It marked a return to Broadway for Kern, who had spent several years in Hollywood writing music for movies, including Swing Time for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

"[1] Very Warm for May ran on Broadway for two months, with June Allyson, Eve Arden, Grace McDonald, Jack Whiting, and Vera-Ellen among the performers.

It received mixed reviews, with the New York World-Telegram calling the show "Gay and delightful" and finding the songs to be "the most charming that Kern and Hammerstein have ever written", while Brooks Atkinson, of 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."

Very Warm for May opened out of town with a plot that had Long Island society girl May Graham fleeing threatening gangsters and hiding out with an avant-garde summer stock troupe in Connecticut.

Very Warm for May was transferred (loosely) to the silver screen for the MGM movie Broadway Rhythm (1944) with only "All the Things You Are" retained from the musical and the plot rewritten yet again.

The actor George Murphy plays snippets of songs from the original score while seated at a piano awaiting the arrival of leading lady Ginny Simms.

In 1985, however, the Hammerstein and Kern estates finally authorized a performance by a small New York company, followed in 1994 by a Carnegie Hall concert (with full orchestrations).