Cole, subtitled "An entertainment based on the words and music of Cole Porter," was devised by Benny Green and Alan Strachan for the Mermaid Theatre in London, where it opened on July 2, 1974. It's both a revue of Cole's music and an overview of his life.

Although the epitome of urbanity, Cole Porter was a small-town boy, born in Peru, Indiana in 1891. He was a wealthy small-town boy, though; he attended the ritzy Worchester Academy in Massachussetts and then Yale, where he wrote several musical comedies (and several songs for the Yale football team). His first produced full-scale professional work was the comic opera See America First, which briefly played Broadway in 1916.

Though it's now well-known that he was gay, he married a rich socialite, Linda Lee Thomas, in 1919, and traveled Europe through the 1920s. His Broadway career took off late in the decade with the shows Paris and Fifty Million Frenchman, which were followed by hit after hit for 30 years. Some of his best-known shows include Gay Divorce (with Fred Astaire), Anything Goes (staged by Regina Summer Stage just this last summer), Kiss Me Kate, Can-Can and Silk Stockings. His last work was a made-for-TV musical version of Aladdin in 1958; he died in October, 1964, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 73.

Many Porter songs have become standards--and many of those standards are in Lyric's production of Cole, including Night and Day, I Love Paris, Love for Sale, Anything Goes, I Get a Kick Out of You, Begin the Beguine, What is This Thing Called Love, In the Still of the Night, and many more. The show also features lesser-known but still-terrific Porter songs, some from lesser-known shows, some written as stand-alone songs, and some that were cut from musicals before they reached Broadway.