Kiss Me, Kate

Introduced by Mr Anthony

There are plays about misogyny and there are misogynistic plays. Kiss Me, Kate, premiering in 1948, was something of a hybrid. 

In placing the frame narrative of a warring theatrical couple around an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, the show viewed the source material through a semi-ironic lens, with the Elizabethan marriage market and its commodification of women sent up in songs such as ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ and ‘I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua’. In ‘I Hate Men’, the female lead wittily condemns sexual double standards in a strikingly modern treatise on toxic masculinity. However, the same character is also beaten publicly by her ex-husband and, in a startling volte-face at the show’s climax, appears willing to subdue herself to his mastery. The programme for the original production of Kiss Me, Kate bore the image of a whip, tipping the musical’s title from playful suggestion to baleful command.

A knowledge of the show’s genesis goes some way to explaining the mixed messaging. Having witnessed a blazing backstage row between Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, a real-life couple starring in a 1935 revival of The Taming of the Shrew, producer Arnold Saint-Subber alerted scriptwriter Bella Spewack to the comic potential of the scenario. 

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne

Bella, no fan of the gender politics of Shakespeare’s comedy (in which a husband employs shame, starvation and sleep deprivation to make meek his new bride), set about writing a more progressive heroine for the play-within-a-play. In early drafts, her Katherine acquires an interest in science (attempting to persuade others that the earth is round), argues against the notion of 'woman as a hapless thing: merely men’s puppet' and (borrowing from As You Like It’s Rosalind) cross-dresses to persuade Petruchio to woo her, even writing him poetry for the purpose (‘Were Thine That Special Face’ was originally sung by the ‘boy’ Katherine).

Bella Spewack, with Cole Porter

These adaptations were eventually quashed by producer Lemuel Ayers, director John Wilson and composer Cole Porter, reducing Kiss Me, Kate’s Katherine (the anomalous articulacy of ‘I Hate Men’ aside) to a flowerpot-throwing harridan. Porter also argued that the musical would be more marketable to conservative Broadway audiences if Bella’s husband Sam, whose only contribution to the project consisted of slight revisions to the gangsters’ dialogue, shared equal billing with his wife; a somewhat ungracious request from a composer whose involvement Bella had keenly fought for, against the wishes of the show’s investors (his previous three musicals had all been flops). Porter et al likely felt their interventions vindicated: the original production ran for over one thousand performances and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

Kiss Me, Kate: original Broadway production

However, revivals and film adaptations have played their part in calcifying characterisations which, on the page, offer a subtler range of options. Actor/manager Fred Graham is often portrayed as a capable, cocksure impresario, yet ex-wife Lilli Vanessi is the wealthy movie star deigning to add box office clout to his struggling out-of-town tour. At a time when patriarchal anxieties about the shifting post-war freedoms of women in the workplace were running high, Fred’s reluctant submission to Lilli’s talent triggers a childish pantomime of masculinity through which, I believe, Fred’s vulnerabilities are all too visible.  Of course, when it comes to tantrums, Lilli can give as good as she gets. But her entrapment in the theatre, at the hands of Fred and the gangsters, may leave modern audiences uncomfortable if she appears enfeebled by the experience. Instead, a Lilli that plays havoc with the production from the inside, puncturing Fred’s performance, can turn entrapment into a glorious upstaging.

Ann Miller as Lois and Kathryn Grayson as Lilli in the 1953 film version of Kiss Me, Kate

Ingrained misogyny is also apparent in the performance history of Lois Lane, a nightclub singer parachuted into her first Shakespearean role by a smitten Mr Graham. Often played as a ‘dumb blonde’ stereotype, the script contains no evidence that she is either. It’s a jealous Lilli who paints her as a vapid starlet fresh from the casting couch; in fact, Lois maintains a cool upper hand, both sexually and socially, in all her interactions with men. Like her soul sister Ado Annie in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Lois’s show-stopping solo (‘Always True to You in My Fashion’) displays a shrewd, guilt-free embrace of polyamory. With a dazzling command of rhyme and assonance, the song’s lyrics flaunt an intellectual capacity unmatched in the trite (yet touching) ditty later penned for her by her lover Bill. If Lois occasionally hides behind a hyperbolised performance of gender, she (unlike Fred) both plays with and profits from the façade: she is the Dolly Parton of her day.

Zoe Rainey as Lois in Opera North's 2018 production: Alan Burkitt, as Bill, looks appropriately dazed 

Still, what to do about that ending? ‘I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple’, Lilli’s self-tranquillising homily to female compliance, is as offensive as it is unexplained. In reprising ‘So in Love’, Fred may have come clean about his feelings for Lilli, but she wasn’t around to hear it. In our production, her brief return to the stage grants her confirmation of their mutual affection and a vision of Fred at his most vulnerable. The 2019 Broadway revival, with permission from the Cole Porter estate, concluded with ‘I Am Ashamed That People Are So Simple’, an overhaul of title and lyrics which un-gendered terms such as ‘supremacy’ and ‘rule’, transforming them into pejoratives for entrenched behaviours. Thus, as academic Bailey Sincox observed, the rewrite “change[d] the problem of the unruly woman to that of partisan dissension, replacing the call for submission with a call for reconciliation”. Following suit, our production ends with a mutual taming: both Lilli and Fred must replace vanity with humility if their love is to survive. For a pair of actors, it is, ironically, performance that they must learnt to do without.

You can watch the trailer for Mr Anthony's production of Kiss Me, Kate here.  All four performances are now sold out, but if you'd like to add your name to the list of those waiting for returns, please e-mail Victoria Tresigne (vt@stpaulsschool.org.uk.)