'Do Do That Voodoo That You Do So Well'

Yesterday in 1929 was the first public performance of the first "real" Cole Porter musical; i.e., with a storyline throughout, and in the mature musical style that elicits us to urge Porter on to "Do do that voodoo that you do so well," in the words of its hit song, "You Do Something To Me."

The show was "Fifty Million Frenchmen," in its Boston tryout before coming to New York. So much about this show has implications for life today, on stage and off.

For one thing, one of the female leads was only cast because she was Mayor Walker's mistress. Betty Compton was a strictly okay performer, but it was understood that she was to be cast because Mr. Walker had an interest in it being thus.

That was a more freewheeling era on the Great White Way. These days, if Mayor Bloomberg put pressure on the producers of "Chicago" to cast his ladyfriend Diana Taylor, head of the New York State Banking Department, as Roxie, Actors' Equity would take to the streets.

But in 1929, Equity was only 10 years old, and its establishment had been a contentious one that many veteran Broadway producers still had not fully accepted. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees had existed since 1893, but the idea of them staging a strike and shutting down most of Broadway open-endedly, as they have of late, would have sounded like science fiction. The producers would have hired scabs and felt no remorse: democracy advances.

The show opened with the male chorus saluting Prohibition for encouraging drinking. "Let us give our endorsement/To his act of enforcement/What a noble experiment!" they harmonized, holding their Manhattans high. Irving Berlin did a similar song, "A Toast to Prohibition," a few years later in his "Face the Music," revived last spring in City Center's glorious "Encores!" series.

We giggle now — but welcome to 2007 when drug use continues despite the War on Drugs.

Let's raise our glasses, for instance, to the 1986 decree that possession of crack would be penalized more heavily than of powdered cocaine, noting that those who backed this noble idea, if transported immediately to last week, would have seen that their program led to precisely nothing they were hoping for.

"Fifty Million Frenchmen" happens to be one of the rare, old shows that has been recorded from start to finish with its original orchestral arrangements. Being a geek, I noticed that the medley overture included a catchy tune that is never sung on the recording.

Since recordings of shows like these are typically highly archival affairs, with their producers dredging up every scrap with the obsessiveness of the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, it is peculiar that there is not a word in the liner notes about what this mysterious melody even is. I knew what the issue must be.

That melody must run up against some taboo, and in our America that would have to be race. All I had to do was consult Robert Kimball's anthology of Porter lyrics, and wouldn't you know, one from this show was "The Happy Heaven of Harlem." Apparently Harlem is a place where "You're never blue, 'cause all you do is eat, sleep and make love." Okay.

I appreciate the album's producers for shielding our virgin ears from the fact that back in the day, attitudes on race weren't as enlightened as our own. But couldn't we have at least had the number played as an instrumental? Oh well.

Then there was "The Tale of the Oyster," about an oyster who seeks to be ingested by someone of the upper class, is indeed thusly consumed, but then vomited out. "I've had a taste of society and society has had a taste of me," the oyster contentedly concludes.

Critics found this song so "disgusting" that a month-and-change into the show's run, it was cut. The notion in the lyric is pretty gross — but unfit for civilized ears? Interesting how taboos change. In 1929, you can celebrate black people as sybarites, but nix on a technicolor yawn. Whereas today, every time some non-black individual somewhere utters the N-word near a microphone it makes national headlines, while in Broadway musicals, characters slit throats and sing about incest and nobody bats an eye.

While we're in geekland, the lead in "Fifty Million Frenchmen" was William Gaxton, who was in lots of classic shows, but didn't work long enough to be on cast albums. Music professor at the University of Puget Sound Geoffrey Block says in his new book on Richard Rodgers that Gaxton's singing voice is "simply unknown" to posterity — but no. In one of the Ed Sullivan show excerpts on the invaluable bluegobo.com, an archive of musical theater performances, we can now catch him in his vigorous late middle age zestily putting over "Thou Swell."

I really do keep up with anniversaries of musicals, I hate to admit. But then, not long ago I heard Mark Steyn introduced as the only oped columnist who also writes about musicals. Well, with a sincere salute to the master: ahem.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.