Kiss Me Kate (1953)

Kiss Me Kate opened on Broadway in 1948 and was Cole Porter’s response to Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (and other integrated musicals), being his first show wherein the music and lyrics were firmly connected to the script. It was his longest running show on Broadway, and in 1949 it won the Tony Award for Best Musical. The book (script) was written by Bella and Samuel Spewack, a husband-and-wife writing team who themselves were working through their own marital woes (though they would end up being married until Samuel’s death in 1971).

Inspired by William Shakespeare’s play, it tells the tale of formerly married musical theater actors Fred Graham (Howard Keel) and Lilli Vanessi (Kathryn Grayson) brought together to star opposite one another in the roles of Petruchio and Katherine in a Broadway musical version of Shakespeare’s play. Already on poor terms, the pair skirmishes from the start. Their relationship eventually breaks into an all-out emotional war mid-performance that threatens the production’s success. The only thing keeping the show together are threats from a pair of gangsters who have come to collect a gambling debt!

Kiss Me Kate is considered a comeback for Cole Porter, who wrote this after being disabled in a horse-riding accident over a decade prior, and contains his quintessential style of writing songs with witty and urbane (yet humorously subversive) lyrics.