Everything Is Swell Again

The touring edition of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate” opens Friday at the Shubert Theatre. So it’s a fine time to ask the question: After Cole, who?

Few, that’s who. None, according to some. Who could top the top, the man who wrote “You’re the Top” and “Night and Day” and “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “After You, Who?”

Peru, Ind.,’s most celebrated dandy, Cole Porter became American musical theater’s inside-outside man. He wrote about love from oblique angles, without ignoring the subject’s vexing complexity or comic possibilities. In “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love),” he deployed a single double-entendre dozens of ways, in a song about beans, oysters and Finns doing it--falling in love, that is, in addition to making it.

He essayed the topics of chipper infidelity (“My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “Always True to You [In My Fashion]”); and pure, aching melancholy, in songs that remain the Tin Pan-tithesis of, say, “My Melancholy Baby.”

The name-dropping, globe-trotting, devilishly witty composer and lyricist became famous both from his work and the high life that fed it. Porter peppered his songs with references to the rich and famous, many of them his pals. That’s Porter the insider, the gossipy bon vivant.

The outsider was ever-present as well. He wasn’t straight, though he married socialite Linda Lee Thomas. He wasn’t Jewish, though often he wrote that way, according to everyone from Irving Berlin to Richard Rodgers to Porter himself. He wasn’t rags-to-riches; he was born rich.

“People always say that so much money spoils one’s life,” Porter once said. “But it didn’t spoil mine; it simply made it wonderful.”

In his long career, Porter started out sounding like Gilbert & Sullivan, a primary influence. Near the end, he sounded more and more like Berlin, a lifelong colleague and supporter. You can hear the resemblance to Berlin in a relatively simple melody such as “C’est Magnifique” from “Can-Can” (1953) or “True Love,” from the film “High Society” (1956). But even when consciously simplifying his approach, Porter could suggest a world of feeling behind a declaration of love.

No one can take your breath away the way Porter can. With a simple swoop up the scale--”Here’s HO-ping we’ll meet now and then,” in “Just One of Those Things,” for example--he captures a moment of realization on the fly, after the end of an affair to remember.

Porter’s songs made much of 20th century America a more playful world, with an air of spring about it. But he was no stranger to autumn, or summer, or winter.

In every decade he wrote for a wide audience, from the 1910s through the ‘50s, he captured all seasons as well as the spirit of his times, from the vantage point of what one Porter lyric called a “regal eagle nest.”

What’s Considered the Top of His Work?

Many consider Porter’s score for “Kiss Me, Kate” his peak stage achievement. The show may not be the quintessential ‘40s Broadway musical, the way Porter’s giddy “Anything Goes” epitomizes ‘30s musical comedy. The ‘40s more or less belonged to Rodgers & Hammerstein. Yet you listen to the songs Porter wrote for “Anything Goes” and “Kiss Me, Kate,” and you can barely believe your ears. Such different aspects of such a distinct sensibility.

“Anything Goes” may offer more pure pleasure, but in “Kiss Me, Kate,” you sense a legend proving himself anew.

In 1948, few were betting on the success of a musical based on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” Porter’s name didn’t inspire much confidence, either. He hadn’t had a hit in years. On stage “Seven Lively Arts” (1944) and, with Orson Welles, “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1946) proved disappointing and a bomb, respectively. For MGM, the movie musical “The Pirate” (1948) offered little of Porter’s sparkle.

“Kiss Me, Kate” co-producer Arnold Saint Subber claimed the conceit of the show came from his own involvement with a production of “Shrew” starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The couple’s backstage friction mirrored the onstage battle of Petruchio and Katharine.

After Thornton Wilder turned down Saint Subber, Bella Spewack was approached about writing a libretto. She balked at first: Uncommercial, esoteric, pitfalls aplenty, she thought. Eventually she relented, realizing she needn’t merely adapt “Shrew” as a musical but could use it as a show-within-a-show.

Like Spewack, Porter heard the idea and initially declined. After repeated pitches from Spewack, Porter began to sense the project’s potential. Spewack roped in her philandering husband, Sam (who had left her for a ballerina) to bolster the story line. To the libretto Sam Spewack added a couple of gangsters, intent on collecting a gambling debt owed by a supporting character, Bill Calhoun, the one who sings “Bianca” (with its shameless Porter rhymes of “Sanka” and “Poppa spanka”). These gangsters eventually became the purveyors of “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” one of Porter’s best-known efforts.

This comic romp doesn’t sound like a song written by someone in terrible pain. But it was. In 1937 Porter had a horse-riding accident that left him with two badly crushed legs. Porter relied on canes and crutches the rest of his life. (He died in 1964.)

For much of her life, Porter’s wife also suffered from poor health. During the time of “Kiss Me, Kate,” Linda was confined to an iron lung in her Waldorf Towers apartment, adjacent to her husband’s. (Both Linda and Cole smoked to the end of their respective days.)

Splitting his time between Manhattan, Hollywood and Williamstown, Mass., Porter completed the “Kiss Me, Kate” score. During one four-day weekend in Williamstown, he knocked off “Another Op’nin, Another Show,” “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua” and “Where Is the Life That Late I Led.”

“Wunderbar,” Porter’s gloriously silly Strauss goof sung by Fred and Lilli, came from Porter’s voluminous trunk. Originally known as “Waltz Down the Aisle,” it dates to the early ‘30s and was eventually dropped from both “Anything Goes” and “Jubilee,” previous Porter Broadway hits. Amazing, really: “Wunderbar” is practically inconceivable outside “Kiss Me, Kate.”

Speaking With Shakespearean Sound

The most obvious strength of “Kiss Me, Kate” is simple and amazing. Porter wrote “in” Shakespeare, and around it. “I Come to Wive It Wealthily” takes its title and first two lines from “Shrew” before swaggering its own way home. “Tom, Dick or Harry” exists in an alternate universe overlapping the Bard and the Copa.

“Wunderbar,” enough (deliberately and wittily) to give Sigmund Romberg a toothache, shares the stage with the American musical theater’s sole investigation of climatic effects on erectile function (“Too Darn Hot”). A burgundy-toned lament of unusual power, “So in Love” eventually makes way for a sure-fire, 11 o’clock number featuring some really awful wonderful puns, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”

Each song with a different mood and intention. Yet they all sounded like they belonged together, in the service of this particular skeletal story.

Theater luminaries Moss Hart and Agnes de Mille saw “Kiss Me, Kate” before its out-of-town opening in Philadelphia, and pronounced it a demi-flop--not unfixable, perhaps, but ... but no buts about it. Opening night in Philly proved them wrong. “Kiss Me, Kate” wasn’t one of those messy but promising maybe-hits that ran a half-hour long, or needed song shuffling. In all, five minutes were cut to make room for extra choruses of “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”

On Broadway it opened Dec. 30, 1948, and Cole Porter was back on top.

In His Final Decade, Some Lovely Work

Lisa Kirk, the original production’s Lois Lane, recalled coming to the opening night party. Co-producer Saint Subber stood at the top of a stairway, according to Kirk, quoted in William McBrien’s 1998 Porter biography. Porter had the reviews in his hand, pronouncing the show a smash, and “Cole threw his canes down and walked that whole flight of stairs, unassisted. I just stood there crying,” Kirk said.

Porter’s final decade of work, in the wake of “Kiss Me, Kate,” generated some lovely results, even as Porter sank into and climbed out of depression, endured shock treatments, lashed out at friends, watched his devoted and beloved mother, Katie, die in 1952, followed two years later by his wife, leaving him emotionally rudderless.

In 1958, he wrote his only score for television, a version of “Aladdin.” The best known song from it is “Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking,” which Barbra Streisand resurrected, years later, riotously, on her first album.

The last tune he composed for “Aladdin” was also the last tune, allegedly, he wrote, period. It was titled “Wouldn’t It Be Fun,” which ends with a second-verse reference--telling, perhaps--to “mixed-up me.”

He had difficult and lonely years at the end. But from the beginning, Cole Porter appealed to the mixed-up, wised-up romantic in everyone. He was a one-man songwriting version of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers--class and sex in tandem, dancing a beguine for the ages, making us all feel like swells.

*

“Kiss Me, Kate,” Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Additional performances: today, 2 p.m.; Oct.. 8, 8 p.m.; Oct. 10, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 13. $40-$70. (800) 447-7400 or https://www.telecharge.com.