France, which became his primary home for 20 years. He joined the French Foreign Legion, married divorcée Linda Lee Thomas (in 1919), hosted wild parties at his luxurious homes in Paris and Venice, cultivated the career of nightclub hostess Bricktop, and wrote lots of songs...and one extended composition, Within The Quota, a 16 minute ballet that premiered in October, 1923 on the same program as Darius Milhaud's La création du monde before enjoying a 69 performance tour in the United States. The Porters quit Europe in 1937 after Cole's serious riding accident followed by the commencement of WWII. Linda died in 1954, Cole a decade later.

Porter had moderate success through the 1920s, but was unable to break into Broadway in a big way until 1928's Paris, which starred the great Irene Bordoni and introduced 2 unqualifed hits, "Let's Misbehave", which was replaced by his renowned list song, "Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)". Paris and Europe generally figures large throughout Porter's catalog, including some of his greatest hits, and several of his shows are set in the Paris or other European locales: Paris (1928), Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), You Never Know (1937 - the show in which "Let's Misbehave" finally found a home), Dubarry Was A Lady (1939), Can-Can (1953), and Les Girls 1955).

http://theshedd.org/divP/festival.aspx?series=2260&event=2266

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