The writer of a theatrical adaptation faces
issues particular to that art form: he or she must stay faithful
to the source material, while presenting an audience with
something new and fresh. Devotees of the original material
must be satisfied with the adaptation, and not feel betrayed.
A newcomer to the material must be able to follow and understand
the adaptation, without having to call back to any prior
knowledge or experience. How can a writer take a classic,
eloquent, and well-known play by William Shakespeare, and
adapt it into a new, emerging, and purely American art form:
the integrated musical? This paper will discuss Bella Spewack
and Cole Porter’s scheme to do just that. Their musical
Kiss Me, Kate, based upon Shakespeare’s The
Taming of the Shrew, is a successfully refreshing adaptation. It
is a product of its time, when integrated musicals were first
coming into vogue, and when sexual politics were in flux;
and of its place, since its form is distinctly American.
By the 1890s, the musical revue had established itself as
a popular form of entertainment in America. Revues had no
real plot, and no throughline. Geoffrey Block points out
that “what normally survives from Broadway’s
revues are its songs and the memory of its stars.” People
flocked to Florenz Ziegfield’s shows in order to see
beautiful women dancing and singing in gorgeously elaborate
costumes, not to be emotionally involved. That all changed
with the opening of Show Boat in 1927. The success of Show
Boat marked the emergence of musical comedies and operettas
as legitimate genres alongside revues. These two styles still
had the music and spectacle of the revue, but added a story
with integrated songs, creating a new, purely American, art
form.
The “golden age” of the integrated musical spanned
fourteen years, from 1943 (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Oklahoma!) to 1957 (Bernstein and Sondheim’s West
Side Story). Plays that followed Oklahoma! had a great deal to
live up to. From 1957 on, writers of musicals stopped attempting
to keep their songs within the same genre; instead, they
moved towards stylistic heterogeneity. This shift increased “interest
and scope while supporting differentiation of character/mood
and moving toward dramatic/musical integrity.” In musical
comedies and operettas, the songs were not only there to
show off the singers’ voices and entertain the audience;
now, a song could illuminate a character, and his realizations,
aspirations, and perceptions. Twelve now-iconic musicals
premiered during the fourteen years between Oklahoma! and
West Side Story. These musicals constitute the Broadway Canon,
and represent the work of only seven composers and seven
lyricists, if, as Block points out, “we include composer-lyricists
[Cole] Porter and [Frank] Loesser. twice” Kiss
Me, Kate, Bella Spewack and Cole Porter’s adaptation of
The Taming of the Shrew, holds its place in the Canonic Twelve,
and, not coincidentally, is number seven on the list of top
thirty longest running musicals on Broadway, through 1957.
Kiss Me, Kate has rightfully secured its place in the musical
theatre canon. It is the most-produced American musical in
light opera houses around the world, and barely a summer-stock,
high school, or college theatrical experience would be complete
without a performance. Spewack and Porter successfully transformed
William Shakespeare’s story and language into a backstage
look at a traveling company performing a musical version
of The Taming of the Shrew. Spewack’s script and Porter’s
lyrics echo Shakespeare’s cadences and entendres, and
the score remains classic. This blending of traditional comedy
with a new American theatre form, the integrated musical,
came at the perfect time for success.
The story of Kiss Me, Kate does not begin, however, with
the already-well-known Porter and Spewack. It begins with
Arnold Saint-Subber, who aided in production of the 1940
Broadway revival of The Taming of the Shrew, which featured
the famous married team of Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne.
During the production, he witnessed the two fighting, and,
as Laurence Maslon describes it, “marveled at how the
Lunts carried their onstage feuding in the play back to their
dressing rooms, where their egos clashed nightly.” Subber
asked production designer Lemuel Ayers to co-produce a play
based on the heated passion between Lunt and Fontanne, and
the two courted Bella Spewack to write the book. Spewack
hated Shakespeare’s play, but said that she would give
it some thought and let them know if anything worthwhile
developed. Six weeks later, after overcoming her distaste
for Shrew, she had devised the script that would later become Kiss
Me, Kate.
Burton Lane, who had previously had a hit in Finian’s
Rainbow, was the team’s first choice for a composer/lyricist,
but he was busy with a previous commitment. Spewack then
turned to Cole Porter, her collaborator with Spewack’s
now-ex-husband, Sam, on the musical Leave it to Me! (1939).
Porter was dejected in the late 1940s, following a string
of flops both on the stage and on the screen. He had considered
doing a score for a script written by Edith Carrington, a
writer of soap operas. Porter thought that he had fallen
out of touch with audiences and found a way to get back their
favor with Carrington’s script. As Charles Schwartz
explains, “Soap operas – as evidenced by the
enormous popularity of many daily radio serials – had
great audience appeal, and he, for some reason, no longer
seemed to have the touch for reading a broad public.” Subbers
and Ayers were wary about the partnership, due to Porter’s
recent string of flops, and Porter was none too keen on the
idea. Spewack was very convincing with her arguments, pointing
out that the plot of The Taming of the Shrew echoed the matchmaking
practices of then-modern New York Jewish families. Porter
ultimately relented.
After Spewack and Porter wrote the play, actors had the daunting
task of bringing the characters to life. Alfred Drake was
chosen for the dual roles of Fred Graham and Petruchio, after
four Broadway failures. He was chosen mainly on the impression
that he had made five years before as the original Curly
in Oklahoma! Patricia Morison was cast as Lilli Vanessi/Kate.
Morison was practically unknown on Broadway; her last appearance
in a New York musical had been ten years earlier in, as Schwartz
phrases it, the “less-than-exalted production” of
The Two Bouquets. After understudying Helen Hayes in the
Broadway production of Victoria Regina (1936) – and
never going on, even when Hayes was sick – Morison
moved to Hollywood, and appeared in several B-movies, the
most notable of which was Lady on a Train (1945). Rounding
out the main cast of Kiss Me, Kate were Lisa Kirk as Lois
Lane/Bianca, and former American Ballet Theatre dancer Harold
Lang as Bill Calhoun/Lucentio. The writing of Lilli/Kate
as a soprano was odd for Porter; he vastly preferred mezzo-soprano/alto
belters like Ethel Merman, but wrote Lilli/Kate with an “odd
tessitura, which stays low most of the time but climbs high
now and again, even if not to truly operatic heights,” according
to Ethan Mordden. The part is nearly impossible to perform
without some sort of operatic-soprano training. Porter created
Lois/Bianca as his built-in belter, and her bluesy numbers
fulfill Porter’s quota. Songs like “Always True
to You in My Fashion” and “Why Can’t You
Behave” are what audiences think of as “Porter-esque,” and
are, if nothing else, fun to sing.
Potential investors were skeptical about backing the production.
Not only was $180,000 a tremendous amount of money, but eyebrows
were also raised due to a lack of big-name stars, and Porter’s
bad reputation at the time. There was also the intrinsic
intellectual snobbery that caused people to balk at the idea
of making a musical out of a Shakespearean play. Mordden
states, “Smart Broadway went, ‘Oh, really?’ while
the show was putting itself together. That washed-up Porter…the
strange idea.” Since Subbers and Ayers were first-time
producers, they brought in a ringer: Jack Wilson, who acted
as both co-producer and director. Wilson had been a friend
of Porter’s since the mid-1920s. They had many things
in common: they were both polished and urbane, both were
heavy drinkers and smokers, both were gay men with insatiable
sexual appetites, and both were married to beautiful, regal-looking
women. The pair reportedly became lovers during the production
of Kiss Me, Kate, but they were discreet about the affair.
Even Noel Coward, a man so connected to the world of entertainment
(and Wilson’s former lover) didn’t know about
the relationship.
After a warm reception at previews in Philadelphia, Kiss
Me, Kate was set to open on Broadway at the New Century Theater
on December 30, 1948. Lemuel Ayers designed the sets and
costumes, as well as acting as co-producer. Ayers’s
sets and costumes were, Mordden asserts, “perhaps the
most magnificent in all the decade, contrasting the bare
stage, theatre alley, and dreary dressing rooms of the real
life with the Renaissance riot going on ‘onstage.’” Advance
ticket sales for the Broadway run amassed $350,000. There
were rumors that tickets were being sold under the table
for as much as $100, an astronomical amount at the time.
These rumors did not dissuade potential buyers; knowing that
there was such fervor only made people more eager to buy
tickets.
Reviewers were ecstatic about the premiere. Richard F. Cooke
of The Wall Street Journal wrote, “These musical bounties
were largely dependent upon the excellence of Cole Porter’s
music and lyrics. The old master (if nearly 30 years of it
make him other than young) has outdone himself. There are
so many good ones this time that their description would
outrun this allotted space considerably.” Brooks Atkinson
of The New York Times agreed, “Without losing his sense
of humor, he [Porter] has written a remarkable melodious
score with an occasional suggestion of Puccini, who was a
good composer, too.” The actors got equally good notes,
with the exception of Harold Lang, who was brushed aside
with mere mention of his dancing ability. Atkinson mentioned
that Lisa Kirk “plays a subordinate part in a style
that might be described as well-bred impudence. Given a sardonic
song like ‘Always True to You (In My Fashion),’ she
can translate it into pert and gleaming buffoonery.” He
also admired Alfred Drake’s performance, “Mr.
Drake’s pleasant style of acting and his unaffected
singing are the heart of the show. By hard work, and through
personal sincerity, Mr. Drake has become about the most valuable
man in his field.” Cooke spoke out about the leading
lady: “Miss Morison, a somewhat icy beauty, can not
only sing beautifully, but warm up to incandescent rage when
required, and play at slapstick expertly.” No wonder,
Schwartz notes, the New York Press Corps honored the show
with their Page One Award for theatrical excellence.
Schwartz goes on to say, “It was easy to see why Cole
enjoyed himself so much at a show for which he had expressed
so many doubts so far. For his songs had all the Porter earmarks
of twentieth-century sophistication and topicality, even
without the context to The Taming of the Shrew.” Porter
himself had invited a large party of 97 guests to see the
show on opening night, costing him more than $1,000 for tickets
alone. After the reviews came out, he enthusiastically returned
with other guests fourteen times within the space of several
weeks. The show was a tremendous success.
Kate amassed three Tony Awards for the 1948-49 season: best
musical production, best book, and best score. In 1949, the
US national company kicked off a three-year tour, and the
British production opened on March 8, 1951 at London’s
Coliseum. Patricia Morison repeated her role as Lilli Vanessi
in the production, which ran for 400 performances.
The problem inherent in The Taming of the Shrew – one
assumes, why Bella Spewack had a problem with the play in
the first place – is the treatment of the central couple.
Petruchio wears Katharina down; he beats her, starves her,
and debases her until she finally gives in. Directors of
modern productions must decide how to treat the blatant overtones
of physical, verbal, and emotional abuse in this central
relationship. Different views of societal relationships in
different time periods may dictate how audience members view
the play. And if the director chooses to set the play in
a more modern time period, the relationship often shifts;
as Charles Marowitz explains, "In the theatre, the actors’ and
directors’ job
is to make a play concrete, to make specific choices about
décor, costume, textual emphasis, and thematic interpretation.
In the theatre, one cannot put on the stage a kind of multi-faceted
resonating chamber called a 'classic,' and allow
all members of the public to draw their own conclusions from
it." It is up to the director, and all writers, designers,
and actors involved in a given production, to lead the audience
to a conclusion. One cannot be nebulous in his or her vision.
Shrew provides a director with a problem specific to time
period, much as The Merchant of Venice does. In a time when
women are coming into their own, how can a production show
an abusive relationship and get away with it? Beyond the
central relationship, Shakespeare also paints a picture of
a willful woman, one who rails and stomps her foot. As Barbara
Hodgdon explains, “In the twentieth century, as in
the sixteenth, the public spectacle of a woman behaving properly
stamps her with the culture’s prerogatives, and, being
looked at, whether by male or female spectators, reconfirms
her meaning.” In the late 1940s, the time during which
Kiss Me, Kate was being written, women had left the home
and entered a workforce which had been vacated by men, due
to World War Two. After the war ended, many women stayed
at work, rather than return to lives as homemakers. Women
were becoming their own people, not spoken for and represented
by their husbands, or judged solely on the merits of their
families. This was the dynamic with which Spewack and Porter
were faced when writing Kiss Me, Kate. Placing the Petruchio-Kate
relationship into a framework of play-within-a-play accomplishes
the feat of equalizing the central relationship.
By making the central relationship Lilli-Fred instead of
Petruchio-Kate, Spewack bends and breaks the dynamic of abuse
contained in The Taming of the Shrew. Fred and Lilli obviously
adore each other, but the breakdown of their previous relationship
has damaged their faith in love. Lilli is a willful woman,
yes, but in the strictures of “modern day,” it
suits her, and is allowable by the audience. As an actor – and
a Shakespearean actor, at that – Fred’s arrogance
is recognized, even perhaps, expected by the audience. This
is, indeed, a loving relationship; like the Lunts, the lovers’ flames
are actually fanned by the Petruchio-Kate fighting onstage.
It is wholly believable that Lilli would leave her rich Texan-politic
lover, Harrison, for her ex-husband Fred, whereas Katharina
has no choice in her lovers. This choice itself speaks volumes
about male-female relationship politics in the mid-twentieth
century.
Katharina’s final speech, the troublesome one in which
she pledges her love for Petruchio and commands all women
to be subservient and kiss their husbands’ feet, was
also reconciled in this fashion. Lilli has finally come around
to the realization that she loves Fred, and would like to
continue their relationship. After fleeing the theatre, she
comes back onstage and delivers the speech, backed by Porter’s
instrumentals:
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
[…]
So wife, hold your temper and meekly put
Your hand ‘neath the sole of your husband’s foot.
But this speech is certainly Kate’s and not Lilli’s.
Lilli does not believe these words, although Kate does. She
uses the entrance itself to apologize to Fred; it is the
fact that she is there speaking Shakespeare’s words,
within the confines of the character she is playing, that
counts.
The songs in Kiss Me, Kate can be divided into three categories:
those with lyrics in Porter’s own style, those whose
lyrics are in the spirit of The Taming of the Shrew, and
those that come nearly straight from Shakespeare’s
own pen. Porter made sure that the songs worked together,
even with their stylistic differences. The first three songs
in the play (“Another Op’nin’, Another
Show,” “Why Can’t You Behave,” and “Wunderbar”)
have practically nothing in common. One is upbeat exposition,
the second a blues number, and the third a satirical Viennese
waltz. But with Porter’s inimitable style, they gel
together, giving the audience an intimate view of who the
characters are behind the songs.
Cole Porter’s racy lyrics intimate Shakespeare’s
own ribald language. In songs like “I’ve Come
to Wive It Wealthily in Padua,” Porter takes the title
and several lines from Shakespeare’s text, and adds
his own Porter-esque touches:
I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua,
If wealthily then happily in Padua.
If my wife has a bag of gold
Do I care if the bag is old?
I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua.
This is the first song in the play in which Porter uses Shakespeare’s
own language while blending his own vernacular in seamlessly.
The best of these pseudo-Shakespeare songs appears late in
the second act, in what would now be called the “eleven
o’clock number.” By this point, the play’s
two gangster characters have entangled themselves in a screwball
plot, involving a bettor’s IOU and a kidnapping, and
have accidentally wandered through the theatre’s asbestos
curtain. The characters spontaneously improvise “Brush
Up Your Shakespeare,” a show-stopping number, where
they prove the theatre fandom that they’ve been professing
throughout the show. Spewack called on her ex-husband, Sam,
to write the gangster subplot; his dialogue foresees Loesser’s
gangsters of Guys and Dolls. Porter matched Sam Spewack’s
low-class comedic dialogue with stylized (and stylish) lyrics.
Of all the songs in the play, this one comes closest to Shakespeare’s
tradition of double entendres. “Too Darn Hot” was,
indeed, banned from the major radio stations for racy lyrics
like “I’d like to fool with my baby tonight,
/ Break ev’ry rule with my baby tonight.” But
for all of that song’s subtle eroticism, “Brush
Up Your Shakespeare” is awash in blatant, but still
masked, entendre. Maslon remarks, “The second-act soft-shoe
showstopper ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ has nothing
to do with an integrated musical, a good deal to do with
old-fashioned specialty numbers, and everything to do with
Porter’s ability to flirt playfully with downright
obscenity.” Checking off the names of eleven of Shakespeare’s
plays, and making reference to three more, this song is Cole
Porter at the height of wordplay, something which has become
a Porter trademark. Porter writes brilliant couplets into
this song, rhyming “Merchant of Venice” with “flesh
you would menace,” and, in a saucy turn, “heinous” with “Coriolanus.” The
height of the double entendres comes in these lines:
Just recite an occasional sonnet
And your lap’ll have “Honey” upon it.
When your baby is pleading for pleasure
Let her sample your Measure for Measure.
Hodgdon maintains that the hoods’ song “brushes
in the tangled links between Shakespeare’s titular
erotics and mid-twentieth century misogyny to recirculate
Shrew’s discourse of phallic potency.” Porter
blends modern vernacular with Shakespeare’s to bring
across the spirit of the play: both Kate and Shrew are bawdy
and playful, making the audience blush, giggle, stomp their
feet in anger, and catch their breath. This is Porter’s
brilliance, in conjunction, of course, with Shakespeare.
Bella Spewack accomplished much the same feat by blending
the backstage text in with the players’ production
of The Taming of the Shrew. Several times during Kiss
Me, Kate, performers bring their backstage business onto the
stage, interrupting the text proper. This is best shown in
Act 2, scene 8. The actress playing Kate has stormed out
of the theatre, and the cast ad-libs using made-up Shakespearean
language to cover her lack of entrance:
BAPTISTA: My dear Bianca, and her new-found spouse –
(Sees PETRUCHIO)
Brother Petruchio – daughter Katharine –
(Then stalling)
…
But where is Katharine?
(To PETRUCHIO)
Where is she?
(To one of the dancers)
Sirrah, command you to Mistress Katharine.
Say I command her to come to me.
PETRUCHIO: [Back to Shakespeare’s original text] I
know she will not come.
The fouler fortune mine and there an end.
As well as this convention works through most of the show,
it also unfortunately lends itself to the least-believable
moment in the show. We, as an audience, can suspend disbelief
through a play-within-a-play where the actors “offstage” burst
into song as frequently as the actors “onstage.” As
in all integrated musicals, the entire cast knows the words
to these songs and is able to join in on a chorus. Having
been bred on opera and previous canonical musicals like Oklahoma!,
we can accept this.
Our disbelief is stretched to its limits, however, in Act
2, scene 4. In this scene, five messengers and deliverymen
come to the stage door with packages for Lois from her various
suitors. Bill catches them at the door, and interrupts a
number onstage with his own improvised song for his “Bianca.” The
chorus sings along; as the stage directions note, “SINGING
GIRLS whistle. DANCERS dance. What else can they do?” There
is a practical reason for this poorly-placed song. Mordden
explains that Harold Lang, who played Bill Calhoun/Lucentio,
was dissatisfied with his part, and so the song “Bianca” was
written to placate him. Indeed, Lang was primarily a dancer,
and even after the song was added and performed to his utmost
ability, reviews pointed this fact out. Richard F. Cooke
wrote in his Wall Street Journal column, “Harold Lang
didn’t do much in the acting department, but danced
with his usual skill and aplomb.” Mordden contends,
however, that “Kiss Me, Kate is a show we love not
despite its sloppy realism and irrelevant hunks of Shakespeare
but because the score is so good that the rest doesn’t
matter.” How is “Bianca” different from “Brush
Up Your Shakespeare” in its improvisational glory?
The play’s libretto provides evidence that the gangsters
know their Shakespeare. For grammatically-challenged men
who speak Brooklynese in the middle of Baltimore, these men
know of what they sing. They seem to have practiced these
puns. And we can imagine the orchestra sitting there dumbfounded
as they sing a cappella. Bill, on the other hand, not only
extemporizes his song, and cloaks it under the name of “Bianca,” even
though it is about Lois, but an entire orchestra plays along
with him, chorus girls sing, and dancers dance. “What
else can they do?” This is the sole low point of an
otherwise glorious play.
Porter and Spewack took Shakespeare’s script and tailored
it perfectly to the musical tastes of the time. Maslon notes
that “Nothing about the story of Kiss Me, Kate required
Porter to master the sweeping narrative of the Rodgers and
Hammerstein musicals; he confined himself instead to the
sweeping emotions of the leading characters.” As Shakespeare
took his inspiration from plays that come before, and stories
of his time, so can Shakespeare’s works be the motivation
for other writers. Charles Marowitz notes, “His ‘greatness’ is
nothing more than the sperm-bank from which we must spawn
our own offspring.” Spewack didn’t want simply
to insert music into an adaptation of a Shakespearean script.
Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Abbot had already
used that stunt in their musical The Boys from Syracuse,
which took the characters, location, and plot of Shakespeare’s
The Comedy of Errors, and adopted a modern setting. She stumbled
upon the gimmick of adapting Shrew, into a backstager, as
Mordden puts it, “showing the lives of a theatre company
putting on someone else’s adaptation of Shrew: thus
pulling off a different stunt altogether.” The gimmick
worked.
October 2006
From guest contributor Jennifer Erin Book
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