Theatre Register

Samuel Spewack

Shows · Samuel Spewack

Book WriterDirector 1899–1971

Samuel Spewack (1899–1971) was an American playwright and librettist who, with his wife Bella, wrote the books for Cole Porter's Leave It to Me! (1938) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948).

Also credited on2 works

Leave It to Me!
Kiss Me, Kate

These come off the person record, which names a work and not a production. So we can say this name is attached to the work and we cannot say which staging, or in what capacity. For a composer or a writer that is the whole career we hold; there is no cast list to find them in.

In the literature8 passages

  • I knew Cole had come through brilliantly. I knew what I had done and what Sam [co-librettist and spouse Samuel Spewack] had done was right. We had nothing to change. I knew it so I didn’t have to be superstitious. In the history of American musicals this is the only one where they didn’t have to touch a scene or a song. In rehearsals, cha…ebooks/Block, Geoffrey/Enchanted Evenings_The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber - Geoffrey Block.txt
  • 48 . Hamm, “Theatre Guild Production,” 495–532. Samuel Spewack and Bella Spewack, Kiss Me, Kate , anthologized in Richards, Great Musicals , 273.ebooks/Block, Geoffrey/Enchanted Evenings_The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber - Geoffrey Block.txt
  • With a book distantly related to their own play, Clear All Wires, Bella and Samuel Spewack came up with a spoof of Communism and U.S. diplomacy that offered comedian Victor Moore one of his meatiest roles as mild-mannered Alonzo P. “Stinky” Goodhue. Goodhue is unwillingly named Ambassador to the Soviet Union because his ambitious wife (So…ebooks/Green, Stanley/Broadway Musicals, Show By Show - Seventh Edition - Stanley Green & Cary Ginell.txt
  • Samuel Spewack, produced by Vinton Freedley, directed by Samuel Spewack, choreography by Robert Alton, and starring William Gaxton, Victor Moore, Sophie Tucker, and Tamara.theatre-pdfs/Mary Martin-Broadway Legend (Ronald L. Davis).txt
  • nomenon of musicals that never quite faded. A few examples are Gay Divorce (1932; book by Dwight Taylor, music and lyrics by Cole Porter), based on an unproduced play by J. Hartley Manners; Roberta (1933; book and lyrics by Otto Harbach, music by Jerome Kern), based on a novel. Gowns by Roberta, by Alice Duer Miller; I Married An Angel (1…theatre-pdfs/McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, v. 3 (I-N).txt
  • Kiss Me, Kate (1948). Book: Bella and Samuel Spewack; music: Cole Porter. Musical comedy, a playwithin-a-play, in which Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi, though divorced, costar in a Shakespearean troupe's production of The Taming of the Shrew. Quickly they realize they are still in love, and as the play shifts from presentday Baltimore to t…theatre-pdfs/McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, v. 3 (I-N).txt

Passages naming this person, found by keyword across 178 books. A keyword match is not a biography, and a common name will pull in the wrong one.

What this page does not know

  • What this person played. No cast list we hold records a character against a performer.
  • Any staging. This name appears in no production cast list we hold — 1,877 of 7,139 people are in that position, most of them writers, composers and designers rather than performers.
  • Which of the credits above the roles on this record — book writer, director — apply to. The roles sit on the person and never on a credit, so a director who also acted looks the same here as one who did not.

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