Out of this World (1950) - 2000 Staged Concert Production

Out of this World (1950)

Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter,
Original book by Dwight Taylor and Reginald Lawrence,
New Book by Greg MacKellan,
(Incorporating Additional Material by Howard Ashman)

Directed by Greg MacKellan
Choreographer: Jayne Zaban

Playbill Notes

The character of Jupiter in Out of This World states Cole Porter's thesis right up front: he's "positively teeming with sex." The word on the street in the late fall of 1950 was that Porter's new show was "teeming with sex" itself; the cognoscenti knew that the production ran into censor trouble in Boston and had been performed in a laundered version to satisfy the city's restrictive "blue laws."

That wasn't the only trouble in Boston: George Abbott replaced Agnes DeMille as director and promptly cut two of the show's best songs, "You Don't Remind Me" and "From This Moment On." But even Abbott's notorious prudery couldn't completely take the fizz out of a show that took such an unabashed (and subversive) delight in sex. By the time Out of This World reached Broadway, the whole town was abuzz over the show's barely-concealed gay sensibility, the scantily-clad chorus, the shockingly erotic "Dance of the Long Night," the risqué book, and Porter's candid - and frequently ribald - lyrics.

Added to this was the general excitement over Porter's first show since the still-running Kiss Me, Kate had set the town on its ear two years before and the return of a beloved favorite, old-time star Charlotte Greenwood. With so much press coverage and an extraordinary advance sale, the show seemed ready to settle in for at least as long as Kate. To everyone's surprise, it closed six months later - and then began a peculiar afterlife.

Although Rick Besoyan (later the playwright/composer of Little Mary Sunshine) brought Out of This World back in a modestly successful 1956 off-Broadway revival, it wasn't until the 1970s that various producers - as well as the Cole Porter Trust itself - made serious attempts to bring Porter's glorious score the acclaim it deserved. One version (re-titled Use Your Imagination) turned the Mt. Olympus Gods and Goddesses into anti-war "hippies" and made it clear that the character of Apollo was gay (only hinted at in 1950).

Another version, called Heaven Sent, managed a bit of a regional life before meeting the same fate as the original. Howard Ashman, who would gain fame as author/lyricist of Little Shop of Horrors and Beauty and the Beast, took a completely different approach in his unproduced rewrite. He turned the character of Helen into a movie star and sent the Gods and Goddesses to Hollywood, where Juno wrote screenplays, Mercury turned film producer, and Apollo pursued "Julio," a cute costume boy on the set.

Encores!, New York's renowned "concert musical" series, presented the show in 1995 (using an edited version of Besoyan's script), and critics marveled again at Porter's wondrous score. (In his book Coming Up Roses, Ethan Mordden states that Out of This World is Porter's "loveliest score... his tenderest and also his sassiest." Mordden also points out that, along with his racy comedy tunes and signature patter songs, Porter wrote three lushly melodic and heartfelt ballads: "Use Your Imagination," "I Am Loved," and "No Lover.")

When we decided to present Out of This World at 42nd Street Moon this year, Robert Montgomery and Roberta Staats of the Porter Trust asked us to have one more go at revising the book, and sent us home with no less than seven different versions of the script. The two most helpful have proven to be Howard Ashman's 1979 rewrite and (surprisingly) the pre-rehearsal, pre-George Abbott, 1950 original by Dwight Taylor and Reginald Lawrence, which is funnier and more richly characterized than one might expect.

So what did we use? From Ashman, we kept his clever conceit of Helen's being a movie star, along with his amusing depiction of the various gods and goddesses as squabbling - and highly eccentric - siblings. We folded these elements into the structure of the Broadway original (keeping the song order essentially in place, as well as most of the scene locations).

A clumsy and unnecessary subplot involving Chloe's uncle, a Chicago gangster, was dropped. Building on the "Hollywood" angle from Ashman, the uncle was replaced by a Hollywood gossip columnist written especially for 42nd Street Moon regular Lisa Peers. The result? The eighth version of Out of This World - Porter's "errant child" musical. With luck, we finally "got it right," and we'll send you home reveling in the genius of the extraordinary Cole Porter!

----Greg MacKellan

Plot Summary

The Roman gods Mercury and Jupiter are in search of some entertainment of the human kind. The focus of their attention is a young bride, Helen and her husband, Art. Mercury joins the two on their trip to Athens, intending to put himself between the blushing newlyweds. While the men are busy chasing Helen, the goddess Juno (Jupiter's wife) is playing games of her own with inept gangster Nikki as her reluctant sidekick.