Overview
When Kiss Me, Kate opened at the New Century Theatre on December 30, 1948, it brought together three theatrical worlds: Shakespeare, backstage Broadway, and Cole Porter's sophisticated musical comedy. The result became one of the defining musicals of the early postwar Broadway era and Cole Porter's greatest theatrical success. The musical operates as a show within a show. Actor-producer Fred Graham and his ex-wife, Lilli Vanessi, are starring opposite each other as Petruchio and Katherine in a musical production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Their onstage battle between Shakespeare's famously combative couple mirrors their backstage relationship, where old resentments, lingering attraction, jealousy, and professional rivalry repeatedly collide. A second romance between performers Lois Lane and Bill Calhoun adds another layer of romantic complication, while two gangsters unexpectedly become part of the production after arriving to collect Bill's gambling debt. The score includes “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” “So in Love,” “Wunderbar,” “Too Darn Hot,” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” Together, they helped turn Kiss Me, Kate into both a celebration of theatre itself and a musical examination of the complicated relationships between performance, love, gender, and power.
Historical Era
Kiss Me, Kate premiered in 1948, as Broadway entered the period now commonly described as the Golden Age of the American musical. Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! and Carousel had demonstrated how completely music, dance, character, and narrative could be integrated. Rather than imitate their earnest dramatic style, Cole Porter adapted the lessons of the integrated musical to his own strengths: witty lyrics, sophisticated romance, comedy, and theatrical self-awareness. The musical also emerged during a changing postwar culture. Women had taken on expanded economic and social roles during World War II, but the late 1940s brought renewed pressure toward conventional marriage and gender roles. Against that background, the battle between Fred and Lilli—and between Petruchio and Katherine—carried implications beyond romantic comedy.
Both women resist men who attempt to control them. The question is what happens when that resistance encounters a theatrical tradition in which romantic resolution has historically depended upon female submission.
Historical & Cultural Context
At the center of Kiss Me, Kate is a problem inherited directly from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew: how should audiences understand a romance structured around the “taming” of an independent woman? The musical deliberately blurs Shakespeare's fictional relationship with Fred and Lilli's supposedly real one. When Petruchio battles Katherine onstage, Fred and Lilli's own anger begins breaking through their performances. When the actors fight backstage, they seem to become the characters they are playing. This structure allows the musical to explore a central theatrical question: where does performance end and reality begin? It also creates tensions that have become more visible over time. Fred's attempts to dominate Lilli—including physical aggression played for comedy in the original production—reflect assumptions about gender and relationships that many contemporary audiences no longer accept. At the same time, Lilli is not a passive Golden Age heroine. She is professionally successful, outspoken, intelligent, and fully capable of challenging Fred. The musical's tension comes partly from the fact that neither Shakespeare's Katherine nor the actress playing her fits comfortably within the submissive role the story seems to demand.
Production Innovation
Kiss Me, Kate was Cole Porter's first major success in the emerging era of the integrated book musical. Rather than creating a collection of sophisticated songs around a loose plot, Porter wrote music that operated across multiple dramatic levels. Some songs belong to Shakespeare's world, others to the backstage story, and still others seem to comment on both simultaneously. “So in Love,” for example, expresses Lilli's emotional attachment to Fred despite their failed marriage. “I Hate Men,” performed as Katherine, belongs formally to The Taming of the Shrew but resonates with Lilli's own frustrations. “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” sung by the gangsters, turns Shakespearean references into comic advice about romance. The musical's most famous dance sequence, “Too Darn Hot,” also demonstrates how performance itself becomes part of the story. Traditionally staged as an explosive ensemble number during the actors' intermission, it momentarily shifts attention away from the principal romantic plot and toward the energy of the theatrical company. The result is a musical that is constantly conscious that it is a musical—a work about performers who repeatedly use performance to reveal truths they cannot express as easily offstage.
Historical Significance
Kiss Me, Kate became a major commercial success, running for more than 1,000 performances. It also won the first-ever Tony Award for Best Musical in 1949, along with several other Tony Awards, including recognition for Cole Porter's score. For Porter, whose Broadway career stretched back decades, the show represented a remarkable late-career triumph. It demonstrated that his sophisticated style could thrive within the new dramatic expectations established by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The musical also helped establish the enduring tradition of Broadway musicals about Broadway itself. Later works would repeatedly explore rehearsal rooms, performers, backstage relationships, and the unstable boundary between theatrical identity and personal identity. Its revival history has been equally revealing. Productions have repeatedly reconsidered the gender politics inherited from both Shakespeare and the 1948 musical. The 2019 Broadway revival starring Kelli O'Hara made significant revisions intended to give Lilli greater agency and rethink some of the physical and sexual politics of the original. Those changes highlight the unusual historical layers inside Kiss Me, Kate: a twenty-first-century audience watches a twentieth-century musical reinterpret a sixteenth-century play. Each period brings different assumptions about gender, marriage, performance, and power.
Why It Resonates With Me
What fascinates me about Kiss Me, Kate is its idea that performing a role can reveal something about the person underneath it. Fred and Lilli cannot completely separate themselves from Petruchio and Katherine, just as modern productions cannot completely separate themselves from the values of 1948 or Shakespeare's original play. For me, that layering captures something essential about theatre: every revival becomes a conversation between the people who first created a story, the performers telling it now, and the audience deciding what it means today.
