Return of Kate the Great

Two years ago there was the first-ever Broadway revival of one of the all-time great American musicals, Kiss Me, Kate, from 1948, featuring Cole Porter's most dazzling score. This fleet and fizzing reappraisal was an instant hit - going on to win five Tonys - and next week it opens in London. But it was a long time arriving.

London has seen a number of Kate revivals over the past 50 years, but New York has not, mostly because of problems with the libretto. Many times the show was announced for New York with various stars attached - Kevin Kline included - only for an updated script to be refused by guardians of the original libretto, by husbandand-wife team of Sam and Bella Spewack.

Then, in the early Nineties, the veteran, Australian-born director Michael Blakemore got involved. It was an ideal pairing: the story of Kiss Me, Kate meshes backstage romance with Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and Blakemore understands "duplex shows" better than any director around - think of the on- and off-stage worlds of the delirious original Noises Off, or the twinning of pulp fiction and film noir in the musical City of Angels, both of which he directed.

It's hard to credit that Blakemore is in his eighth decade - expensively tooled leather slippers in the rehearsal room his one apparent concession to age - as he calmly reworks the show for London. He remembers the original West End production of 1951 as "an absolutely joyous event", but wryly concedes that when he first came on board, "at the height of political correctness", a story structured round an embattled stage couple (Lilli and Fred) on the road in "The Shrew", featuring a husband spanking his wife, might have some problems with postfeminist audiences. (No wonder Ken Tynan loved the show; and on finding out that Evelyn Waugh, who abhorred theatre, had seen Kate 10 times, he mused in his Diaries: "Was he a spanker?")

Blakemore felt that the perception of Fred's conduct was " absolutely dependent on what she does to himî and in the new version Lilli's behaviour has been "spiced upî. At this point, he turned to the sharp, urbane playwright John Guare, whose analysis of Nineties Manhattan, Six Degrees of Separation, was a Broadway and West End hit. Crucially, Guare loves the American musical, and back in 1972 co-authored another Broadway Shakespeare-inspired show, Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Blakemore and Guare - both uncredited - worked on reshaping some key episodes, principally-those involving an elderly senator in pursuit of Lilli. He was transformed into General Harrison Howell, a kind of gung-ho Patton or MacArthur character and "a much more recognisable postwar figure", according to Guare; "a true male chauvinist ... he makes Fred look like an apostle of feminism", says Blakemore.

Both Guare and Blakemore insist that the script changes are "non-radical", although they include giving Lilli another song, From This Moment On, in the second act, thereby addressing a musical imbalance. Blakemore stresses that it's easy to overlook the merits of the Spewacks' work - "so spare, savvy and tight" - while Guare adds: "We happily honoured the original intention of Kate."

Indeed, without the feisty Bella Spewack, a tiny, Bucharestborn fireball, Kate might never have seen Broadway at all. The show was the brainchild of a young would-be producer, Saint Subber, who as a stage manager had watched spectacular quarrels between Broadway's great acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, rehearsing The Taming of the Shrew. But it was Bella who cajoled an ill and frightened Cole Porter - at that stage considered a back-number after three successive flops - into taking on the project.

It was Bella who conceived the show-within-a-show structure, which gave Porter the framework for his astonishing score, the numbers ranging from soaring ballads and beguines to dynamic dance routines and the show-stopping lilts of Brush Up Your Shakespeare (rhyming "Troilus and Cressida" with "British Ambassador"). And when a panicky Saint Subber, whose mother ran a ticket agency, rushed up to Bella after a run-through in a grimy rehearsal hall to wail: "Mother says this is schwatz (weak)î, she snarled back: "Tell your mother to go home and sell tickets.î

Not many shared her belief in Kate. With unknown producers and no stars (Mary Martin passed on Lilli for Nellie in South Pacific), the show had a nightmare time raising capital: 72 separate backers finally provided the $180,000 for a project no Broadway insider took seriously.