Cole Porter

Although the celebrations in honor of the Cole Porter centenary are numerous, here are a few of the highlights:Concerts: "A Gala Birthday Concert," featuring such estimable Porter performers as Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison, will be held June 9 in Carnegie Hall, New York.Video: "You're the Top: The Cole Porter Story" (Island Visual Arts) features clips of Porter, as well as such Porter interpreters as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire."Red, Hot and Blue" is the name of a Porter musical, but this actually is a 90-minute video version of the recording released last year, featuring various pop artists performing Porter standards.

Thanks to the tenacity of a director and a talented cast, fans of Cole Porter can get to know the composer's 1937 musical, "You Never Know," currently getting first-rate treatment at Prince George's Little Theatre at the Bowie Playhouse. The legendary lyricist and master tunesmith's farcical comedy is an exciting, charming close to the Little Theatre's 53rd season. Production director Roy Hammond says his love affair with the show dates back 16 years, when he discovered a CD of "You Never Know" in a Hollywood record shop.

Thanks to the tenacity of a director and a talented cast, fans of Cole Porter can get to know the composer's 1937 musical, "You Never Know," currently getting first-rate treatment at Prince George's Little Theatre at the Bowie Playhouse. The legendary lyricist and master tunesmith's farcical comedy is an exciting, charming close to the Little Theatre's 53rd season. Production director Roy Hammond says his love affair with the show dates back 16 years, when he discovered a CD of "You Never Know" in a Hollywood record shop.

Every Friday evening, Ken Jackson's basso profundo voice pulls his listeners into their memories. As the host of In the Mood, a weekly, three-hour show on WYPR-FM that invokes the big-band sound of the 1930s and 1940s -- along with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughan -- the courtly, 75-year-old Jackson is keeping alive for his audience a genre of music that to many people is a thing of the distant past. To Jackson and his loyal adherents, though, there is nothing more enriching than tunes like Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade"; Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's "All the Things You Are," from Artie Shaw's band; Tommy Dorsey's take on Irving Berlin's "Marie"; and anything composed by Cole Porter.

Cole Porter may have written "Can-Can," but the revue of his songs at Olney Theatre is more like "Can't-Can't."The fault isn't in the songs. It's in the way they've been interpreted by the show's creators -- director and choreographer David Holdgrive, musical director and arranger Bruce W. Coyle and actor Mark Waldrop.The quality most often associated with Cole Porter's music is sophistication. "Hot 'n' Cole" doesn't merely lack sophistication, after intermission it's downright tasteless.

To most of us, he is the ultimate sophisticate -- a debonair, decadently rich gentleman who triumphed on Broadway, partied in Paris, soireed in Venice, cruised up the Nile and never left his sumptuous New York apartment without placing a carnation in the lapel of his impeccably tailored suits.But there's another, equally intriguing -- if lesser known -- side to Cole Porter, the brilliant songwriter whose 100th birthday is being celebrated this year.Beneath the surface glitter of the career that produced both music and lyrics for "Night and Day," "You're the Top," "Anything Goes," "I Love Paris," "Begin the Beguine," "I Get a Kick Out of You" and dozens more is a personality that was shaped and nurtured not in cultural capitals but in Peru, Ind., a dot on the map about 150 miles southeast of Chicago and 75 miles north of Indianapolis.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- A trove of Cole Porter material, written while he was a college student and discovered in a house in Kennebunk, Maine, has been acquired by the music library of Yale University.The collection includes notes, lyrics and doodles as well as the score and lyrics for a football song and the outline for a college musical, both previously unknown. The 700 manuscript pages were written in pencil in Porter's neat, loopy hand while he was at Yale, from which he graduated in 1913.

"I GET A Kick Out of You," "It's De-Lovely," "Friendship," "Let's Misbehave."It's hard to imagine a musical with funnier, more romantic and durable songs than Cole Porter's "Anything Goes," and you can enjoy all the shipboard sweetness and intrigue in Atholton High School's production March 28, 29 and 30.Cast members include Sara Glazer, Dave Johnson, Courtney Bell, Jeff Hubbard, Melissa Millin, Kyle Hubbard, Ryan Sullivan, Jon Sanford and Maggie Sheer.Keith Marin, Jon Sykes, Tom Lukacsina, Jordon Schulman, John Armstrong, Patrick Morton, Danny Dworkin and Alan Landsman also have roles.

Why do moviemakers keep trying to turn the story of the brilliant, sybaritic songwriter Cole Porter into a tribute to married love and devotion? Night and Day (1946) did it with Cary Grant as a heterosexual Cole and Alexis Smith as his high-society wife, Linda. Now De-Lovely does it with Kevin Kline playing the factual gay Cole and Ashley Judd a Linda who accepts his homosexuality and focuses on the non-erotic portions of his life. In the flagrantly bad and fallacious old movie, Linda can't save Cole from his workaholism until a horse-riding accident crushes his legs; she abandons him, then returns after he proves his bravery and seriousness by standing on his own two feet (albeit, with canes)

A cruise ship filled with colorful passengers, including Wall Street moguls, debutantes, escaped convicts, noblemen and a former nightclub singer turned evangelist - accompanied by her own group of guardian angels - will dock at Key Auditorium at St. John's College on Aug. 2. These characters from composer Cole Porter's 1934 hit musical Anything Goes will be brought to life by the 14- to 18-year-old Talent Machine cast, a 26-member troupe of familiar favorites...

CONCERT COLE PORTER TRIBUTE Get a kick out of Cole Porter at the concert "Too Darn Hot! A Tribute to Cole Porter" today through Sunday at the Music Center at Strathmore and the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra SuperPops, under the direction of Jack Everly, along with the Baltimore Choral Arts Society and music director Tom Hall and guest vocalists, will perform many of Porter's famed Broadway hits from the Great American Songbook. Among them: "I Get a Kick Out of You," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Night and Day" and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy."

You might say that the musical Bricktop was born in a trunk. The trunk had belonged to an African-American singer named Ada "Bricktop" Smith and was purchased a few years ago by the library at Atlanta's Emory University, which is where native Baltimore playwright Calvin A. Ramsey saw it. Ramsey had never heard of the singer, but when he started going through her trunk, he says, "I saw all these telegrams from Cole Porter, letters from Arlene Francis and...

The Annapolis Chorale opened its 34th season with "An Evening with Cole Porter," filled with marvelous classic melodies and sassy tunes fused to incomparable lyrics that remain among Broadway's wittiest. Under J. Ernest Green's sensitive direction, last weekend's program was filled with stylish singing complete with flawless diction and masterful musicianship to pay tribute to Porter. The concert featured the Annapolis Chamber Orchestra, guest artists who provided a light jazz approach and other soloists drawn from the chorus who offered more classical renditions to cover the wide range of versatility that Porter's music requires.

NEW YORK - Bobby Short, who entertained Manhattan's cafe society for more than half a century, died yesterday of leukemia at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Mr. Short, a venerable institution who preferred to describe himself as a "saloon singer," celebrated his 80th birthday last fall and on New Year's Eve closed out his 36th year at Manhattan's Carlyle hotel. At engagements every spring and autumn, Mr. Short presided at the keyboard in the Cafe Carlyle. Elegantly attired - he said he went through three or four tuxedos a year - he accompanied himself in a barreling style as he croakily embraced the songs of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington and others that met his qualifications.

After a couple of months watching the Sharks and Jets kill each other on stage in West Side Story, the folks at the Chesapeake Music Hall were ready for a walk on the lighter side. They chose a sparkler all right, Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, which will play at the Annapolis area's premier dinner theater through Nov. 13. Clever to a fault, Kate makes wonderfully inventive use of the play-within-a-play format as it spins the tale of an estranged husband and wife acting team brought together to perform Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew in hot, stultifying Baltimore.

Venturing a half-mile outside Anne Arundel County - about five minutes from Crofton - leads to Bowie Playhouse, hidden in the woods of Whitemarsh Park. This functional theater boasts a large, high stage that accommodates rapid set changes, a full orchestra pit and comfortable seating for 150. Here, full-fledged productions are mounted by top-notch technicians to showcase first-rate, on-stage talent. The combination wins prestigious awards for 2nd Star Productions and Bowie Community Theatre - the two companies at Bowie Playhouse.

The more I see our toxic youth culture spiraling into the depths of moral and aesthetic bankruptcy, the greater the joy I take in watching gifted youngsters use their talents to produce something sassy, sophisticated and laden with oodles of savoir-faire. A Cole Porter show is all that in spades, which explains why I enjoyed such a lovely evening at the theater Saturday when Annapolis' Talent Machine Company presented Porter's musical Anything Goes at Key Auditorium on the campus of St. John's College.

Why do moviemakers keep trying to turn the story of the brilliant, sybaritic songwriter Cole Porter into a tribute to married love and devotion? Night and Day (1946) did it with Cary Grant as a heterosexual Cole and Alexis Smith as his high-society wife, Linda. Now De-Lovely does it with Kevin Kline playing the factual gay Cole and Ashley Judd a Linda who accepts his homosexuality and focuses on the non-erotic portions of his life. In the flagrantly bad and fallacious old movie, Linda can't save Cole from his workaholism until a horse-riding accident crushes his legs; she abandons him, then returns after he proves his bravery and seriousness by standing on his own two feet (albeit, with canes)

Marilyn Horne, one of the great singers of the 20th century, sang a recital Sunday afternoon at Columbia's Jim Rouse Theatre in celebration of the Candlelight Concert Society's 30th anniversary season. Although the 69-year-old coloratura mezzo-soprano is no longer setting off fireworks in the bel canto and baroque arias that made her the Metropolitan Opera's lead mezzo for nearly three decades, she still knows how to put over a song. These days, when not serving on the faculty of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, Calif.