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Very Warm for May opened at the Alvin Theatre on November 17, 1939 and was Jerome Kern's last score for Broadway before relocating to Hollywood and writing music for movies until his death in 1945. Kern was scheduled to return to Broadway to write music for Annie Get Your Gun, but died before work on the musical began. Oscar Hammerstein wrote the lyrics.

Vincente Minnelli directed the show which contained such favorite songs as "All the Things You Are", "All in Fun" and the "In the Heart of the Dark." Gerald Bordman, author of the definitive Kern biography Jerome Kern: His Life and Music, hailed the score as one of Kern's finest. Very Warm for May ran on Broadway for two months, receiving mixed reviews: The New York World Telegram called the show "Gay and delightful" and found the songs to be "the most charming that Kern and Hammerstein have ever written," while the New York Times yawned, "Very Warm for May is not so hot for November," and Robert Benchley of the New Yorker praised the show as, "Lovely to the ear and complimentary to the intelligence...unlike most musicals, (it) actually gets better and funnier as it goes on."

Part of the lukewarm response may have been due to a book that was changed at the last minute. Very Warm for May opened out of town with a plot that had Long Island society girl May Graham fleeing threatening gangsters and hides out with an avant garde summer stock troupe in Connecticut. Eve Arden portrayed a dizzy society matron. This first version of the show received rave reviews and played to sold-out houses.

Producer Max Gordon had been away when the show opened out of town and when he saw it, he hated the gangster subplot and had it taken out, but New Yorkers didn't seem to be as crazy about the summer stock story, having just seen Babes in Arms the year before. It was a very competitive season on Broadway. One month after Very Warm for May opened, Cole Porter's Dubarry was a Lady, DeSylva and Henderson's The George White Scandals and Rodgers and Hart's Too Many Girls all opened. Very Warm for May is a quintessential "lost musical from the 1930s" because of it's enduring score by two Broadway legends and its surprisingly quick disappearance from the theatre scene. In 1984 recordings of the original cast performances from 1939 were discovered and which were assembled to form a long playing album and thus became the oldest Original Broadway Cast Recording. With notes by Gerald Bordman, the album received a Nomination for a Grammy Award in 1985 as Best Cast Show Album. It was subsequently released as a compact disc and later on iTunes.

Very Warm for May was transferred (loosely) to the silver screen for the 1940's movie, "Broadway Rhythm," with only one song from the musical retained and yet another complete plot rewrite.