Kiss Me, Kate (Original Broadway Cast 1949) / Let's Face It (1941)

The overture is about to start. You cross your fingers and hold your heart.

Those lines from the opening number of Kiss Me, Kate were probably running through the brains of everyone connected with the nowclassic musical when it opened on 30 December 1948.

For most of the major players involved, this show was either the big break or the last chance: the musical that would put them on the map, or knock them off the board forever.

Saint Subber was a stage manager who dreamed of being a producer; this was his one big opportunity. Patricia Morison was a B picture ingénue who at 33 knew she had to become a star this time out or give up her dreams.

Bella Spewack had written numerous successful shows with her husband Sam, but he had left her for a younger woman and she felt she needed a hit on her own to redeem herself. Alfred Drake had scored big in 1943's Oklahoma! but had been involved in five years of flops since then.

And then there was Cole Porter. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, his name had been synonymous with smart, sophisticated musicals. His score for Anything Goes alone would have earned him a place in theatre history.

But a tragic riding accident in 1937 had left him crippled and his work began a slow decline. By the time he started Kiss Me Kate, he hadn't had a hit in five years, while Rodgers and Hammerstein and Irving Berlin were enjoying the biggest smashes of their careers.

Clearly a lot was at stake here, and the fact that a musicalization of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew was the vehicle that everyone pinned their anxious hopes on shows how desperate they were, because no one on Broadway thought it was a good idea.

Not even the mitigating factor that it was actually a play within a play about a recently divorced diva-ish husband and wife who happened to be doing a musical of Shakespeare's battle-of-the-sexes comedy made it sound like a winner to the Shubert Alley regulars.

The question of who came up with the concept has never truly been settled. Saint Subber suggests the idea was his and stemmed from the days he was on tour with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and watched the married stars bickering onstage as well as off.

Bella Spewack insists she was first approached about just turning Shrew into a musical and that she originated the backstage story, while Cole Porter is on record as saying the whole thing began with Alfred Drake.

Everyone agrees that Porter took a long time in being convinced of the project, but the dynamic Bella wouldn't take no for an answer and the songwriter finally relented.

One reason for Porter's reluctance may have been the fact that he was in what he later called 'complete agony' during the period, due to an abscess on one of his badly damaged legs. But, self-medicating with alcohol, he plowed ahead, usually writing in the wee small hours of the morning and awakening a not-delighted Spewack to sing her selections like Why Can't You Behave?