By KEVIN NANCE
Staff Writer
The Tennessean
Kiss Me, Kate is one of those musicals you've heard about but probably not seen, and no wonder. Although the Cole Porter musical was a hit when it opened in 1948, half a century passed before a Broadway revival was mounted.
But when the revival finally arrived in 1999, with a refurbished script, delightful new orchestrations and sizzling new choreography by Kathleen Marshall (especially of the second-act production number Too Darn Hot), it took Broadway by storm, winning five Tony Awards including best musical revival.
Staged by acclaimed British director Michael Blakemore - who also directed the touring version, starring Rex Smith and Rachel York, which arrives next week at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center - the show delighted audiences with its hilarious storyline, about a pair of divorced actors battling onstage and off during a musical version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
And Porter's supremely witty score, highlighted by Brush Up Your Shakespeare, which includes a raft of marvelous puns on almost all of the Bard's plays, made a new case for itself as one of American musical theater's greatest gems.
"I'd always felt that it was a great musical but underappreciated," says top Broadway producer Roger Berlind, who had seen the original company in 1951. "It's an extremely funny show, a very sophisticated musical with Cole Porter's best score. I always thought of it as one of the top 10 of all time, but a lot of people had forgotten it."
Steven J. Greil, TPAC's president and CEO, agrees. "Kiss Me, Kate is a show that people maybe don't realize is such a masterpiece," he says. "It's among a group of classics, which also includes Fiddler on the Roof, South Pacific and Cabaret, that people call 'blue chip' titles."
Berlind had had his eye on Kate for about a decade before he was able to mount the revival, he says. First, he had to get representatives of the original writers of the musical's book, Sam and Bella Spewack, to agree to allow playwright John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation) to alter the script, which Berlind felt was dated.
"I had several meetings with them to convince them that we would respect the book writers' original work," he says. "They felt very jealous of the work and guarded it very carefully. They had to be comfortable that it would be treated with respect. But when I introduced them to John and Michael, who are immensely charming people, it created a confidence factor that allowed us to do what needed to be done."
The idea, he says, was to make the script more accessible for a contemporary audience. "John is a very funny man, and he put in some really funny lines. He also took out some clinkers, and some jokes that wouldn't register at all today. There were jokes about Harry Truman's piano playing and his daughter's singing, for example, and about Bernard Baruch sitting on a park bench. The audience wouldn't get those things now."
Guare also created a new character, Gen. Harrison Howell, replacing a senator who, in the old version, kept falling asleep. Howell, an affectionate spoof of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, is played by Middle Tennessee native Chuck Wagner.
"It's a great, great show, but it's easy to do a bad production of it, I think," Wagner says. "That's why I really wanted to do this production, which is so fabulous. Besides the simplicity and elegance of Michael Blakemore's direction, there's Cole Porter's score, and there's also some serious dancing that goes on. Kathleen Marshall's choreography is breathtaking."
The show features Smith, best-known as a former teen-idol singer and co-star of the Broadway production of The Pirates of Penzance opposite Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt. Smith is reunited with York, with whom he starred in the Broadway production of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
"It's been a dream to do this show," Smith said from a tour stop in Los Angeles. "It's one of funniest things I've ever been in, and working with Michael was incredible. He's the most amazing director I've ever seen. Doing comedy like Kiss Me, Kate is lot more difficult than it looks, but he made it work."
For more background on the production, visit the official Kiss Me, Kate Web site at www.kissmekateontour.com.
Getting there
Kiss Me, Kate, an Actors' Equity-affiliated touring Broadway production, opens Tuesday and continues through Nov. 11 at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Jackson Hall. Show times are 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets ($21.50-$65) are available at the TPAC box offices downtown, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, at Ticketmaster outlets, online at www.tpac.org or by calling 255-ARTS (2787).
Tennessean arts writer Kevin Nance can be reached at 259-8238 or by e-mail at knance@tennessean.com.