Riffs on shakespeare: Kiss me kate
The stratford festival
the national post

I have a couple of pedantic reservations about Stratford's smashing production of Kiss Me, Kate, and I'll get them out of the way at the start.

First: The interpolation, from another Cole Porter score altogether, of From This Moment On does nothing for the show, and the character who sings it shouldn't be singing at all, as he's the one civilian in a backstage/ onstage musical otherwise peopled by theatre folk going, mostly frantically, about their business. (This is no reflection on the actor, Kristian Truelsen; he's excellent.)

Second: Director John Doyle has had the idea of using the chorus characters, actors or stage hands or both, as a more classical kind of chorus, live sounding boards for the principals' songs, and it mostly works brilliantly. But he overplays his hand when he lets them share the stage with soubrette Lois Lane for her gold-digging classic ‘Always True to You in My Fashion’, which should be strictly between her and her boyfriend-in-waiting. He's also cut about half the song, including its best stanza, the two decisions depriving Chilina Kennedy, who plays Lois, of a full- blooded chance to stop the show.

On the other hand, she has been stopping it all evening. Kennedy is a tornado dancer, a dynamite singer with a voice as true as powerful, and a lithe and delectable looker. She's also an actress, able to take a role to its limits. She runs here with the idea of Lois as a nightclub singer, eager to prove herself in a Shakespearean musical based on The Taming of the Shrew but unable to shed old habits. Lois's blank-verse line readings are best described as enthusiastic; likewise her vamping of the audience. Mike Jackson matches her as Bill, her amatory and professional partner, a champion hoofer who has a slightly more refined version of the same thespian problem. The two of them also manage to build a relationship, ultimately a touching one, from a minimum of material. This is part of the triumph of Doyle's production, the only one I've seen to make Porter's score seem like a score, rather than a collection of great individual songs. He knows which, like ‘Why Can't You Behave’, can be finessed to advance story and character; which, like ‘Too Darn Hot’, must be given extended and irresistible rein in their own right; and which, like the glorious ‘So in Love’, can do both. The reappraisal starts at the top. This Kiss Me, Kate is not only a show within a show; it's also a show within a dream, maybe owing something to the Christopher Sly framing scenes in Shrew itself. The normally rumbustious ‘Another Op'nin, Another Show’ is here bemused and reflective (and it actually comes before the overture); the production's ending I wouldn't want to give away, except to say that it's magic and a perfect match.

Which reminds me: the leads. Juan Chioran plays Fred Graham, the egomaniacal actor-manager who both directs and acts Petruchio, and Monique Lund is his ex-wife Lilli Vanessi, lured back from a dubiously successful stint in Hollywood to play Kate, and finding herself stuck in an unusually trying tryout in Baltimore. Of course they squabble, enflamed by all kinds of jealousy; of course they will get back together again. The process is here surprisingly detailed, and even moving, with the interplay of their on-and offstage roles more vividly realized than I would have thought possible. If a few vital pages of the relationship seem to have gone missing at the end, that must be blamed on the book (by Sam and Bella Spewack), which is funny but fragmentary.

Chioran, an obviously fine Petruchio in any context, is witty and commanding, but also unobtrusively sensitive, though his singing, while resonant, is not as supple and exploratory as his acting. Lund, who has a powerhouse voice, also seems to be a very good sport; I'm not sure that she too needs to vamp the audience (maybe Lilli is being competitive) but nobody could fail to love her spectacularly furtive exit, flat on her back, all the way down the Festival stage's front steps. It's good to see those in use again, and indeed David Farley's designs make excellent use of the space, leaving it uncluttered for the backstage scenes while giving us a spectacular and hilarious slant on Mr. Graham's interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew. He appears to have been ahead of his time in some respects, such as using actors as mobile scenery, though his taste in costumes might have been considered garish even in 1948.

His production, as we behold it, is in a state of severe accident-proneness, not all of it due to histrionic temperament or novitiate ineptitude; a door frame makes a memorable appearance with the side marked "Interior" pointed proudly towards the audience. It's also used to great effect by the two gangsters who, through a slight case of mistaken identity, turn up to collect a debt of honour from Fred and will not be dissuaded. Theirs are infallible roles, taken to incomparable heights by Steve Ross (burly and menacing) and Cliff Saunders (slight and even more menacing). Their 11-o'clock injunction to ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’, with multiple built-in encores is, as expected, sublime, an old-time waltz for mugs, for which choreographer Tracey Flye has devised dainty stepping as great in its way as the full- blooded routine with which she galvanizes ‘Too Darn Hot’.

Yes, I know I said that civilians in this show shouldn't sing; the point, maybe the show's main point, is that by the time the two guys do this number they, too, have been thoroughly caught up in the dream. They've even been given walk-on roles. Start to finish, this is an intoxicating show, up there among Stratford musicals with Fiddler on the Roof and My One and Only. Or, as one of Mr. Graham's underworld visitors puts it, having caught part of the first act, "It's entertaining, vivacious and calculated to please the discriminating theatregoer. You may quote me."

Kiss Me, Kate is in repertory at the Festival Theatre, Stratford through Oct.30.