This showy production of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy of the battle of the sexes is mostly a romp for Stratford’s star couple: Ben Carlson [also playing Captain von Trapp this season in The Sound of Music and an internationally renowned Hamlet] and Deborah Hay [luminous star of Cabaret and Born Yesterday at Shaw Festival and seven Shakespearean plays at Stratford]. They are undeniably great actors, a treat to see anywhere in any roles. But it is also a very intricate staging of a complex play, inventive, elaborate looking, and cast with varied, masterful classical repertory actors.
I don’t find the “induction” that sets up the “play Within the Play” of the Taming of the Shrew to be valuable. It has comic drunken rowdiness and shows off the actor who plays the drunk Christopher Sly [in this case Carlson, who then plays Petruchio] to perform a lot of slapstick comedy. And, if Sly turns up at the end of the play proper [an addition which no one thinks Shakespeare wrote], it can also add related thought about a change in treatment causing a change in one’s basic nature [especially in women, as we see in the taming of Kate].
Sly is found drunk after causing a brawl at a tavern and then moved to a Lord’s home where he is fooled to think himself a rich married man and treated to a “cure” provided by the story of a tamed shrew. Stratford’s latest version puts all that in, but I think the addition to be mostly tedious. It does allow for some showy changes in scenery and costume.
I’ve found director Chris Abraham to be too enamored of invention to permit a classic play to demonstrate its own charm and appeal, but he is technically able at encouraging actors’ personal gifts and creating entertaining displays, so his work overall is usually enjoyable, even when I can’t see what is gained by, for instance, changing a beloved Shakespearean comic couple in A Midsummer Night’s Dream into two males. Most of the prancing about here is certainly entertaining, though I was beginning to pity Gordon S. Miller, whose Biondello, Lucentio’s servant, hardly stops high-kicking all over the large stage throughout the last act.
My favorite all-time Cordelia in King Lear was Ruby Dee, so I’m all for non-traditional casting, but a black actress playing a woman named Bianca is a bit much – particularly since there isn’t so much contrast here with Sarah Afful, a powerhouse, dynamic actress, playing the shrewish Kate’s demure younger sister. Still, Afful, the elegant Sarah Orenstein and Deborah Hay really play up the feminist contest between the three brides in the wedding scene. The whole cast is solid and strong. Peter Hutt’s Baptista, the loving but frustrated father of Kate and Bianca, is unusually sympathetic and funny throughout. Brian Tree is somehow commandingly subservient as Petruchio’s groom Grumio – a dynamic comic foil, as is Brad Rudy as Petruchio’s steward, Curtis. Of the many goofy suitors, Mike Shara’s Hortensio is perhaps the most winning. But it is the leading couple who dominate virtually every scene of the comedy. Deborah Hay is pretty much the most ferocious shrew I’ve seen as Katherina. She is hilariously uncontrollable, yet self-driven with steely control: everyone we see is afraid of her, and even when she makes herself unhappy, she is a formidable antagonist. Unlike many who show a sometimes soft side in the role, Hay just shows a sexy desire for a worthy antagonist. In her notorious “I am ashamed that women are so simple” speech showing her “tamed” obedience to her mate, Hay’s Katherina is a satisfied woman in love and virtually boasting of it.
Her husband, at that point, is not the sometimes smirky satisfied victor, but the delighted lover uncontrollably in her thrall. Ben Carlson’s Petruchio is raunchy and eccentric, a dashing rebel at the beginning, but he is unmistakably attracted when he finally sees “Kate” in action. His goofy role-playing is layered with self-conflict as he proceeds to “tame” her; and his famous “Where is the life that late I led?” speech and scene on their honeymoon [a bravura self-proclaiming aria in the musical made from this play, Kiss Me, Kate] is here wry and almost sad. In a sense, their conflict is two star-turns slyly offered to each other. If the exact nature of their relationship is not a sure thing at all times, what is unmistakable is that theirs is the winner’s circle.
The final group dance at curtain call could be more spontaneously joyous if so many distracting and lengthening elements, like the Christopher Sly intro, had been trimmed. But this is a delicious playing out of the Shakespeare classic with a pretty much unbeatable cast.
