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'''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''.

Contents

Plot

Songs

Broadway production

London production

External links

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.

Songs

;Act I ★ After You, Who? ★ Why Marry Them? ★ Salt Air ★ I Still Love the Red, White and Blue ★ After You, Who? (Reprise) ★ Night and Day ★ How's Your Romance?

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''

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.

External links

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