Gay Divorce
| Gay Divorce | |
|---|---|
| Music | Cole Porter |
| Lyrics | Cole Porter |
| Book |
Dwight Taylor Adapted by: Kenneth Webb and Samuel Hoffenstein |
| Basis | An unproduced play by J. Hartley Manners |
| Productions | 1932 Broadway 1933 West End |
Gay Divorce is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and book by Dwight Taylor, adapted by Kenneth Webb and Samuel Hoffenstein. It was Fred Astaire's last Broadway show and featured the hit song "Night and Day" in which Astaire danced with co-star Claire Luce.
It was made into a musical film by RKO Radio Pictures in 1934, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and renamed The Gay Divorcee.
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 co-respondent" to assist his client in obtaining a divorce from her boring, aging, geologist husband Robert. 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" romance novels — for the paid co-respondent.
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.
‡new song for the London production, ‡‡for London production
Astaire's sister Adele retired from showbusiness and married Lord Charles Cavendish after her last show with Fred, The Band Wagon (1931). When the producers of Gay Divorce asked Fred to star in the show, he deferred an answer until he could spend the summer of 1932 wooing his future wife, Phyllis, in London. He finally agreed, and rehearsals began in September 1932. The show was both Astaire's last Broadway musical (after which he moved to Hollywood) and also his only stage musical without Adele. Also in the cast were Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore who soon became famous in the early 1930s RKO comedies.
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