Broadway moves in mysterious ways. Kiss Me, Kate is said to have had its origin when a young stage manager, Arnold Saint Subber, overheard a backstage quarrel between Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne during their 1935 appearance in The Taming of the Shrew. Years later, teamed with costume and set designer Lemuel Ayers, Saint Subber approached Bella Spewack with the notion of adapting Shakespeare in a life-imitates-art play-within-a-play setting which would follow the maneuvers of a newly divorced couple as they take the leads in a musical adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. Spewack took but six weeks to come up with a promising book. Burton Lane, composer of Finian's Rainbow, was first choice for the music, but proved unavailable. Spewack then proposed Cole Porter, a suggestion no one cared for—least of all, Porter himself. His last two musicals had flopped, and flagging inspiration left him fearful about embarking on another ambitious—and seemingly unlikely—project. Despite his eminence as one of the miracle workers of the pop song—"Just One of Those Things," "Begin the Beguine," "Night and Day"—to say nothing of his lyrics and score for the Broadway classic Anything Goes (1934), the consensus was that Porter was a spent force, a has-been, a relic from another age. But Spewack was adamant with her producers and charmingly persistent with the composer. And when he relented, he took the bit with a zest he had not known for a decade or more.

The upshot is generally acknowledged as Porter's masterpiece, his richest score, strutting elaborate song and dance numbers (arranged by Genevieve Pitot and orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett), in a variety of pop styles, with plot development realism, combining (as does Shakespeare) gags and knockabout with character ("I Hate Men"), and brandishing his trademark naughty lyrics ("Too Darn Hot," "Where is the Life That Late I Led") cheek-by-jowl with ravishing love songs ("Were Thine That Special Face," "So In Love"). "Wunderbar," rescued from a 1933 show which never saw production, here found its place to become an enduring hit. And "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" offers a satirical yet liltingly persuasive highbrow/lowbrow gloss on the Bard. Kiss Me, Kate shuffles these oddments with a deftness not only riveting but nearly surreal. So keen was Porter to triumph that he composed several scenes twice—the six viable songs he replaced with ones even better remained unknown until John McGlinn's EMI recording with Josephine Barstow and Thomas Hampson gave them currency.

From the beginning, Alfred Drake was the intended lead. Patricia Morison, on the other hand, was a virtual unknown, though she so wowed Porter at the auditions that she was engaged immediately for Kate. The two other principal roles were taken by Lisa Kirk and Harold Lang. Funding was slow in coming and Kiss Me, Kate opened on a slender budget—the generally admired costumes (designed to resemble playing card suits) had been made from upholstery fabric. The Philadelphia première, on December 2, 1948, was enthusiastically received by an adoring public and critically acclaimed, beginning a groundswell which had attained seismic proportions by the time the show reached Broadway on December 30. The New York press was rapturous; Kiss Me, Kate carried off five Tony Awards the following year (best musical, best script, best produced, best costumes, and best score), and the public kept coming for 1,077 performances. In a Broadway season recalled as especially brilliant, Kiss Me, Kate's only real rival was the very different South Pacific.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi