The Wartburg Players and the Wartburg College Opera Workshop will perform the Cole Porter musical “Kiss Me, Kate” Feb. 21-23.

Thirty Wartburg students and one professor are cast in Porter’s biggest Broadway hit — featuring a play (William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”) within a play.
Tickets are $5 for the 7:30 p.m. performances in Neumann Auditorium and are available at the Saemann Student Center ticket office or at the door.
“Kiss Me, Kate” debuted in 1948 as Porter’s first big hit, winning the first Tony Award for best musical. Fifty years later, it won another Tony for best musical revival.

“It’s a big Broadway musical,” said Dr. William Earl, associate professor of communication arts who directs the Wartburg Players theater group. “It’s one of the great warhorses of theater with all the elements — terrific music and dancing, gangsters, and backstage and onstage intrigue.”

Dr. Brian Pfaltzgraff, associate professor of voice, is teaming with Earl to present the annual Wartburg musical production. Many of the students are veterans of “Oliver” in 2010 and the Opera Workshop performance in 2011.

The plot involves the egotistical producer, director and star of a foundering touring company. He recruits his ex-wife, a movie-star diva, to save his musical adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy. Mismatched lovers and gambling debts owed gangsters, who also portray actors in the musical, add to the mischief.

Describing a recent revival of the musical, a critic wrote, “Cole Porter’s unbeatable songs, divas, gangsters, dancing, jokes, and even Shakespeare make ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ all that it is … pure fun.”