THAT LUNT AND FONTANNE MUSICAL By Peter Filichia
But no mention of KISS ME, KATE?
Granted, film producer-director Stephen D.M. Smith was more interested in celebrating where Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne lived in This Place Matters! Ten Chimneys.
(Yes, Ten Chimneys. Santa Claus would have no problem entering Lunt and Fontanne’s rural Wisconsin retreat.)
However, while I was watching this marvelous hour-long documentary at its kickoff on Oct. 6 at – where else? – the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, I did wonder if Cole Porter’s best musical would be referenced. There is, after all, reason to believe that America’s greatest acting couple may well have inspired what was once the third-longest-running book musical in Broadway history.
Of course, if you believe KATE’s co-librettist Bella Spewack, the Lunts had nothing to do with it. She maintained that she first had the idea of turning The Taming of the Shrew into a musical. Because Shakespeare had already been musicalized in THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE (from The Comedy of Errors), she just didn’t want to throw songs into various places of The Bard’s script. With the aim of doing something different, she’d have two actors mirror the lives of warring characters Petruchio, the suitor, and Katharine, who initially felt that he didn’t suit her.
You may find Arnold Saint-Subber’s story more convincing. He had worked on the Lunts’ legendary 1935 production of The Taming of the Shrew. Some say he was the production’s stage manager (ibdb.com doesn’t corroborate this) while others say a stagehand. Whatever the case, his being around the 129-performance run would seem to substantiate his claims that he got the idea for the musical by watching Lunt and Fontanne before and after performances, where they would fight as fiercely as Shakespeare’s Tamer and Shrew.
Even the Lunts’ biographer Margot Peters stated that “they were at each other all the time.”
And yet, they were a strongly devoted couple; as Sheldon Harnick reminded us in THE APPLE TREE, “Love and hate can go hand in hand.” Smith’s documentary detailed that, after they married in 1922, they stipulated in all their contracts that if producers wanted to hire one, they’d have to take the other.
That’s how it went during their 35-year career – first in the 1923 month-long flop Sweet Nell of Old Drury (whatever that was) to the landmark drama The Visit in 1958, which opened at a theater that had been known as the Globe but had just been rechristened the Lunt-Fontanne.
Perhaps, though, there is something to the theory that actors in real life take on the personalities they’re currently performing on stage. (The excellent 1961 musical KEAN, about 19th-century superstar Edmund Kean, makes this point as well.) Whatever the case, a dozen years after the Lunts had closed Shrew, Saint-Subber decided to show this onstage when turning his musical idea into a reality.
Give him credit for daring to hire writers that many Broadway observers felt were on the wane – the aforementioned Bella Spewack and her husband Sam. Although they’d had two major hits in the 1930s, by this point in the late 1940s, almost a decade had passed since they’d had a success.
(Did Saint-Subber choose them because their relationship wasn’t so far afield from Petruchio and Katharine’s initial one? Orchestrator Don Walker once joked that the Spewacks could have been Edward Albee’s inspiration for Martha and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
And, yes, Cole Porter was considered a has-been by many Broadway observers in the late 1940s. What a slap in the face for a composer-lyricist who’d been represented on Broadway each and every week from October 1939 to May 1945. And yet, although 1944’s MEXICAN HAYRIDE had run more than a year, even Porter might have admitted that it was far from his best work. Its subsequent film version even dropped his entire score, preferring to include songs by Walter Scharf and Jack Brooks.
(WHO?)
After HAYRIDE, Porter endured two high-profile flops: THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS and AROUND THE WORLD. Mike Todd produced the latter, and a decade later when he did a film version of the famous Jules Verne story – one that would win a Best Picture Oscar – he retained no Porter melody.
So, Saint-Subber was taking big chances, for any rookie producer who endures a flop will find producing a second show substantially harder. But his hiring hunches would pay off. Peter Stone – the librettist of 1776, WOMAN OF THE YEAR and TITANIC – often said that after KATE’S tryout in Philadelphia, it came to Broadway “without changing as much as a comma.” Audiences immediately took to the story of Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi, once married, now divorced, but needing each other as co-stars in a production of The Taming of the Shrew.
And, as the original cast album of KISS ME, KATE has been proving since 1949, Porter came through superbly with his most accomplished score. It gets off to a great start with “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” which often is found on lists of Broadway’s greatest opening numbers.
“Wunderbar” has Fred and Lilli romantically remembering the song from the show that had given them their early chances. Waltzes that are funny are rare, but Porter’s music amuses as much as his lyric “Gazing down on the Jungfrau.” That mountain is nearly 14,000 feet tall, which makes finding a place where you could gaze down less than easy.
“So in Love,” the musical’s biggest hit song, lets us see that Katharine still loves Fred. In a while, he’ll reprise it to show us he still loves her, too.
This was the era where musicals had a secondary couple, so Bill and Lois were included. Porter had her ask her gambling beau, “Why Can’t You Behave?” He smartly made the words and music come across as a resigned plea rather than a castigating one.
And who’s Lois to talk about misbehaving? She mentions no fewer than 11 lovers in “Almost True to You in My Fashion” – including the three she references in a well-earned encore.
In comparison, Petruchio can only ruminate on eight past inamoratas in “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” He does center on one and only in the lushly romantic “Were Thine That Special Face.” An extra bonus is that Alfred Drake sings it, best known for this, KISMET and OKLAHOMA! (and while we’re at it, that KEAN that had been mentioned earlier).
As for Katharine, she gets two songs about men that aren’t romantic in nature, as you’ll discover from the recording.
And how would we rank KISS ME, KATE on a scale from one to ten? The rating is identical to the number of chimneys atop Lunt and Fontanne’s former home.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His day-by-day wall calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon and The Drama Book Shop.
