Fifty Million Frenchmen

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Fifty Million Frenchmen is a musical comedy with the music and lyrics by Cole Porter , the book is by Herbert Fields . It premiered on November 27, 1929 at the Lyric Theater in New York , one month after the stock market crash on Black Thursday , the beginning of the Great Depression . It was the first to Porter's big Broadway -Hit. The main role was played by William Gaxton .

content

Paris has a lot to offer Americans in the late twenties: culture, beauty, entertainment and alcohol! (see Prohibition ) , forbidden books, uninhibited men.
Three well-to-do college buddies are vacationing in Paris. When one of them, Peter Forbes, meets again a girl, Looloo Carroll, whom he had already noticed during the crossing, a bet is made for 50,000 francs (“fifty mille”): within a month he should get him to Looloo to marry without, however, using his wealth as a means of courtship for his livelihood.
Now we see Peter as a tour guide and as a dancer ; also: a visit to the Longchamp racecourse , a pompous reception and in between some other Paris-great Americans.

The plot of Fifty Million Frenchmen still has the disjointedness of a revue , as was common on the shows of the 1920s. Porter wrote about twice the musical numbers used at the end - the piece only took shape during rehearsals. The increasing concentration of Broadway shows on a single storyline only became common in the musical plays of the 1930s and has to do with competition from the sound film .

Well-known music numbers

  •  I'm Unlucky at Gambling
  •  You Do Something To Me
  •  You've Got That Thing
  •  You don't know paree

filming

There are film adaptations from 1931 under the direction of Lloyd Bacon (the songs were only played instrumentally here), and from 1934 under the title Paree, Paree (a short film).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. New World Records, concert production 1991, New York Fifty Million Frenchmen ( Memento of the original from July 18, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. PDF document @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.newworldrecords.org