“So in love” from Kiss me Kate (1947)

After two failures, one after the other, earlier in the 1940s, the general opinion was that Cole Porter’s genius was exhausted and that he would never write a successful show again. Kiss me Kate, a musical comedy based partly on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew opened at the New Century Theatre in 1947 and became the fourth longest running show of the decade in New York. With numbers like “Another op’nin’ another show,” “So in love,” “Wunderbar,” “I hate men” and “Always true to you in my fashion.” it could scarcely have failed. The most melodious of them, “So in love” - an attractive example of Porter’s predeliction for Latin-American rhythms - is sung by the Kate figure Lilli Vanessi who, on receiving from her ex-husband a bouquet of the same flowers as she carried at their wedding, acknowledges she is still in love with him, no matter how badly he treats her. The irony is that the bouquet was intended for someone else and delivered to Lilli by mistake.