- Performances: 1,077
- Open / Close: December 30, 1948 – July 28, 1951
- Theater: New Century Theatre.
- Tony Awards: Won the first ever Tony Award for Best Musical. Also won the other 4 awards it was nominated for including Best Author and Best Producer (both awards that have been retired). Cole Porter’s work also won Best Original Score.
- Fun Fact: Even though the 1st Tony Awards were held in 1947, it was not until the third awards ceremony in 1949 that the category of “Best Musical” was created. The first few years, winners were given “a scroll, cigarette lighter and articles of jewelry.” In 1949, the first Tony medallion was given to honorees.
Podcast
The podcast’s first three-peat guest, Phil Crosby, digs into the treasure trove of Broadway lore associated with this fabulous show. He also relates personal anecdotes from his work with Broadway star Alfred Drake and also invites everyone over to his place to watch the movie version in glorious 3D!
Show business loves a show about show business. That explains part of the success of “Kiss Me, Kate” but the enduring popularity of the show — and its ability to be revived decades after it was conceived — have at least as much to do with the strong bones it’s built upon (Shakespeare, duh) as well as the extremely concise and sturdy construction of the show, written by Bella and Samuel Spewack.
The musical was inspired by the on-stage/off-stage battling of legendary husband-and-wife actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne during their 1935 production of The Taming of the Shrew, witnessed by future Broadway producer Arnold Saint-Subber. Usually just called Saint Subber, the mega-producer would go on to produce seven Neil Simon plays, Lerner and Loewe’s Gigi and keep on keeping on until his last production, K2, in 1983. It’s an impressive track record and his proficiency at pulling shows together seems like one of the reasons they had a Best Producer Tony Award back in the day.
In 1947, Subber asked the Spewacks (undergoing their own marital woes at the time) to write the script for “Kiss Me Kate.” If you believe Bella Spewack, she enlisted Cole Porter to write the music and lyrics. Saint Subber says Montgomery Clift introduced him to Cole Porter.
- Fun Fact: Bella was a successful publicist for the Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts of the USA and claimed to have introduced the idea of selling cookies for the latter as a means of raising revenue for the organization.
The competing claims to bringing in Porter arise, of course, because his work on the score is ground-breaking. In response to the gauntlet thrown by “Oklahoma!”, famously the first popular Broadway show to have a score specifically written to support the script, Porter responded with a masterful series of tunes, with hardly a bummer in the lot.
Surprisingly, KMK is the only show anchored by a Porter score to run for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway so this may be one of the only time he gets mentioned on this site. Sad!
The couple at the center of KMK are Fred Graham, played by Alfred Drake, and Lilli Vanessi, wonderfully portrayed by Patricia Morison. Drake and Morison are both the subject of much theater history lore. Drake had appeared in “Oklahoma!” and would go on to play Claudius in the famed Richard Burton as “Hamlet” production in 1964. He was also a notorious womanizer who had an ego thing about his height, contractually requiring that leading ladies playing opposite him be shorter than he.
Morison has an even deeper and more storied show biz bio, thanks in part to its length: she lived to be 103, dying in 2018. Her career spans six decades with one of her last prominent appearances being a guest shot on the TV show, Cheers, in 1989.
- Fun fact: One of Morison’s earliest roles was in a 1938 musical, The Two Bouquets, ten years before KMK. One of her costars was Alfred Drake.
Morison had been courted by Hollywood for years, landing a contract with Paramount in 1939. But the story is that directors had a tough time figuring out where she fit in among the crowded pantheon of 40s era stars that spanned from beauties like Lana Turner to strong mavericks like Katharine Hepburn. Her leaving Broadway for the movies is folded into the characterization of Lilli in KMK.
After KMK, Morison would go on to star in many revivals and adaptations of the show while also jumping into “The King and I” as it was wrapping up its Broadway run, then continuing on its first national tour.
- Just missed: In a 2015 interview, Morison said she was approached to possibly play Rose as an old woman in the 1997 film “Titanic.” She was disappointed she didn’t get the role in part because her father had nearly boarded the Titanic in 1912 but transferred to a different ship at the last minute.
One of the joys of KMK is the two thugs that show up to rough up Fred on account of gambling debts, a mix-up perpetrated by his stage costar and actual reprobate gambler, Bill Calhoun. The script allows for full-bodied and full three-dimensional development of these unnamed characters, allowing several actors (Jack Klugman, James Whitmore, etc.) to have a field day in their performances in various productions. And Porter gives them an amazing send-off with the wickedly off-color “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”
KMK was quickly turned into a movie after its stellar Broadway run, a movie that is notable for many reasons:
- It was one of the first movies created to be shown in 3D, leading to a interesting (or weird, depending on your personal proclivities) number of bits played direct to the camera to enhance the dimensionality.
- It’s one of the few film appearances of Bob Fosse, who plays one of Bianca’s suitors, Lucentio, and who also choreographed his one-off dance routine with Carol Haney (see the entry on The Pajama Game for more on her/them!)
- It doesn’t star any of the Broadway stars, leading to a not exactly scintillating chemistry between Fred and Lilli as played by Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson. It does add in Ann Miller as Lois / Bianca, who adds an amazing pizzazz to numbers like “Too Darn Hot.”
KMK has been revived numerous times, notably on Broadway in 1999 and 2019, and remains a surprisingly popular choice among regional theaters. The gender dynamics can be a little disconcerting but are also fairly easily updated to match whatever level of sparring makes sense. Marginal songs, like “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple,” were ‘fixed’ in the 2019 revival by simply swapping in ‘people’ for women.
Pushing my regret meter overboard is finding out that a 2012 London revival starred Hannah Waddingham as Lilli and the 2019 Broadway production starred Corbin Bleu as Bill Calhoun. I would have loved to see “Ted Lasso”‘s Waddingham command the stage and I saw Bleu in “In the Heights” years ago, his magnetic stage presence making me a lifelong fan.
I could only find one contemporary review for the original production of KMK, a Variety rave that basically says the show lives up to its hype. While I didn’t have the chance to see the original production, I did watch Drake and Morison in a 1958 Hallmark TV version and Keel and Morison in a 1964 BBC production. That, plus a sense of the delightful energy the show can project thanks to the movie, lead me to categorize this as a true classic. I’m already running through actors in my head that I think would be fun to see star in yet another revival that I’ll look for in the years to come.
Final Grade: A.
PS: Cross promotion opportunity! I do a show with my podcasting partner, Grace Todd, called “Convince Me I Care,” and we recently discussed another contemporary masterpiece built from the same IP: the movie “Ten Things I Hate About You.” Check out our chat about how another set of adaptors took problematic Shakespeare and turned it into charming modern fare.