Tag Archives: Cole Porter

Goofing, Music

‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’

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I have no real excuse for posting something fun and trivial tonight, except…

  • First of all, I don’t have a book finished for review;
  • Secondly, everything’s so sad today, and this clip amused me.

Above, a show-stopping number from the musical, “Kiss Me Kate.” The production, in its various manifestations, is a meta-narrative – a musical about a musical. It deals with a fictional musical production of a version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming Of the Shrew.” The producer and star is Fred Graham, played here by Howard Keel. The female lead is Lilli Vanessi, played by Kathryn Grayson. They are divorced, but still cherish suppressed feelings for one another, though each is now involved with someone else. Lilli’s guy is another actor in the play, who owes a large sum of money to a gangster, and has deviously signed Frank’s name to his IOU. The gangster sends two minions to collect from Frank; here they’re played by two of the great character actors of the 20th Century – Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore. Who knew they could dance like that?

(By the way, I have never seen “Kiss Me Kate” in any of its forms, and I get this information from the Wikipedia article. But I’ve long been familiar with the song.)

The lyrics are by Cole Porter, better than which you do not get.

The movie altered the plot somewhat from the stage version, so I don’t entirely understand what excuse they made for having the two goons encourage Frank with this number in the back alley. In the original play, they find themselves onstage alone before the audience, and improvise it.

Does quoting Shakespeare to women actually make a man interesting to them?

Not in my experience.

Music, Poetry

‘Mountain Greenery’

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I have nothing to review today. That leaves me with no alternative to writing about stuff I’ve been thinking about – and that, as you know, can get weird.

Tonight’s subject, to take an example at random, is “broken rhyme.” You can find several examples of broken rhyme in the song, “Mountain Greenery,” by Rodgers and Hart, embedded above (the song was debuted on Broadway by the actor Sterling Holloway, who would live long enough to be the original voice of Winnie the Pooh in the Disney cartoons). A meme is going around Basefook where somebody asks to quote the greatest line from any song, ever. I haven’t responded to it yet, but when I do it’ll be:

We could get no keener re- 
ception in a beanery 
Bless our mountain greenery home!

That, my friends, is broken rhyme. At first I thought it was “enjambment,” and I prepared a long disquisition on that subject for this post, but then I found out enjambment is something else, so I cut that part. All in all, probably for the best.

Lorenz Hart was known for using broken rhyme in his songs. Cole Porter employs it in his song, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” where you have the lines (in the original, unexpurgated version):

Some get a kick from cocaine
I'm sure that if
I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrif-
Ically, too
Yet, I get a kick out of you

I’ve always been fascinated by broken rhyme. Love those word tricks in verse. It’s one of the reasons contemporary popular music leaves me cold. Today’s lyrics are generally simplistic, intended to be yelled. That’s why I like the old songs. There’s a station in St. Cloud, Minnesota (Uptown 1010, Ring-a-Ding Radio) that I make a point of listening to, every time I drive north on I-94. All oldies, with an emphasis on Sinatra and the crooners. Songs with lyrics worth paying attention to.

I could move on to the subject of Contemporary Christian Worship Music, but I think you can guess my opinion on that.