Rating:
Genre:
Soundtrack
Release Date: 11/19/1996
Run Time: 62:28
The
Original Soundtrack album for
Kiss Me, Kate is, in most ways, inferior to the
Original Broadway Cast album. There are three exceptions to this finding, and two of them have to do with casting.
Howard Keel, in the role of
Fred Graham, who in turn plays
Petruchio in the show-within-a-show version of
The Taming of the Shrew, is the equal of
Alfred Drake, who took the part on Broadway, and
Ann Miller, as
Lois Lane and
Bianca, is at least as effective as
Lisa Kirk was on-stage and gets more to do as well, having been given the song
"Too Darn Hot," which was sung by a different character on Broadway. Finally, the song
"From This Moment On" has been interpolated into the score. It was actually intended for, but cut from,
Out of This World, the
Cole Porter musical that followed
Kiss Me, Kate in 1950. Independently published, it was already on its way to becoming a standard when it was inserted here. It doesn't have much to do with
Kiss Me, Kate, but it would be a welcome addition to any movie
musical. That's the good news. Otherwise, the Hollywood production team has altered the score of the
musical in many ways that make it less impressive. Two songs,
"Another Op'nin', Another Show," and
"Bianca," have been cut, along with most of the finale.
Robert Russell Bennett's masterful orchestrations have been jettisoned in favor of overdone charts by
Conrad Salinger and
Robert Franklyn that tend to be inappropriate to the material, particularly the
big-band-and-bongos treatment of
"Too Darn Hot." Worst of all (but perhaps inevitably), the censors have made themselves felt heavily in the song lyrics. To be fair, the score for
Kiss Me, Kate as written for the stage is very suggestive, full of sexual innuendos, puns, references, and mildly naughty words. And the revisions are sometimes so skillful that it seems possible
Porter himself was involved in the bowdlerizing. For example, in
"I've Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua," where
Petruchio on-stage had sung of women, "In the dark they are all the same," in the film he sings, "In a brawl they are all the same," introducing an internal rhyme. But skillful censorship is still censorship; throughout the score, objectionable words like "virgin," "puberty," "hell," and even "grave" have disappeared, along with the reference to the
Kinsey Report, of course. Curiously, some anatomical puns ("Kick her right in the
Coriolanus," for one) have gotten through, along with jokes the censors must have felt were too obscure to offend moviegoers. (Thus, "
Lisa," who "gave a new meaning to the leaning tow'r of Pisa" remains in
"Where Is the Life That Late I Led.") Maybe this is what had to be done to get a film into movie theaters in 1953, but music fans can only be disappointed at the airbrushing of a classic score.
In 1990,
CBS Special Products issued a version of the
soundtrack that was more faithful to the movie itself, including the sounds of dancing feet in extended instrumental interludes that lengthened the album from 39 to 51 minutes. Six years later,
Rhino stretched that out to 63 minutes by including more instrumentals and underscoring, and the reissue producers stripped off the sound effects, the better to hear the work of a small army of arrangers and orchestrators --
Saul Chaplin,
Maurice dePackh,
Robert Franklyn,
Wally Heglin,
Skip Martin,
André Previn,
Pete Rugolo, and
Conrad Salinger.
Previn and
Chaplin actually earned the picture its only Oscar nomination for their adapted score, and it does manage to introduce instrumental themes from the missing songs
"Another Op'nin', Another Show" and
"Bianca." But the arrangements are the aural equivalent of the lyric censorship; they make
Porter's music safer, blander, and duller, and they are very identifiable as coming from the post-
swing era of early-'50s
pop.
~William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
Listen
