Showbits

My first musical performance was in Cole Porter's Anything Goes. It wasn't for another 13 years — Kiss Me, Kate, opening tonight at the country's second oldest community theater company — that I again performed the works of this prolific composer. So today seemed timely for me to finally watch Kevin Kline portray Porter's life in the 2005 film De-Lovely.

The film is creatively framed as a dying Cole Porter viewing his life as a musical, thus explaining his company's proclivity for breaking into song and dance. Though these numbers are subdued — despite Porter's work is laced throughout the film, I would not call it a musical — they are certainly fiction. What of the story is fact, I am unsure. Surely the highlights of the story are true: his time in Europe writing musicals, his success in Hollywood, his painful, later years. The movie, like my theatrical career thus far, begins with Anything Goes and ends with Kiss Me, Kate.

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