‘No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We’: Kiss Me, Kate and the Politics of the Integrated Musical

Abstract

In this article I use psychoanalytic feminist theory to consider the integration of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate (1948). Despite often being considered his most integrated musical the show seems to flaunt its undecidability, its resistance to integration between number and narrative. The dominance of the narrative over the numbers is a motif that dominates all standard accounts of musical theatre history, central to the notion of integration. This account pivots around 1943, the date of the opening of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! Musicals before 1943 tend to be considered either as precursors to Oklahoma! or are retrospectively dismissed in the light of what was to come. This article builds Martin Sutton's suggestion that the relationship between the narrative and the musical numbers is a battle between psychic freedom and social repression, but rejects his conclusion that the narrative must win out. I look once again at Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate to reveal its instabilities and dis-integration, using concepts drawn from Cixous and Kristeva to argue for a sexual–political content to this musical's play with form.

Notes

1. Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 94. Although he is discussing film musicals, his comments apply equally well to their theatre counterparts.

2. Martin Sutton, ‘Patterns of Meaning in the Musical’, in Genre–the Musical, ed. by Rick Altman, BFI Readers in Film Studies (London: BFI, 1981), pp. 190–96.

3. Ibid., p.191.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 195.

7. Ibid., p. 191.

8. David Ewen, The Story of America's Musical Theater, rev. edn (Philadelphia and London: Chilton, 1968), p. 183.

9. Ann Sears, ‘The Coming of the Musical Play: Rodgers and Hammerstein’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. by William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 120–36 (p. 124).

10. ‘The musical play is the most significant of all developments in the American musical’ (Ethan Mordden, Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 142); ‘the notion of the book as a well-constructed drama is itself the single greatest innovation in the history of the Broadway musical’ (Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), p. 56); ‘audiences had to wait until 1943 for Oklahoma! to finally establish the integrated musical as the norm for musical theatre writing and production in America’ (John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theater (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003), p. 77); ‘the show that most notably changed America's thinking about the nature of musical theatre was almost certainly Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's Oklahoma!’ (Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy from Adonis to Dreamgirls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 159). These comments are typical.

11. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, p. 58.

12. Ibid., pp. 54–56.

13. Richard Kislan, The Musical: A Look at the American Musical Theatre (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), p. 141.

15. Mordden, Broadway Babies, p. 58.

14. Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves, p. 140.

16. Max Wilk, OK! The Story of Oklahoma! (New York: Grove, 1993), pp. 118, 156–57.

17. Carter, Tim. Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 79–136.

18. Kislan, The Musical, p. 123.

19. Ibid., p. 134.

20. Robert Kimball, ‘Cole Porter’, You're the Top: Cole Porter in the 1930s, Cole Porter Centennial Collection (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1992), 1–15 (p. 5); see also Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy: The Story of the American Musical Stage as Told through the Careers of Its Foremost Composers and Lyricists, 3rd edn (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1974), pp. 187–88, for the stumbling genesis of Anything Goes).

21. Cole Porter, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (New York: Da Capo, 1983), pp. 301–02.

22. Quoted in Green, The World of Musical Comedy, p. 197.

23. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 180.

24. Ethan Mordden is somewhat more cautious in his estimation: ‘he was apparently trying to write his version of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show’, he writes, making a number of important qualifications to the claim (Ethan Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 252). In an earlier book he argued that at the high point of integration ‘old hands despaired of keeping up or labored to outdo themselves, as Cole Porter did on Kiss Me, Kate’ (Mordden, Broadway Babies, p. 145). It is worth noting that none of Porter's public statements about the importance of Rodgers and Hammerstein suggest definitively that he approved of their influence and wanted to ape it. Indeed, his remark that their musicals ‘are, let us say, more musicianly’ may be a queenly put-down (quoted in Block, Enchanted Evenings, p. 373).

25. The idea came from the producer's involvement in the Lunts' 1940 revival tour of their production of The Taming of the Shrew. By comparing prompt books with the text, Elizabeth Schafer has demonstrated just how close the onstage business in Kiss Me, Kate is to the production decisions in the Lunts' version (Elizabeth Schafer, The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 32).

26. Bordman, American Musical Comedy, p. 171.

27. Cole Porter, Samuel Spewack, and Bella Spewack. Kiss Me, Kate. Ten Great Musicals of the American Theatre, ed. by Stanley Richards (Radnor, Pennsylvania: Chilton, 1973), pp. 213–77 (p. 228).

28. The song does fit comfortably in the experience of Kiss Me, Kate because it engages in a kind of dialogue with the more upbeat ‘Another Op'nin’, Another Show’ while sharing its motif of exhaustion. A similar, though more satirical, celebration of theatre comes in ‘Wunderbar’ (Kiss Me, Kate, pp. 223–24), an affectionate pastiche of Viennese Operetta, with deliberately nonsensical Ruritanian lyrics. Other musical theatre references are mentioned elsewhere but we shouldn't forget the lines from ‘I Sing of Love’, ‘I won't waste a note of my patters / On socially significant matters’ (p. 247); this refers to the surprise Trade-Union-sponsored Broadway hit Pins and Needles (1937) and its opening number, ‘Sing Me a Song of Social Significance’. The joys of showbusiness are therefore already thematised by the time Fred tries to woo Lilli by evoking the whirl of applause and first-night parties (Kiss Me, Kate, p. 266).

30. Porter, Kiss Me, Kate, p. 238.

29. Quoted in Richard M. Sudbalter, ‘The Songs’, You're Sensational: Cole Porter in the ‘20s, ‘40s, & ‘50s, Cole Porter Centennial Collection, vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1999), pp. 7–88 (p. 52).

31. Ibid., p. 216.

32. Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’, p. 256.

33. Ewen, The Story of America's Musical Theater, p. 205; Charles Schwartz, Cole Porter: A Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1979), p. 233.

34. Block, Enchanted Evenings, p. 184.

36. Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’, p. 259.

35. Porter, Kiss Me, Kate, pp. 262–70.

37. Porter, Kiss Me, Kate, p. 271.

40. Ibid., p. 254.

38. Carousel (1945) does the same thing, so perhaps here Porter is being genuinely Rodgers-and-Hammersteinian.

39. Porter, Kiss Me, Kate, p. 277.

41. Ibid., p. 228.

42. Schwartz, Cole Porter, p. 232.

43. Quoted in Sudbalter, ‘The Songs’, p. 52.

44. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.), p. 30.

45. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by G. R. Hibbard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 4.1, p. 121.

46. Ibid., 4.1, p. 119.

47. Porter, Kiss Me, Kate, pp. 260–61.

48. There are two original cast recordings, one from 1949, recorded only a fortnight after the Broadway opening, and another in 1959 when, unusually, the cast reunited for a stereo recording of the original. Both recordings are currently available on CD.

49. Mordden, Broadway Babies, p. 100.

50. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 90–136.

51. Helene Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1/4 (1976), 875–93.

53. Ibid.

52. Porter, Kiss Me, Kate, p. 261.

54. Porter, The Complete Lyrics, p. 302.

55. Porter, Kiss Me, Kate, p. 261.

56. Ibid., p. 265.

57. Ibid., p. 264.

58. Ibid., pp. 254–55.

59. Ibid., p. 256.

60. Green, The World of Musical Comedy, p. 199.

61. Porter, Kiss Me, Kate, p. 234.

62. Ibid., p. 275.

63. Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 40.

64. Ethan Mordden, usually one of the most reliable and intuitively accurate commentators on the musical, lists a series of problems with Kiss Me, Kate's construction that, for him, take it off the list of truly great musical theatre shows (Beautiful Mornin’, pp. 255–56). It may or may not be worthy of that list, but these faults of construction are only faults when seen from the perspective of integration.

65. Kislan, The Musical, p. 134.

66. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, p. 63.

67. Sutton, ‘Patterns of Meaning in the Musical’, p. 191.

68. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis–Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the Ego and the Id and Other Works, Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 191.

69. McMillin, The Musical as Drama, p. 2.

70. D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

71. Otis L. Guernsey Jr, Broadway Song and Story: Playwrights/Lyricists/Composers Discuss Their Hits (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1985), p. 205.

72. I would like to record my thanks to Dominic Symonds, Maria Delgado and Colette Conroy for their help in developing this article.