Please let's have more musicals like this Kiss Me, Kate at Opera North

Opera North’s new production of Cole Porter’s masterwork Kiss Me, Kate has been so widely and justly praised that I wonder whether there is much for a week-later reviewer to add. It’s not as if the work needs much exegesis or critical commentary, though it may be worth pointing out that what we hear in Leeds amounts to a new critical edition, in which the conductor, David Charles Abell, has played a major role. Musicals have been treated with as little respect as Italian operas were in the 19th century, with arias and whole scenes added or subtracted according to the taste and abilities of the performers, the management’s judgment of the initial reception, and the casualness with which manuscripts and orchestral parts have been handled. So Abell has an alarming tale to tell of chances lost and coincidences redeeming them, of tap-dance routines only recently discovered — all the makings, really, of the plot of a musical involving the disinterment of an earlier musical, with scholars fighting for grants and attending conferences in desirable places, etc.