Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

(LILLIleaves.)

After Lilli has walked out on both Fred and her sleeping (and, more significantly, non-singing) fiancé, Harrison Howell, Fred, “alone, reprises ‘So in Love.’” In the May libretto Lilli decides to stay in the show, the Spewacks were able to maintain their fidelity to Shakespeare, and Petruchio wins his wager in the last scene. In the revised libretto, however, Lilli leaves. What can Petruchio say if his offstage counterpart knows that he will lose the wager? Petruchio replies to Kate’s father: “I know she will not come. / The fouler fortune mine and there an end.” In contrast to both Shakespeare and the May libretto Lilli’s reappearance in December as a tamed Kate who will follow Petruchio’s bidding comes as much of a surprise to Petruchio as it does to the other Shrew players. To clarify the impact of her return, the stage directions tell us that Fred becomes “really moved, forgetting Shakespeare” and then utters a heartfelt “Darling” before returning to his Paduan character.

The circumstances that led to the addition of “So in Love” sometime between June and November remain a mystery. Neither Spewack nor any Porter biographer has anything definitive to say about its appearance during auditions, but Morison recalled in 1990 that “‘So in Love’ was finished after I came into the show.”26 It is known, however, that “So in Love”—along with “Bianca” and “I Hate Men,” the last songs to be added to the show—replaced “We Shall Never Be Younger,” a song which all involved in the production agreed was a beautiful song but “too sad for a musical.”27 Like the song it superseded, the setting of “So in Love” is Lilli’s dressing room in act I (after Fred’s exit), and Lilli sings the song to herself unheard by her former husband. But the new song, unlike “We Shall Never Be Younger,” is unknown to Fred as well as unheard. The once-married couple (the show opens on the first anniversary of their divorce) had sung a few lines of the sad earlier song as a mood-changing coda to their earlier duet, “It Was Great Fun” (also dropped after May). In the May libretto Fred does not hear Lilli sing her confession and remains oblivious of her hope that “my darling might even need me,” but at least he knows the song that he has shared with his former romantic partner.28

In chapter 5 it was noted that in the original 1936 production of On Your Toes, Sergei Alexandrovitch and Peggy Porterfield sing the reprise of “There’s a Small Hotel.” Audiences were asked to accept a convention in which characters somehow know songs introduced privately by others, in this case Phil Dolan II and Frankie Frayne. In 1983 Sergei and Peggy sing a reprise of “Quiet Night” instead, a song that they have actually heard. Nevertheless, modern audiences still are expected to accept the idea that the entire cast can manage to learn “There’s a Small Hotel” well enough to sing it the finale.

In Kiss Me, Kate, Porter continues the tradition of characters singing songs they’re not really supposed to know. Certainly, the most significant example of this practice can be observed when Porter does not allow Lilli and Fred the opportunity to sing even a portion of “So in Love” together (as he did with the discarded “We Shall Never Be Younger”). Porter thus removes the means by which his characters can establish associations and connections with a song. When Fred reprises “So in Love” in act II, audiences might justifiably ask how he came to know it. Was he eavesdropping on Lilli when she sang it in act I?

In contrast to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s powerful reuse of “If I Loved You” in Carousel, the reprise of “So in Love” puts the song above the drama, so that it becomes, as Joseph Kerman might say, a reprise “for the audience, not the play.”29 The dramatic impact of Billy Bigelow’s reprise of “If I Loved You” in Carousel stems at least in part from the audience’s memory of a shared interchange between Billy and Julie Jordan. The song belongs to them, they know it, and the audience knows that they know it. In this isolated but telling dramatic detail in Kiss Me, Kate, Porter returns to the era he himself had done so much to establish: once again a great song (and its reprise) takes precedence over the dramatic integrity of a book. Despite this criticism, it might also be said that Fred’s reprise of “So in Love” demonstrates a credible bond and a communication with Lilli and serves a theatrical if not a literal truth.30

Kiss Me, Kate and the Broadway Heroine

In the revised ending Lilli (and, by extension, her Shrew counterpart, Katherine) willingly joins Fred and Petruchio in the final scene. She is free to leave both Fred (the frame of the musical) and his show (the musical within a musical). Although this ending took Porter and the Spewacks further away from their Shakespearean source, it also brought them perhaps a little closer to a modern view of the world. Lilli and Katherine return to their men as free agents, not as tamed falcons.

Nevertheless, Katherine’s final Shakespearean speech, only “slightly altered by Cole Porter with apologies,” creates a serious challenge to a feminist interpretation.31 Katherine freely comes to Petruchio, but she then sings a speech almost invariably construed as degrading to women. Is Kiss Me, Kate therefore a sexist musical that should be banned, or at least restaged?

Long before feminism became part of the mainstream of intellectual thought and social action in the late 1960s and early 1970s, critics have been put off by Shakespeare’s ending. For example, in 1897 George Bernard Shaw came to the following conclusion: “The last scene is altogether disgusting to modern sensibility. No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of woman without feeling extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into