Smooching is not exactly a lost art this Valentine’s Day; it’s more like in storage, along with many other practices, onstage and off. But it’s a good day to remember how much theater has revolved around a kiss, illustrated below by dozens of photographs of  stage kisses from 1887 to 2020.  

“Romeo and Juliet” is the one play in which we’re guaranteed a stage kiss — and it’s the first theater in which many of us saw one.

Clare Danes and Leonardo diCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo and Juliet

Beyond Babel

Romeo and Bernadette, 2020

West Side Story, 2020 Shereen Pimentel and Isaac Powell

Romeo and Juliet at Royal Shakespeare Theater

Juliet and Her Romeo

Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet

But kisses have been common as well in contemporary shows on Broadway, even in their titles — “Kiss Me Kate,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Kiss and Tell,” “The Kiss Burglar” —  26 in all. “Stage Kiss,” Sarah Ruhl’s 2014 Off-Broadway play, begins with the actress about to begin rehearsal; turning to her co-star, she asks whether he would mind if they would actually kiss: “You look young, I don’t want to traumatize you.”

Stage kisses are different enough from off-stage kisses as to require guidance. There have been manuals for some time, such as  How To Stage Kiss (Set ground rules, pay attention to hygiene, make sure you know your lines) and Tell and Kiss: A Manual for Actors (Boundaries—to tongue or not to tongue: For me, this is an easy one: open mouth, no tongue…. Make sure your makeup won’t rub off on your partner. ..Use good sense. Be respectful. Speak up for yourself.”) Intimacy coaching is a growing vocation in the theater. Last month, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival hired Sarah Lozoff https://www.sarahlozoff.com/ as its first “resident intimacy director.”

Click on any photograph to see it enlarged and learn who is kissing whom and in what, e.g. Elizabeth Taylor kisses John Culllum in Private Lives in 1983, and Tallulah Bankhead kisses Donald Cook in Private Lives in 1948. Sydney Chaplin kisses Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, 1964. Faith Prince kisses Nathan Lane in Guys and Dolls in 1992. Caitlin Kinnunen kisses Isabelle McCalla in The Prom in 2018.

Annie Scott as Rosemary Pillkington kisses Robert Morse as J. Pierrepont Finch, as Rudy Vallee as the boss looks on shocked in How to Succeed in Business without really Trying 1961

The re-enactment of the same-sex kiss from The Prom at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2018 mock-shocked Christopher Sieber (left.)

Ben Whishaw and Hugh Dancy kiss in The Pride, 2010

Ivan Hernandez and Bobby Steggert in Yank, 2010.

Adina Verson and Katrina Lenk In “Indecent,” 2017. Paula Vogel’s play tells the story of the hundred-year-old Yiddish play that featured the first Lesbian kiss on Broadway. The actors playing the troupe keep on referring to the kiss as “the rain scene.” When we finally see the rain scene, it’s not so much the kiss as the rain that overwhelms us.

Jessica Hecht and Dominic Fumusa in Stage Kiss, 2014

Unidentified show and actors

Trixie Friganza as Mrs. Waxtapper and George Beban as Pierre Souchet in The American Idea 1908

Francesca da Rimini. Act V, Scene I, 1887

Louis Gossett as Willie Nurse and Cicely Tyson as Myrna Jessup in Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights 1968

Stubby Kaye as Pooch Kearney, Alice Faye as Professor Kenyon, and John Payne as Bill Johnson in Good News 1974

Donald Cook and Tallulah Bankhead in Private Lives 1948

Has there ever before been such a touching love scene between poultry? In The Year of the Rooster, by Eric Dufault, a young rooster named Odysseus Rex, played by Bobby Moreno like an angry punk with a knife, is introduced to Lucky Lady (Megan Tusing), a hen genetically engineered by McDonald’s to be twice her normal weight, and so virtually unable to stand. At first they don’t get along. He’s all…well…cocky. She behaves in a way that explains where the phrase “hen-pecked” comes from. But swiftly she is able to reach inside his chest and remove the anger he says is there, shaped like an anvil. They kiss, like the French (like birds!), cheek to cheek, and snuggle.

Elizabeth Taylor and John Cullum, Private Lives 1983

Actors Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor in a publicity shot for the Broadway production of the play “Private Lives.”

A 21st century musician kisses a 20th century explorer in Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, 2017

Frozen, 2018, Princess Anna (Patti Murin) Kissing Prince Hans (John Riddle)