Get to know composer Cole Porter ahead of 'High Society'

As London welcomes back Porter's fabulously stylish musical comedy, starring Helen George, find out more about his work on stage and screen.

Summary

• Cole Porter was a legendary American composer of stage and screen
• His musical comedy High Society is playing at the Barbican this summer
• His other work includes shows like Anything Goes
• His famous songs include "I Get a Kick Out of You" and "You're the Top"

The Barbican is really delivering this summer. Call the Midwife star Helen George leads a sparkling revival of Cole Porter’s musical High Society, playing the glamorous socialite Tracy Lord who finds herself in a romantic quandary just before her wedding. The production also features Felicity Kendal as Tracy’s mother.

The show is packed with wonderfully witty Porter hits, including “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, “Let’s Misbehave”, “I Love Paris”, “Just One of Those Things”, and that swinging tribute to a swell bash, “Well Did You Evah!”.

Ahead of securing your invite to the party of the season, aka tickets to High Society, get to know more about this legendary composer and his beloved work on stage and screen.

Book High Society tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Who was Cole Porter?

The great American composer and lyricist was a musical prodigy, writing his first operetta aged 10. He rebelled against his wealthy grandfather, who wanted him to become a lawyer, and instead explored his true passion while at Yale, becoming an early member of a cappella singing group the Whiffenpoofs and writing numerous songs and musicals.

Porter became a leading Broadway composer in the 1920s-50s thanks to his hit musical comedies, including Paris, Fifty Million Frenchman, The New Yorkers, and Gay Divorce. His best-known and most eagerly revived stage shows are probably ocean-liner romp Anything Goes and the Shakespearean comic riff Kiss Me, Kate.

Porter also made a big impression on Hollywood. Several of his stage shows became movies too, like Gay Divorce being adapted into the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicle The Gay Divorcee, and he scored a lasting hit with 1956 movie High Society, starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly, which journeyed in the opposite direction: it subsequently became a successful stage musical in 1998.

Porter has even had the honour of being immortalised on film himself twice: the 1946 semi-fictional biopic Night and Day, with Cary Grant luxury casting as the composer, and a slightly more realistic portrayal in 2004’s De-Lovely, starring Kevin Kline.

In his personal life, Porter was fairly openly homosexual, although he married a socially connected divorcée, Linda Lee Thomas, to their mutual advantage. They shared many interests, such as a love of travel, Thomas gained a kind companion in contrast to her abusive first husband, and it allowed Porter to maintain a respectable veneer in this conservative time.

What are Porter’s best-known songs?

Many of the fantastic numbers in Porter’s shows and movies became popular jazz standards which are still regularly performed today. They include iconic songs like “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love”, “You Do Something to Me”, “I Happen to Like New York”, “Night and Day”, “I Get a Kick Out of You”, “You’re the Top”, “De-Lovely”, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, “Anything Goes”, “So in Love”, “Too Darn Hot”, Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”, and “True Love”.

Multiple great artists have recorded Porter’s songs, everyone from Sinatra, Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, Judy Garland and Dionne Warwick to, more recently, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, U2, and Annie Lennox.

Porter songs are also frequently used in movie soundtracks, spanning a wide range of eras and genres – from Hannah and Her Sisters, Blazing Saddles and Million Dollar Baby to The Parent Trap, Terms of Endearment, What Women Want, and Once Upon a Time in America.

What are Porter’s musicals like?

Porter’s shows boast the irresistible combination of madcap comic plots, teeming with pithy one-liners, heartfelt romance expressed through yearning song, and a host of jazzy musical theatre numbers that reflect those two modes of storytelling.

The stories usually feature multiple strands. For example, Anything Goes merges a disparate group of characters, including debutantes, showgirls and gangsters, while Kiss Me, Kate centres on a bickering divorced couple starring in The Taming of the Show, but also follows the entire company’s attempt to mount the show, and High Society juggles several romantic plots, the build-up to Tracy’s society wedding, the encroachment of a journalist and photographer, and various family dramas.

Porter was heralded in his day, winning the first ever Best Musical Tony Award for Kiss Me, Kate. He had an unerring knack for balancing sophistication in his lyrics, as expressed through wry humour (often mocking the upper-class elite into which he had been born), urbane references and clever interior rhymes, with music that connected – and continues to connect – with all kinds of audiences thanks to its emotional sincerity, whether tapping into desire, melancholy, or giddy joy.

Cole Porter on the London stage

We can’t get enough of Porter’s work in the capital. Kiss Me, Kate has been frequently revived here since it first opened in 1951, including a 2012 production starring Hannah Waddingham (who was nominated for an Olivier Award), and a 2024 production at the Barbican led by Adrian Dunbar, Stephanie J. Block, Charlie Stemp and Georgina Onuorah.

Anything Goes began in the West End in 1935, and has had numerous major revivals. In 1989 Elaine Paige starred in a production at the Prince Edward Theatre, the National Theatre mounted it in 2002 (plus a West End transfer), and in 2021 Kathleen Marshall brought her smash Broadway version to the Barbican, once again led by Sutton Foster. That Olivier-winning production proved so popular that it was brought back in 2022 with Kerry Ellis, as well as going on a UK and Ireland tour.

London first staged High Society at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2003, and that hit production then went into the West End, led by Katherine Kingsley and featuring Jerry Hall. High Society was brilliantly revived at the Old Vic by director Maria Friedman in 2015, starring Kate Fleetwood, Jamie Parker and Rupert Young.

Now we get a lavish new production of High Society at the Barbican for 2026 directed by Rachel Kavanaugh (Half a Sixpence, The Great British Bake Off Musical) and starring Call the Midwife’s Helen George, who previously led The King and I at the Dominion Theatre in 2024, as Tracy Lord. The production also features The Good Life’s Felicity Kendal (who proved her Porter chops in Anything Goes) as Tracy’s mother. It promises to be the most fabulous party in town!

Book High Society tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Main photo credit: Helen George in High Society (Photo courtesy of the production). Inset: Kevin Kline in De-Lovely, Stephanie J. Block and Adrian Dunbar in Kiss Me, Kate, Kerry Ellis in Anything Goes (Photo courtesy of the movie, photos by Johan Persson, Marc Brenner)