Shows · Seven Lively Arts
A lavish revue celebrating the seven lively arts — theatre, music, dance, painting, sculpture, cinema, and radio — through a series of sketches, musical numbers, and ballet sequences. Beatrice Lillie delivers comic sketches, Bert Lahr provides broad comedy, and Benny Goodman's orchestra plays jazz while prima ballerina Alicia Markova dances to a ballet composed by Igor Stravinsky.
- Opened
- 1944
- Performances
- 183
- Type
- Revue
- Era
- Golden Age
Productions1 on Broadway
| 1944 | Ziegfeld Theatre Original. December 7, 1944 · Hassard Short, Philip Loeb | 183 performances |
Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. West End runs are not yet held.
Licensing not confirmed
| Rights | Not confirmed We have not been able to confirm the publisher. |
Read from the licensor's own pages and catalogues. Rights move, and an empty row means we have not confirmed a publisher, not that the show cannot be licensed.
27 passages naming Seven Lively Arts, found by keyword across 178 books. It's where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.
In her early career, Worth appeared in a number of short-lived musicals (Very Warm for May, Higher and Higher, Bright Lights of 1944, Jackpot, and Seven Lively Arts), and was also closely associated with Mary Martin. book:complete-book-of-1950s-broadway-musicals-the-dan-dietz#p184
Porter’s next show was The Seven Lively Arts (12/7/44; 183 performances). The cast was superlative: Beatrice Lillie, Bert Lahr, Benny Goodman, Alicia Markova, and Dolores Gray headlined. The revue introduced one hit, “Ev’rytime We Say Goodbye,” one of Porter’s greatest ballads. book:broadway-its-history-people-and-places-an-encyclopedia-bloom-ken-1949-2nd-ed-new#p439
The Seven Lively Arts, 417, 586 book:broadway-its-history-people-and-places-an-encyclopedia-bloom-ken-1949-2nd-ed-new#p683
After laying them in the aisles in Du Barry Was a Lady, he next returned to the musical stage in the revues Seven Lively Arts (costarring with another utterly brilliant, utterly unique clown, Bea Lillie) and Two on the Aisle, costarring (and feuding) with Dolores Gray. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p99
While these shows contained the occasional gem (The Show Is On had “I Love You” and Seven Lively Arts boasted a fine score by Kurt Weill, including “All I Know”), in general, they were flops. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p178
Two successive failures, Seven Lively Arts (1944) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1946), prompted Porter and his backers to question the commercial vitality of the pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein–type musical. book:enchanted-evenings-the-broadway-musical-from-show-boat-block-geoffrey-oxford-new#p262
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