A rare original June 1940 Broadway program for Cole Porter's musical Du Barry Was A Lady with Bert Lahr, a year after his Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, and Ethel Merman. Thirty two pages. Dimensions nine by six and a half inches. Light wear otherwise good. See Cole Porter's extraordinary biography and the story of the musical below. 

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From Wikipedia:

Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Many of his songs became standards noted for their witty, urbane lyrics, and many of his scores found success on Broadway and in film.

Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter defied his grandfather's wishes and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn to musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote the lyrics as well as the music for his songs. After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 1930s, but in 1948 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate. It won the first Tony Award for Best Musical.

Porter's other musicals include Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady, Anything Goes, Can-Can and Silk Stockings. His numerous hit songs include "Night and Day", "Begin the Beguine", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "Well, Did You Evah!", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" and "You're the Top". He also composed scores for films from the 1930s to the 1950s, including Born to Dance (1936), which featured the song "You'd Be So Easy to Love"; Rosalie (1937), which featured "In the Still of the Night"; High Society (1956), which included "True Love"; and Les Girls (1957).

Du Barry Was a Lady is a Broadway musical, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, and the book by Herbert Fields and Buddy DeSylva.^[1] The musical starred Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman and Betty Grable, and the song "Friendship" was one of the highlights. The musical was made into a 1943 Technicolor film Du Barry Was a Lady, starring Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly and Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra.

The musical opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre on December 6, 1939, transferred to the Royale Theatre on October 21, 1940 and closed December 12, 1940, after 408 performances. It was directed by Edgar MacGregor, choreographed by Robert Alton, with the orchestrations of Robert Russell Bennett and Ted Royal. The cast featured Bert Lahr as Louis Blore, Ethel Merman as May Daly, Betty Grable as Alice Barton, Benny Baker as Charley, Ronald Graham as Alex Barton and Charles Walters as Harry Norton. Gypsy Rose Lee and Frances Williams later played the part of May Daly.

Irving Lahrheim (August 13, 1895 – December 4, 1967), known professionally as Bert Lahr, was an American actor, comedian and vaudevillian. He was best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion, as well as his counterpart Kansas farmworker "Zeke", in the MGM adaptation of The Wizard of Oz (1939). He was well known for his quick-witted humor and his work in burlesque and vaudeville and on Broadway.