Five things you didn’t know about Kiss Me, Kate

Kiss Me, Kate, with its divorced actor-producer and leading lady, was inspired by the on-stage/off-stage battling of husband-and-wife actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne during THEIR 1935 production of The Taming of the Shrew. This was witnessed by future Broadway producer Arnold Saint-Subber, who commissioned the musical.

Kiss Me, Kate was Cole Porter's response to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! and other integrated musicals that had begun to appear — it was the first show he wrote in which the music and lyrics were firmly connected to the script.

Many of the songs from Kiss Me, Kate were huge hits in there own right – ‘Wunderbar’, ‘Always True to You (In My Fashion)’ and ‘So In Love’ were recorded by numerous artists in the late 1940s and were in the music charts for several months.

Some of the original Broadway lyrics were considered very risqué (and TOO risqué for the 1953 film version, including one verse of particularly bawdy puns in ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’). In fact, when asked by the press what she thought of her son's new musical, the composer's mother replied, 'My Cole is a very naughty boy!'

Kiss Me, Kate won the first ever Tony Award for Best Musical in 1949, and also went onto win Best Original Score, Best Author and Best Costume Design! It became Cole Porter’s biggest hit and ran for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway.