A Few Hot Tunes

Okay, we've already talked about Irving Berlin's "Heat Wave;" here are a few more songs suitable for a sizzling summer (stop me, as Jurgen Gothe once said, from alliterating again).

First, Cole Porter's "Too Darn Hot," delivered by Bianca in "Kiss Me, Kate." "I'd like to coo with my baby tonight/And pitch the woo with my baby tonight/But it's too darn hot."

Then there's "Steam Heat"--sisss--from "Pyjama Game," and Duke Ellington's great "Harlem Air-Shaft," which he described as a picture of apartment life in the summer: "You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love."

But our favorite, perhaps, is "Ain't It Awful, the Heat?"--lyrics by Langston Hughes, set to music by Kurt Weill, and sung by two weary women sitting on tenement steps in Elmer Rice's "Street Scene."

And finally, for a splendidly surreal scene, there is this number, written by Edgar Leslie and Walter Donaldson, but best known, probably, from the Tom Waits recording:

"When it gets too hot for comfort
And you can't get ice cream cones
T'ain't no sin to take off your skin
And dance around in your bones."