Get Hot! follows Spencer Williams’s musical career from his upbringing in his Aunt Lulu’s New Orleans brothel, through spells in America’s musical hotbeds of Chicago and New York, to Paris and finally London. We hear the fruits of his collaborations with the greatest talents of the time, among them Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker and Sophie Tucker. The show puts his greatest songs into the context of the events of the twentieth century, taking us on a journey through America and Europe from 1916-1945. Events, both in America and the wider world, form an integral part of the show and help reflect the huge social changes of the period. Dance, too, was part of the rapidly changing popular culture of the time and this additional focus on dance inspired the show’s title – Get Hot! – an encouragement shouted by onlookers to the dancers in the nightclubs and dancehalls of America between the wars. The energy of these dance-halls reflects the first expression of youth culture, with all its excitement, exuberance and optimism that’s at the heart of what the show expresses.

Reflecting the age’s passion for speed, the show whisks us from the streets of New Orleans’s notorious red-light district, Storyville via Chicago to the ‘Roaring Twenties’ New York of Prohibition speakeasies, and the acquaintance of notorious bootleggers and gangsters. At one of their nightclubs, Spencer meets the nineteen-year old Josephine Baker, and persuades a rich heiress to bankroll a trip with Josephine to Paris, where his songs help propel Josephine to overnight international stardom – though her unclad dance act may also have had something to do with that success. Back in New York, Spencer was accused of involvement in an affray at gangster-run Connie’s Inn nightclub, but the charges were dropped. Next, London, and marriage to an Englishwoman and becoming a star fixture in the African-American talent firmament that lived and worked in, and toured to, the city in the thirties, where pleasure-seekers danced the night away to great swing bands like that of Spencer’s friend and collaborator Benny Carter. Despite the entreaties of his great friend Fats Waller to leave an England on the brink of war, Spencer stayed in London with his family throughout the conflict. But soon after the war’s end, the grey dreariness of the shattered city encouraged them to return to America, bringing Spencer Williams’s long association with England, and our show, to an end.