The run closed July 1, 1933
- Opened
- November 29, 1932
- Closed
- July 1, 1933
- Performances
- 248
- Previews
- —
- Theatre
- Ethel Barrymore Theatre
Of the 1,388 productions we hold that opened in the 1930s and record a performance count, this is the 77th longest. That is a rank within what we hold, not within everything that was staged.
Other stagings of Gay Divorce 1 more that season
| 1905 | Transfer Transfer |
Who was in it25 named
Edna Abbey
Helen Allen
Roland Bottomley
Joan Burgess
Martin Cravath
Eleanor Etheridge
Sonia B Fitch
Jean Frontai
Mitzi Garner
Taylor Gordon
Billie Green
Ethel Hampton
Mary Jo Mathews
Grace Moore
Pat Palmer
Bobbie Sheehan
Jacquie Simmons
Dorothy Waller
7 of these 25 names have a person record behind them and link to one. The other 18 are set from the identifier in the cast list, which is a slug of the name — so hyphens and full stops are lost and a few come out wrong. We hold nothing else about them. Nobody here is matched to a character: the cast list records who was in the company and not what they played.
Creative team
- Director
- Howard Lindsay
- Choreographer
- Carl Randall, Barbara Newberry
- Producer
- Dwight Deere Wiman & Tom Weatherly
A producer is one string on this record, however many people or companies it names. Directors and choreographers are held both as text and as identifiers; where an identifier exists the name links to a page.
Around this production
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. RKO Radio Pictures released a film production of the musical in 1934, starring Astaire and Ginger Rogers, renamed The Gay Divorcee.
On November 29, 1932, the Barrymore Theatre housed its first musical, Cole Porter's Gay Divorce. Fred Astaire, without his sister Adele for the first time, danced with the blonde Claire Luce, who once rode a live ostrich in the Ziegfeld Tollies. At This Theatre 100 Years of Broadway Shows Stories and Botto Louis Viagas Rober, p. 298
- The gamble paid off when he opened in Gay Divorce the next year, and once he proved he could go it alone, he, too, left the theatre and made his way to Hollywood, where he became an even greater star, teaming most famously with Ginger Rogers. Broadway Musicals the 101 Greatest Shows of All Time Bloom Ken 1949 Vlastnik Fra, p. 125
- The Gay Divorcée, which was based, but not quite nominally, on Gay Divorce, starring Astaire, retained but one Porter tune, “Night and Day.” Enchanted Evenings the Broadway Musical From Show Boat Block Geoffrey Oxford New, p. 198
- From 1928 until 1944, about the time Hollywood canonized him for pop culture with a film biography (Night and Day, 1945), Porter created songs for a new Broadway musical comedy almost every season—fourteen altogether. And he went on to write a handful of book shows after that—including the finest theater score of his c… Showtime A History of the Broadway Musical Theatre Larry Stempel, p. 297
- The New Yorkers marked the first of eight musicals by Porter to open on Broadway during the decade, and it was followed by Gay Divorce; Anything Goes; Jubilee; Red, Hot and Blue; You Never Know; Leave It to Me!; and DuBarry Was a Lady (Porter also wrote the songs for the 1933 London musical Nymph Errant). The Complete Book of 1930s Broadway Musicals Dietz Dan Rowman Littlefield Publis, p. 105
- At 248 performances, the show became the season’s second-longest-running musical. The Complete Book of 1930s Broadway Musicals Dietz Dan Rowman Littlefield Publis, p. 254
Passages naming this production, found by keyword across 178 books. Where it turns up in the literature, not curated notes about it.
What this page does not know
- No photograph of this staging. 48 of 13,459 productions hold one.
- No character names. We can say who was in the company and not who they played.
- No recording is held for Gay Divorce at all.
- Reviews, box office, running order, understudies and designers: none of it is held for any production.