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If you're looking for holiday entertainment this year, Harry Connick Jr. has some Cole for your stockings.
By Cole, of course, we mean Broadway composer Cole Porter, a sophisticate and musical magpie whose songs continue to haunt the public imagination. On October 25, Connick is releasing an album devoted entirely to Porter's songs, and December 7 through 29—backed by a 25-piece band—the hunky crooner-pianist-arranger will swing into New York City to perform Harry Connick Jr.—A Celebration of Cole Porter at Broadway's Nederlander Theatre.
Porter's heyday was in the 1930s and 1940s, and most of his Broadway musicals—aside from Anything Goes, Can-Can and Kiss Me, Kate—are not considered revivable today. But many his songs, popularized by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, have endured as standards of the Great American Songbook. If Connick’s Broadway concert hews to the song list on his album, we can expect such favorites as "All of You," "In the Still of the Night," "Begin the Beguine," "I Concentrate on You," “You Do Something to Me” and "Just One of Those Things."
Connick is no stranger to Broadway: In addition to his two previous concert runs, in 1990 and 2010, he has starred in three full-fledged Broadway musicals, notably the 2006 revival of The Pajama Game. He has a way with retro material, and Porter's witty, romantic oeuvre seems like it should be right up his jazzy alley.
Tickets for the engagement go on sale through Ticketmaster at 10am on Friday, October 4.
Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy