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Prelude to a Kiss was first commissioned by South Coast Repertory, where it premiered on 15 January 1988. A revised version with Alec Baldwin as Peter premiered on 14 March 1990. The play then moved to Broadway, as the Helen Hayes Theatre, open on 1 May 1990, starring Timothy Hutton, Mary-Louis Parker and Bernard Hughes in the lead roles.
The play's title comes from a 1938 Duke Ellington-Irving Gordon-Irving Mills song. It has been sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. "How my love song gently cries/ For the tenderness within your eyes/ My love is a prelude that never dies/ My prelude to a kiss."
