Lecture Series – The Great American Songbook: What Makes it Great? Cole Porter Edition

Brent Wagner, Host
Tyler Driskill, Pianist
with University of Michigan Musical Theatre students TBA

Kerrytown Concert House is honored to bring back the enormously popular lecture series, The Great American Songbook: What Makes it Great? featuring the incomparable Brent Wagner (University of Michigan Emeritus Professor of Musical Theatre) with pianist Tyler Driskill (U-M Asst. Prof of Musical Theatre).

This installment of the 2025-26 lecture series centers around Cole Porter. From “So in Love” to “I Get a Kick Out of You,” Porter had a gift for yearning, sophisticated ballads, often combined with pulsating Latin rhythms (‘Begin the Beguine”). At the same time, he was surely the wittiest lyricist since W.S. Gilbert, with outrageous double-entendres and endlessly clever rhymes (“Let’s Do It,” You’re the Top”). As Stephen Holden said in The New York Times, “Porter’s songs still convey an incredible ebullience and erotic energy.” Perhaps Stephen Sondheim put it most succinctly: “Technically, in both music and lyrics, no one is better than Porter and few are his equal.”