Sunday, November 2, 2003

Now you know: Cole Porter gem not to be missed

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — “You Never Know” has all the fun and games that make Cole Porter’s musicals such treats. Set in Paris at the end of the razzle-dazzle Jazz Age, it opened on Broadway in 1938 and ran for 78 performances before slipping into relative obscurity.

Now, with the Seaside Music Theater production that runs Thursday through Nov. 23, the madcap farce that includes a double dose of mistaken identities and Porter’s peerless music is back.

“We found a re-creation of his original intention — the Schuberts (who produced “You Never Know” in 1938) increased the cast size when they adapted it for Broadway but we’re going back to the smaller-size cast that Cole Porter had intended,” said director Lester Malizia.

“I first heard about ‘You Never Know’ from a friend who directed it in Indiana, and learned more when I was researching Cole Porter recordings. The original was based on a Viennese play, Siegfried Geiger’s ‘By Candlelight, ’” he said. “It’s just such a ‘swelligant,’ stylish show, with glamorous costumes and a set with a curving staircase, for dancing and dramatic, gracious entrances.”

That glamour has been Cole Porter’s trademark from his first Broadway show — a 1916 flop called “See America First,” written when the Indiana native was in his mid-20s — to the triumphs that came before his death in 1964, at age 73. Among those later hits were “Kiss Me, Kate,” “Can-Can,” “Silk Stockings” and “High Society,” lively shows that complement the more than 800 songs Porter wrote, beginning with “Song of the Birds” in 1901.

From the start, it was clear that Porter was musically talented. His piano and violin studies began when he was 6, turning to the piano and using it to accompany the parodies of popular tunes he and his mother created. After graduation from the Worcester Academy in Massachusetts, where he developed his belief that “words and music must be so inseparably wedded to each other that they are like one,” as he put it, Porter toured Europe and went on to Yale.

There, in the years just before World War I, he wrote “And the Villain Still Pursued Her,” “The Pot of Gold” and other student shows. His first big hit, “Fifty Million Frenchmen,” came in 1929, after years of living in the high life in Jazz Age Paris. After that, Porter was one of Broadway’s top composers and tunewriters, with such hits as “Let’s Do It,” “Night and Day,” “Anything Goes” and the music for “You Nev, in the revival Seaside is presenting, two songs dropped from the 1938 Schubert production — “By Candlelight” and “I’m Back in Circulation” — are back too. The entire show takes place in the hotel suite of the Baron de Rommer (Ayal Miodovnik), with its sweeping view of the Paris skyline as a summer evening fades to dark.

Along the way, events in the suite light up. The baron and his valet, Gaston (Ben Franklin), switch identities, not knowing that their lady friends — Ida (Kahliah Rivers) and Maria (Jennifer Swiderski) — also have switched identities. The resulting confusion, backed by an on-stage combo and the “swellegant” Parisian panorama, underlines the arch title. In Porter’s playful, colorful universe, “You Never Know.”

Playbill

WHAT: Cole Porter’s “You Never Know,” the second of Seaside Music Theater’s three winter season productions.

WHEN: Thursday (preview) through Nov. 23.

WHERE: SMT Downtown, 176 N. Beach St., Daytona Beach.

TICKETS: $27-$34.

INFORMATION: (386) 252-6200, (800) 854-5592, www.seasidemusictheater.org.