Word: shows
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Daughter Elizabeth was also feeling fine. Chipper in mink and taffeta, she showed up at a BBC show, looking every inch the serene and happy matron (see cut), in her first public appearance since the baby came...
Kiss Me, Kate (music & lyrics by Cole Porter; book by Bella & Sam Spewack; produced by Arnold Saint Subber & Lemuel Ayers) was 1948's last new show, and by far its best musical. It is only a musical, and not, like Oklahoma!, a milestone as well. But if nothing about it is revolutionary, everything is right. Full-blooded and sassy and enormously gay, Kiss Me, Kate can brag about its music at least, without blushing for its book; it looks pretty, moves fast, is full of bright ideas and likable people...
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...
...vast amount of skill; and Dancer Harold Lang and Singer Lisa Kirk take care of the subplot in style. In the leading roles, Hollywood's Patricia Morison proves to be right at home on Broadway, and Alfred Drake stands forth as the best all-round musicomedy hero in show business...
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...