Word: kate
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...evening last week, a small, elegantly groomed man with thinning black hair, a limp, and the smile of a tired elf, took a party of friends to see the new Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate. The show is such a smash hit that ordinary playgoers find it impossible to get seats for any performance sooner than next April. Seats are just a little harder to get because this one satisfied customer has been buying up so many of them. At a cost of more than $1,000, Cole Porter, who wrote the music and lyrics for Kiss Me, Kate, took...
...because, after writing the songs for 22 shows and nine movies, he is still just a little stagestruck. He also combines genuine modesty about his work with an amateur's enthusiasm for hearing it played and sung by first-rate professionals. At the opening performance of Kiss Me, Kate four weeks ago, he turned up in evening dress and settled himself happily down front in the midst of his large, glittering party. He was the picture of relaxed enjoyment, and a sight to amaze his fellow composers and authors, who generally pace, squirm and chew their nails backstage...
Shakespeare and show business divide the burden in Kiss Me, Kate, which has to do with the out-of-town opening of a production of The Taming of the Shrew. The pair who play Katharine and Petruchio were once stormily married and are still snarlingly in love, and the cuffing and spitting in their performances are more intense than Shakespeare's script requires. With a sharp eye, Kiss Me, Kate kids Shakespeare and show business impartially; and whenever the taming threatens to become too tame, out pops a dancer or up strikes the band...
What really makes a topnotch musical of Kiss Me, Kate is Cole Porter's score. If no one of its tunes equals Begin the Beguine or Get a Kick Out of You, all 17 of them have their good points, and together form a sort of triumphal procession. They range from the slow torching of So in Love Am I to the fast jive of Too Darn Hot, from the musical brio of We Open in Venice to the verbal lift of Always True to You (In My Fashion). And again & again melody and mockery go hand in hand...
Broadway had begun to wonder when Cole Porter's next smash was coming; Kiss Me, Kate marks an interval of five years and two flops since his last hit show (Mexican Hayride). In the barren interval he also had to endure a film biography, Night and Day, of which he said: "It ought to be good because none of it is true...