At Home Abroad is a revue with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz. It introduced the songs "Love Is a Dancing Thing", "What a Wonderful World" and "Got a Bran' New Suit", among others. The revue follows a bored couple who flee America and go on a musical world tour.
The setting is a cruise around the world, featuring 25 musical numbers at various locations: a London store, an African jungle ("Hottentot Potentate"), a Balkan country where Powell taps spy messages, and a West Indies dockside for "Loadin' Time", to mention a few. The revue gave Bea Lillie the range of a variety of exotic locations. She had the tongue-twister lines "two dozen double damask dinner napkins"; became a Russian ballerina who could not "face the mujik"; and disrupted the line of geisha girls with "It's better with your shoes off" in a Japanese garden. In "Paree", she was a Parisian grisette in the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and "made something of a carnival of this song, with lyrics like 'I want to kiss your right bank, kiss your left bank; kiss Montparnasse' with the emphasis on the last syllable."[1][2][3]
Musical numbers
Get Away From it All
The Survey
Dinner Napkins - Eddie Foy, Jr, James McColl
Hottentot Potentate - Ethel Waters
Paree - Beatrice Lillie
Thief in the Night - Ethel Waters
Love Is a Dancing Thing - Paul Haakon, Woods Miller, Nina Whitney
Loadin' Time - Ethel Waters
Trains - Reginald Gardiner
What a Wonderful World - Eleanor Powell
You May Be Far Away From Me - Beatrice Lillie, Reginald Gardiner
The Steamboat Whistle - Ethel Waters
Get Yourself a Geisha
Got a Bran' New Suit - Eleanor Powell, Ethel Waters
That's Not Cricket
The Lady With the Tap - Eleanor Powell, Woods Miller
Farewell, my lovely - Paul Haakon, Woods Miller, Nina Whitney
References
^Smith, Cecil Michener and Litton, Glenn. Musical comedy in America (1987), Routledge, ISBN0-87830-564-5 p. 172
^Green, Kay. Broadway musicals, show by show (1996), Hal Leonard Corporation, ISBN0-7935-7750-0, p. 89