Kiss Me Kate

Cole Porter's shocking double-entendre and spellbinding lyric verbosity (which was scrubbed clean in the 1953 MGM film adaptation) has been replaced in this 2003 remake of "Kiss Me, Kate!," a filmic stage show built from the 1999 Broadway and 2001 London revivals.

In the 1940s musical producers realized that their stock in trade would be increased significantly by replacing one of the elemental ingredients of drama back into their shows: Plot. So the great songwriter Cole Porter teamed up with popular playwriting team of Sam and Bella Spewack to create one of the composer's best-plotted shows, a life-imitates-art comic romp about theater folk attempting to produce a Broadway-bound musical version of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew." The result is a layered musical comedy that speaks both to Shakespeare's understanding of romantic relationships and his Renaissance sexism.

Brett Barrett and Rachel York light up the screen as the narcissistic actor/director Fred Graham (who has cast himself as Petruchio) and his temperamental leading lady and ex-wife Lilli Vanessi (saving Fred's ass in the role of Katherine). She is a big name and he has a big head, so they put aside their differences in order to make a hit show. But when long-buried feelings start to resurface, the play threatens to fall apart. As plots involving mistaken messages and gangster interventions merge with acrobatic dance numbers, Porter pulls off some of his most popular ditties, like "So in Love," "Another Op'nin', Another Show," "Too Darn Hot," "Wunderbar," "Why Can't You Behave," "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," "Where is the Life That Once I Led," "Always True to You in My Fashion" and "I Hate Men."

The filmmakers forego the convention of making the viewer feel like she's sitting in an audience. Rather, they use the reaction footage from an actual audience only for the play within a play, heightening that theatrical irony that Shakespeare use so often.

The menu on this Blu-ray disc is bare bones, and it isn't convenient to navigate through the musical numbers, so it's best to watch this musical in one sitting.

"Kiss Me, Kate!"
Blu-ray
$19.95
ShoutFactory.com