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As it happens, the Shrew’s opening coincides with the first anniversary of Fred and Lilli’s divorce. Lilli is now engaged to presidential advisor Harrison Howell, who offers her the security she lacked as an actress. But there’s one hitch: deep down, Lilli is still in love with Fred – and is consumed with jealousy over his flirtation with Lois Lane, the actress playing Bianca.

Discovering that Fred has sent Lois an opening-night bouquet identical to the one she carried at her wedding, Lilli slaps him on stage in front of the audience. Fred retaliates by throwing Lilli across his knee and giving her a public spanking. Vowing to walk out of the show immediately, the enraged Lilli calls Harrison to come and get her.

Meanwhile, Lois’s true love is Bill Calhoun, who plays Lucentio in the Shrew. An inveterate gambler, Bill has lost $10,000 in a crap game – and has signed Fred’s name to the IOU. When two gangsters arrive to collect from Fred, he has the idea of using them to force Lilli to continue with the performance.

The hilarity mounts as the onstage performance reflects the backstage battles – all to the accompaniment of Cole Porter’s celebrated score, including such songs as “Wunderbar,” “So In Love,” “Always True to You in My Fashion” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”

The program notes by James Magruder that you’ll find elsewhere on this website will give you the musical in context. I would simply like to share a little of what we discovered in the rehearsal room.

We had a rich experience, not only with Porter’s great score but also with how the characters weave between the Shakespeare and the backstage world. Indeed, more time is spent “backstage” than “on stage” in the musical. The four principal characters lead onstage and offstage lives, which often merge with glorious results. Fred, Lilli, Lois and Bill become Petruchio, Kate, Bianca and Lucentio – and sometimes the tangle of their personal lives topples into their onstage lives.

We also had fun developing on/offstage worlds for all the other players in our troupe. Everybody in Fred Graham’s company is asked to be in The Shrew – even the stage door man! It happens – I’ve been in such companies!

Yet for all the fun, this musical has an interesting context. It is set on the first anniversary of Fred and Lilli’s divorce. This allows it to be just a little painful and more than a little heartfelt.

For me as a director, the greatest pleasure has been to take this vaudevillian musical theatre form, built for the proscenium arch, and to explore it on the Festival Theatre’s magnificent thrust stage. That, by its very nature, invites you to re-invent. It also reminds you that the actor is central to the storytelling. Thank you, Stratford, for the opportunity.

Their first, Leave It to Me!, was a jerry-built piece of satiric nonsense – very 1938 – drawn partly upon the Spewacks’ experiences as foreign correspondents in Moscow. Starring William Gaxton, Sophie Tucker and Victor Moore as a hapless American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Leave It to Me is recalled today, if at all, for introducing Mary Martin and her deathless Siberian striptease in “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”

A decade later, pondering The Taming of the Shrew as source material, the Spewacks turned again to Porter. Shakespeare was a tough sell to their composer-lyricist, and to the twenty-seven nervous producers who eventually capitalized the musical show-within-a-show now revered the world over as Kiss Me, Kate.

Musicals had changed irrevocably in the ten years since Leave It to Me! Bella Spewack, a tough cookie by all accounts, refers more than once to the “New Art Form” in her introduction to the published text of Kiss Me, Kate, and although her tongue is planted firmly in her cheek, a little “musical play” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein called Oklahoma! had permanently raised the bar in 1943 for how the American musical could and would operate.

When considering the spectacular triumph of Oklahoma!, Richard Rodgers puts it best: “The orchestrations sounded the way the costumes looked.” The serious intentions behind Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new “integrated” style meant, among other things, that songs reveal character; that songs aren’t interchangeable from show to show or character to character; and that songs and dances ideally move the plot forward.

This being America, however, these innovations wouldn’t have taken permanent root if Oklahoma! hadn’t run five years, toured for ten and thrown off millions of dollars. Over time the profit motive will advance the New Art Form as much as the dream ballet.

Rodgers and Hammerstein followed up with Carousel, Allegro and South Pacific, and other talents, both established and new, followed suit with shows like Bloomer Girl, On the Town, Street Scene, Finian’s Rainbow, Brigadoon, Regina and – most to the point here – Irving Berlin’s 1946 smash Annie Get Your Gun, the musical that domesticated Ethel Merman, who had been Porter’s go-to siren through the thirties and early forties, by giving her a real character with a dramatic arc to play and sing.

The overwhelming success in the forties of the musical play meant that the musical comedy would have to start behaving too. Pre-Oklahoma!, a producer or composer or librettist might get an idea for a show, hire a clutch of headliners and write to their particular comic talents, filling out woolly storylines with topical gags, toothsome chorines and take-home tunes. It had worked time and again for the Gershwins, for Rodgers and Hart, for Berlin and for Porter – Leave It to Me! being a prime example.

When the Spewacks approached him with Shrew, Porter, the ne plus ultra in Gotham swank, was considered washed up. Although his four wartime musicals (Panama Hattie, Let’s Face It!, Something for the Boys and Mexican Hayride) hadn’t lost money, they were forgettable, undisciplined, old-school vehicles with mediocre scores. Then, his Seven Lively Arts and Around the World in Eighty Days were outright flops.

In Annie Get Your Gun, Berlin and Merman had risen to the challenge of the New Art Form. Could Porter, famously uninvolved in the day-to-day creation of his shows-in-vitro (unthinkable today), step up to the plate and collaborate on a semi-Elizabethan backstage musical without stars? Especially when, as Bella Spewack claims, he couldn’t make heads or tails of the Shakespeare even after it was read aloud to him?

And how. Porter wrote and – new for him – re-wrote his score for Kiss Me, Kate in three months; seven songs were either deleted during rehearsals or never used. Whether the feuding, divorced-for-a-year Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi, the backstage counterparts of Petruchio and Kate, were based on the legendary egos of Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne or on the combative Spewacks, their serio-comic battle of the sexes was tailor-made for Porter’s melodic genius and the insouciant ribaldry of his lyrics.

Three songs, including Kate’s capitulation, “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple,” are direct from Shakespeare (via the Spewacks). The Italian setting inspires a tarantella, “We Open in Venice,” and a most felicitous bawdry for Petruchio in “Where Is the Life that Late I Led?” And a steamy backstage intermission at the Ford’s Theatre in Baltimore provokes the cool jazz of “Too Darn Hot.”

Kiss Me, Kate opened on December 30, 1948, to rapturous reviews and ran until July of 1951. America loves nothing more than a comeback, and this was Porter’s. Writing for specific characters in a developing story led him to his finest score, one as chockablock with standards as Berlin’s for Annie Get Your Gun. It landed him on the cover of Time magazine in January of 1949, and although his final trio of musical comedies (Out of This World, Can-Can and Silk Stockings) didn’t match his undisputed masterpiece, Porter, whose songs had first graced a Broadway stage in 1916, was given a fresh start in the New Art Form.

And yet . . . what about First Man and Second Man, those gangsters shoehorned into the plot as if it were still 1923 and Oklahoma! had never happened? The Spewacks had initially promised Porter that this pair of vaudeville clowns weren’t going to sing – but then the rules of showbiz intervened: how about a comedy number playing on the Bard’s titles?

Let it be said, in conclusion, that Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t eschew entertainment for its own sake. While their talents certainly elevated and extended the dramatic range of a popular form and set benchmarks for posterity, many, many strains of musical theatre co-exist every season on Broadway (even in 2010, when for every Next to Normal there are two Rock of Ages).

The musical comedy has traditionally been a more elastic beast, so if your evening’s entertainment has already included “Wunderbar,” “So In Love,” Why Can’t You Behave?,” “Were Thine That Special Face?,” “Tom, Dick or Harry,” “Too Darn Hot” and “Always True to You in My Fashion,” then there is no reason in the world why First Man and Second Man can’t come down to the footlights just before the finale and kill the audience with “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” Because if their laughs have been raining down all night, and their eleven o’clock number has lyrics on the order of 

    Just recite an occasional Sonnet 
    And your lap will have “Honey” upon it,
    When your baby is pleading for pleasure 
    Let her sample your “Measure for Measure”

then this pair of deliriously unintegrated, all-licens’d fools can misbehave to their heart’s content – and ours.

James Magruder, dramaturge for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum last season, teaches at Swarthmore College and the Yale School of Drama.