"Kiss Me, Kate"

1999 Broadway Revival version

Kiss Me, Kate is a Tony Award-winning musical with a book by Samuel and Bella Spewack and music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It won the first Tony Award for "Best Musical" in 1949.

Inspired by The Taming of the Shrew, it tells the tale of two once-married, now-divorced musical theatre actors, Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi, who are performing opposite each other in the roles of Petruchio and Katharine in a Broadway-bound musical version of William Shakespeare's play. Already on poor terms, the pair begin 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 from the show's Lucentio, Bill Calhoun. In classic musical comedy fashion, slapstick madness ensues before everything is resolved.

After a 3½ week pre-Broadway tryout at the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia starting December 2, 1948, the original Broadway production, directed by John C. Wilson and choreographed by Hanya Holm, opened on December 30, 1948 at the New Century Theatre, where it ran for nineteen months before transferring to the Shubert, for a total run of 1077 performances. The original cast included Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk, Harold Lang, Edwin Clay, Charles Wood, Annabelle Hill, Lorenzo Fuller, Eddie Sledge, Fred Davis, Harry Clark and Jack Diamond.

Kiss Me, Kate was a comeback and a personal triumph for Cole Porter. After several successful musicals in the 1930s, notably Anything Goes, Du Barry Was a Lady, and Panama Hattie, he experienced an equestrian accident in 1937 that left him in constant pain. Following the accident, he continued to write songs and musicals but with limited success, and some thought he was past his prime. Kiss Me, Kate was a response to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! and other integrated musicals, and proved to be his biggest hit and the only one of his shows to run for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway.

A film version of the same name was released in 1953. There have been at least four television productions, the first on Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1958, with Drake and Morison reprising their Broadway roles, the second recorded for the launch of BBC Two in the UK in 1964 ,starring Howard Keel, Patricia Morison and Millicent Martin, the third in 1968 with then husband-and-wife team Robert Goulet and Carol Lawrence, and the fourth in 2003 on Great Performances, a high-definition shot performance of the London revival with Brent Barrett and Rachel York.

A 1999 Broadway revival at the Martin Beck Theatre, directed by Michael Blakemore and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall and Rob Ashford, ran for 881 performances. The opening night cast included Marin Mazzie, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Amy Spanger, Michael Berresse, Ron Holgate, Lee Wilkof, and Michael Mulheren.

We will be performing the 1999 Broadway Revival of Kiss Me, Kate.

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