[Dixielandjazz] The Ambassador Revue - Cole Porter's Lost Show Unearthed

[Robert Ringwald]

Cole Porter's Lost Show Unearthed
by James Barron
New York Times, June 23, 2014
The bandleader Vince Giordano said that when he dialed the number, he figured it
was little more than a Hail Mary pass. But that simple phone call solved the mystery.
The mystery was what had happened to the music for "La Revue des Ambassadeurs," a
lost Cole Porter show that was staged in Paris in mid-1928 with singers, dancers,
the bandleader Fred Waring, a cast that included Clifton Webb and Morton Downey and,
remarkably, George Gershwin at the piano on opening night.
"La Revue" was a frothy nightclub concoction that was soon forgotten, eclipsed by
Porter's first Broadway hit a few months later. Porter scholars had long assumed
that the orchestra parts from "La Revue" had disappeared, and that the show would
never be heard again.
But the missing music has been found, along with a previously unknown number, "Rippling
Stream." The show, retitled "The Ambassador Revue," will be staged for the first
time in this country on Friday at 8 p.m. at Town Hall with Mr. Giordano and his Nighthawks
and a cast that includes Amy Burton, Anita Gillette, Jason Graae, Ted Levy, Catherine
Russell and Tom Wopat. The choreography will be by Randy Skinner.
On the bill are the 19 numbers that Porter wrote for "La Revue," including four that
were not included in a piano-and-voice reduction issued in France soon after the
Paris run. Robert Kimball's authoritative anthology "The Complete Lyrics of Cole
Porter" (Vintage, 1983) described three of the four with the phrase "no music survives."
"Rippling Stream" was not even listed, and another was reworked later by Porter under
another title.
"Very few people to my knowledge have performed these songs," Mr. Kimball said in
a recent interview, noting that since the publication of his 501-page book in 1983,
fewer than six unknown Porter songs had surfaced before these. "It's an unknown score.
It's never really been heard since then."
Peter Filichia, a musical theater historian, said "La Revue" was "something that
we heard about, but we didn't think we'd hear." Bobby Short recorded one song from
"La Revue" in the 1970s: "Pilot Me," about romance in a newfangled "aeroplane." But
Mr. Filichia said it was not surprising that the numbers in "La Revue" remained unknown
outside the fairly small circle of Porter experts.
"If Broadway shows can disappear after their first and only production, why would
a nightclub show have any afterlife?" he asked. "And back in 1928, Cole Porter was
nothing. He was lucky he got the job. This turned out to be a significant steppingstone
in the history of Cole Porter. He might not have had a career if this had not come
along."
"La Revue" was staged in Paris, where Porter was living, while his musical "Paris"
was being staged in out-of-town tryouts in this country on its way to becoming his
first Broadway hit. As such, said Ken Bloom, who is directing the Town Hall production,
"La Revue" was "early Porter on his way to becoming Cole Porter in capital letters."
"You see all of the slyness, the humor, the double entendres, the playfulness, the
wit," he said. "You see it there in a nascent form. You can visualize what he would
become."
The sleuthing that is now bringing the show to life took place on both sides of the
Atlantic. In preparation for the Town Hall performance, Mr. Giordano faced the prospect
of having to orchestrate the piano-and-voice arrangements (as had been done for a
2012 performance in Paris, but those parts were unavailable for the New York staging).
Mr. Giordano knew that Mr. Bloom had already checked with Waring's archive in University
Park, Pa., and had been told that nothing from "The Ambassador Revue" had been found
in the thousands of orchestra parts that Waring had saved over his long career.
Still, Mr. Giordano decided to double-check. He wrote out a list of the songs known
to have been performed in "La Revue" and called the Waring archive himself. "They
called back and said, 'We have all the numbers you listed here, and more,'" Mr. Giordano
recalled. He called Mr. Bloom and told him: "You're never going to believe this.
I hope you're sitting down. They found the actual arrangements that were used in
the show."
The find included the music for the show's opening number, "Keep Moving." Mr. Kimball's
book said that music was not extant.
Porter wrote two other numbers for Frances Gershwin, who was in the original cast
and appeared on opening night with her famous brother George as accompanist. One
was an introduction:
If you're prepared for an orgy
Of music written by Georgie,
I'll try to sing you some fav'rites of
The man I love.
And then there was a number titled "Rippling Stream." It was not mentioned at all
in Mr. Kimball's book.
"We don't have any words for it," Mr. Giordano said. "We're just going to play it
as an instrumental."
The find astonished Mr. Bloom, himself a musical theater historian who wrote "Broadway
Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time" with Frank Vlastnik (Black Dog and
Leventhal, 2004). "You just don't come across a lost score like this," he said. "If
we don't have complete scores for an early Gershwin show or an early Kern show, at
least we know the songs. This, we don't even know the songs."
The path to staging the show began with a lesser discovery in an antiquarian book-and-poster
shop in SoHo in 2011. Ms. Burton, browsing, spotted a bound copy of the piano-and-voice
reduction. Mr. Kimball had already sent her photocopies of some of the songs, and
she had called Mr. Bloom and Barry Kleinbort, a composer and lyricist.
"I felt we were sitting on something important, like an early Mozart opera," Ms.
Burton said. "Nobody knew about it here. It struck me as very French, what he wrote."
They wondered about the missing songs and called Christophe Mirambeau, a songwriter
and music historian in Paris. As it happened, he had done some sleuthing in a warehouse
that had belonged to Porter's French publisher. Deep in a stack of sheet music that
was about to be discarded, he found "Boulevard Break," a second number written for
Frances Gershwin. It, too, was listed in "The Complete Lyrics" as lacking music.
And the book with the voice-and-piano reductions that Ms. Burton bought for $35 in
SoHo?
"I put it away somewhere safe," she said. "I can't even find it."
-30


-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

“My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying.” 
--Rodney Dangerfield