The new Kiss Me, Kate from Roundabout Theater Company at Studio 54 tries a bit too hard to be au courant with feminist perspectives on the historically sexist plot derived from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, but it’s so damned entertaining, joyously staged, and performed that the minor politically correct tweaks to its book hardly matter.
Cole Porter’s classic score is given the evergreen treatment by music director Paul Gemignani, Scott Ellis’s production is crisp, clean, and sleek, and Warren Carlyle’s choreography is athletic, humorous, and sexy. The fabulous Kelli O’Hara and the comically virile Will Chase lead a dazzling cast full of snappy dancers, riotous clowns, and clashing lovers.
Premiering in 1948, Kate came about when writers Sam and Bella Spewack witnessed a backstage fight between the legendary acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne during a performance of Shrew. The married playwrights fashioned an ingenious plot with a fictional divorced pair headlining a musical version of the Bard’s comedy during a Baltimore try-out. The battle between Katherine and Petruchio parallels that of the show’s stars Fred Graham, an egotistical actor-director-producer, and Lilli Vanessi, an equally self-centered thespian, bouncing back from a Hollywood sojourn and about to remarry a wealthy Texas oil millionaire (here, as in the 1999 revival, recast as a five-star general with presidential ambitions enacted with proper macho swagger by Terence Archie).
Following Shakespeare’s lead, Lilli ultimately subjugates her strong will to Fred just as Katherine gives in to her tamer, Petruchio. This, as well as the slapstick physical abuse the female lead endures, was perceived as problematic in age of #MeToo. So Amanda Green was called in to update the more objectionable sections of the book. She receives an “Additional Material” credit in the program. Now Lilli gives as good as she gets, smacking around Fred, and her final capitulation song is changed from an anthem of suppression to one of cooperation between the sexes. (“I Am Ashamed that Women are So Simple” is now “I Am Ashamed That People are So Simple.”) There are also jokes about gun control, if you can believe it.
Similar updates have occurred with revivals of Carousel and My Fair Lady. Does these changes subvert or spoil a classic? Green’s rewrites come across as a trifle forced, but they do nothing to lessen the pure ecstatic rush a Golden Age musical like Kiss Me, Kate provides.
After her stellar turns in The Pajama Game, South Pacific, and The King and I, O’Hara secures her crown as the queen of classic Broadway. She and Chase joust with zest and provide plenty of heat and spark.
Corbin Bleu and Stephanie Styles exhibit breathtaking dance skills as the supporting secondary players Bill Calhoun and Lois Lane (no relation to Superman’s best gal), particularly in the spectacularly staged number of flirtation, “Tom, Dick, or Harry,” where Will Burton and Rick Faugno also display praiseworthy hoofing. James T. Lane and Adrienne Walker are featured to advantage in “Another Openin’” and “Too Darned Hot” as are John Pankow and Lance Coadie Williams as a pair of comic gangsters brushing up their Shakespeare. Add David Rockwell’s colorful sets and Jeff Mahshie’s gorgeous costumes, both of which create a cartoonish 1940s version of Elizabethan Padua, and you have a delightful valentine to musical comedy’s past to enjoy in the present.
