Riffs on Shakespeare: Romancin’ The One I Love
Musical Bard
The National Post

There is something unwieldy about the title Romancin' the One I Love; it's overlong and somewhat tautological. (I mean, who else are you gonna be romancin'; unless of course you're two-timin'?)

That makes it a good fit for the show itself, which is groaningly unwieldy -- a scene-for-scene enactment of The Taming of the Shrew, with a couple of dozen songs thrown in -- and is also a tautology in itself: It's a Shrew musical that acts as if it didn't know that there was -- indeed, still is -- a show called Kiss Me Kate, drawn from the same source. Quite often in Romancin’, we seem to be hearing cues for songs that we already know, and it's frustrating when new ones turn up, especially when ... but I'll get to that.

Mind you, I read recently that someone in the United States is writing a musical based on the stories of Damon Runyon, thereby going head to head with Guys and Dolls; by that yardstick, the hubris of John R. Briggs, creator of the present show, seems like modesty itself. Romancin' takes both plots of The Shrew -- the subduing of Katharine the fierce by the upstart Petruchio, and the wooing of her younger sister by three competing suitors, most of them in disguise -- and sets it down in 1930s Miami Beach.

The show starts with everybody silhouetted in Art Deco poses, prior to going into a welcoming company number that does something to set up the basic situation. One of the crowd turns out to be Kate herself (she likes to be called Katharine, but her creators put her in her place by calling her Kate in the program) but we hardly notice her; this must be the weakest first entrance ever inflicted on the leading lady of a musical comedy.

Anyway, the whole sequence turns out to be superfluous, since the identical ground is immediately gone over again, courtesy of Shakespeare's own exposition. Or of some of it; here, as throughout, the harder Elizabethan words are replaced by modern slang, not all of it native to the Thirties. This is probably meant to be funny.

If the dialogue aims at pastiche, the score, by Briggs and Dennis West, is outright nostalgia. The 1930s were the greatest decade of American popular music, and if you're going to use its styles now, you have to use them, comment on them in some way; otherwise you're simply competing with the incomparable.

All this score conveys is a fervent desire to put the clock back: understandable but vain. The songs aren't actually that bad; it's just that they all seem to have been written at least once before. The words are mostly after Cole Porter (Kate's “Nobody Loves Me” is a list-song uncomfortably close to Porter's “Nobody's Chasing Me”), the music mostly after Gershwin (the title song has the impudence to quote directly from “I Got Rhythm”). Kate's big torch song, “My Attitude”, crammed with blue notes and low-down throbbings, is after everybody; it seems to have been written 17 times before. It's also dramatically destructive. She sings it while waiting at the church for her non-appearing bridegroom, and it's all about how much she really and secretly loves him. Meanwhile the text, which suggests nothing of the kind, is still chugging incorrigibly along around her.

This is a musical of The Taming of the Shrew that's plainly embarrassed by The Taming of the Shrew.

Plenty of straight productions -- most straight productions -- manage to suggest an instant attraction between hero and heroine. The play's appeal is that it's about the coming together of a pair of outsiders too good for the society in which they find themselves. But they neither of them give in that easily. In this version, Petruchio overhears Kate moaning another love song, is touched, and gives up on the taming idea altogether. The final notorious wager on Kate's obedience is played as a pre-arranged put-up job, thereby destroying any dramatic point it might have. It would be better to cut it altogether; this is, after all, an adaptation.

The couple signal their love-at-first-sightedness by doing an energetic Fred-and-Ginger routine, dancing over sofas. But that's not enough to give them chemistry.

Camilla Scott's Kate is less a characterization than a prolonged display of good sportsmanship, while Brad Aspel's slick bantamweight Petruchio is charmless to the point of being repulsive. He's played as an out-of-work song-and-dance man, which makes it seem very strange that Kate's mercenary father would accept him as an eligible suitor. It does mean, though, that he can take her home, not to his country seat, but to a New York rehearsal hall, where his troupe, though presumably unemployed, are still hard at work.

"We'll keep her awake," he says of his bride, "by rehearsing our closing number" -- at which promise of yet another generic routine I, case-hardened though I am, heard myself whimpering "Oh, no!"

Sergio Trujillo's musical staging is a complete compendium of choreographic cliches, but he does not, in fairness, have much to go on. Supporting performances, mostly executed with an air of gamely desperate professionalism, are similarly stereotyped; Grumio (Lloyd Culbreath) is the hero's black hoofing-and-gospelling sidekick; Hortensio (Larry Mannell) is the cheerful, brow-mopping, all- purpose second banana; Gremio (Gerry Salsberg) is a stock rich Jew, breaking into Hava Nagila when he thinks he's got the girl; and Tranio (Derek Marshall) is a tireless impressionist who -- after flying at Groucho, Cagney and Jerry Lewis -- settles for imitating Tony Curtis imitating Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot. Bianca (Melissa Thomson) is your standard cute minx.

In one of the show's token gestures to feminism, all the women get behind Kate to sing a man-defying song called “I Don't Have to Listen to You”; but it goes nowhere, since Shakespeare's Kate stands for no one, male or female. (And no one, which is their loss, will stand for her.)

Kiss Me Kate, which has an elaborate play-within-a-play framework, is far more cavalier with its source (it actually makes it difficult to follow the Shakespearean plot) but, by virtue of being a good show with its own identity, ends up being more respectful of it.

It's certainly no accident that makers of musicals keep returning to Shakespeare's comedies, and especially to his earliest comedies; between them, Shakespeare and Broadway-Hollywood are responsible for most of our modern conception of romance. This, with especial reference to Kenneth Branagh's new and (I think) unfairly maligned movie version of Love's Labour's Lost, is a subject worthy of further exploration.