Summary 
Colorful entertainment with a memorable Cole Porter score and a talented trio of stars - Petruchio, Katarina, and Bianca - as a post-war theatre company struggles to present The Taming of the Shrew. The 1948 Broadway musical is a comical romance with jealous lovers, backstage shenanigans, and a couple of sardonic hit- men, less a behind-the-scenes musical comedy than a full blown period-piece farce.
Design
Directed by John Doyle. Choreographed by Tracey Flye. Musical direction by Franklin Brasz. Designed by David Farley. Sound by Peter McBoyle. Fights by Daniel Levinson.
Cast
Rudy Webb (Pops), Jaz Sealey (Stage Electrician), Jordan Bell (Boy), Kyle Golemba (Stage Carpenter), Douglas E. Sermonia (Harry Trevor), Vince Staltari (Ralph), Chillina Kennedy (Lois Lane), Mike Jackson (Bill Calhoun), Monique Lund (Lilli Vanessi), Juan Chioran (Fred Graham), Kristian Truelsen (Harrison Howell), Steve Ross (First Man), Cliff Saunders (Second Man).
Analysis
John Doyle's production of the 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival is a colorful comedy with a slew of catchy Cole Porter songs. The play is set in downtown Baltimore, Doyle seeking less a variation on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew than a humorous glimpse at backstage and onstage chaos just after the Second World War. Kiss Me, Kate begins amid urban street noise as a theatrical company prepares - "Another Op'nin', Another Show" - for their opening night performance. Crews hustle about, working on light rigging and wardrobes, the stage manager harried and frantic as a cleaning crewman sweeps around him. The show's stars are Lilli Vanessi, a strutting diva in a purple dress, her coat carefully thrown over her shoulders with chic carelessness, and Fred Graham, a self-absorbed artistic snob - "we're gonna make a hell of a show out of The Shrew" - in a suit and stylish scarf. The two stars are just one year divorced - Lilli plays Kate, and Fred directs and plays Petruchio - and she dates a military officer while he is embroiled in a May-December romance with Lois Lane, his production's daft but gorgeous young Bianca.
Doyle effectively establishes the conflict between Lilli and Fred as central to the production, the two singing "Wunderbar" in an unwilling duet, trading sections of the song as well as sniping dialogue - his "it could have been your temper" versus her "it could have been your ego" - as they sit beside each other at their backstage dressing tables to ready for opening night, she applying makeup and he a fake mustache and beard. Monique Lund and Juan Chioran prove a dynamic pair of lead performers, both well-polished with a command of the stage as well as strong singing voices, and Chorian's lead in a world premiere musical of Dracula still resonates from back in 1999. The two tease each other mercilessly, she playing up a telephone call from her boyfriend ("darling!") in her pink and red dress with high heels and a big red bow in her hair that looks like devil's horns, and he sending a bouquet of flowers to Lois while absurdly attired in his H.R. Pufnstuf-on-acid Petruchio costume, a poofy and puffy green-and-yellow jerkin with hat and boots. The flowers are of course delivered wrongly to Lund's Lilli, and Chioran's Fred plays along - they sing "So in Love" - as even more complications develop: Lois's other boyfriend has signed a gambling debt as Chioran's Fred Graham, and a pair of comically wisecracking gangsters have come backstage to collect from the wrong man.
Doyle layers the romantic comedy over the titular taming of Kate in an entertaining on-stage disaster. Once Lund's Kate reads the gift card and realizes the flowers from Fred were intended for the vacuous Lois, she wages an audible screaming fight backstage during the performance that spills onto the set as her temper explodes in shrewish proportions. While Fred's Petruchio struggles gallantly to perform and sing "Were Thine That Special Face," Lilli's Kate rages, punching him in the stomach, jumping up and down, and beckoning him into a wrestling match with wiggling fingers. She puts him in a choke hold and knocks him over, then makes silly faces at him - bulging eyes, a wagging tongue - as he tries to recite dialogue, until he must finally lift her bodily, her skirt flying up, to plop her down on his knee for a spanking. Once backstage, the lively argument continues, a la Noises Off, the whole cast shifting from the performance onstage to the fireworks beyond as they sing "Cantiamo D'Amore" but follow the Fred and Lilli firestorm.
The best moments of the production, quite appropriate for any take on The Taming of the Shrew, are the verbal fireworks between Kate and Petruchio and between Lilli and Fred, indicative of extreme underlying passion as well as high strung intellect, and Lund and Chioran play the combative roles with wonderful ease. When Fred boasts of his Hamlet production in Dublin, she denigrates him - "you got paid in potatoes...mashed" - and their eavesdropping fellow cast-members scatter as the battle shifts to the dressing room - Lilli: "I can't sit down!" - and Fred further complicates matters by sending the mobster goons after Lilli for their payoff. The two intimidators speak in cartoonish east coast mob accents, laughing at Fred's claim that he does not recall an IOU - "the doctors call it 'magnesia'" - and threatening to comply when a fellow actor tells the director to "break a leg." Dispatched like dogs to follow Lilli, they take out their pistols and stand on either side of her, even joining her onstage to clear a path for her - "the show must go on!" - their handguns concealed in their pockets. As Fred sings "Kiss Me, Kate" - the whole cast urges Lilli, "kiss him, Kate; kiss him, Kate" - and Petruchio fails to truly tame his shrew - "you swine!" - as both shows pause for interval.
A secondary romance between Lois and Bill Calhoun, who plays Bianca suitor Lucentio in the onstage fiasco, features younger performers and far more sexual sizzle, as well as more flesh. Chillina Kennedy, a diminutive with a big singing voice and an even bigger personality, dallies with Fred - "didst thou call me, honey?" - but pursues the equally dallying Bill. Kennedy's perky Lois strips down to her underwear, singing "Why Can't You Behave" to him as he disrobes as well. The steamy situation becomes silly as they begin donning their show costumes, Bill multi-colored tights, puffy pants and multi-colored Renaissance clown jerkin, and Lois a pretty red-and-pink Bianca dress. Doyle's second half begins in backstage languor within an eastern seaboard heat wave, Kennedy's lithe Lois leading the cast through "Too Darn Hot" in various stages of undress, the dancing sexy if perhaps a tad gratuitous. Lois and Bill reprise "Why Can't You Behave" later, this time Bill singing to Lois, and her catty song-response is the memorable "Always True to You in My Fashion." Kennedy's Lois just about steals the show, a confident and funny young actress with excellent song-and-dance skills - she stars in the title role of the Festival's in-repertory Evita - and her clever little tune ("if a Gable boat means a sable coat, anchors aweigh!") is sung as the quarreling lovers are eavesdropped upon by their nosy fellow cast members. Kennedy's Lois spins Bill around in a laundry basket, and he in turn spins her on a wardrobe cart before they finally kiss and make up.
Doyle may have focused more on his sexy young co-stars or he might have chosen to show a serious slice-of-life via backstage at a big city theatre company post-World War II, but with this production he decidedly aims more for a Noises Off-style behind-the-scenes farce. With the cast in their awful colorful costumes like a debauched design for Beauty and the Beast - performers are overdressed as a golden fountain, as tables, even as vine-laden lattices with clinging roses next to Kate in a balcony window - they look pained and more than a little embarrassed, one actress shouting at another, "you look like an Easter egg!" as they sing an energetic "We Open in Venice." Kennedy's Bianca speaks of her "faddah" Baptista, and when wooed by Lucentio, Hortensio, and Gremio - "marry me, marry me, marry me" - she flees up an onstage ladder singing about "Tom, Dick or Harry," descending to laugh in an aside to the audience: "I said Dick!" The cast deliver their Shakespearean lines in over-the-top East Coast accents and clumsy meter, proving less than inept in performance. A big swing and a punch to the face results in a sound effect but no reaction from Bill's Lucentio, a prop doorway is lugged onstage backward, and a tavern girl refuses to let go of her rubber-foam beer glass prop. Chioran's Fred, a star but now an aging veteran, struggles to "leap" onto a tavern table while singing, "I've Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua," and instead crawls slowly up, and instead of a triumphant jump back down, he gingerly descends and strikes a manly pose. Later he huffs to blow out obviously electric candles, and his song "Where Is the Life That I Led?" speaks of his character in both the play and the play-within-the-play: "whatta ya do at a quarter to two, with only a shrew to kiss?" Lilli's Kate responds in kind, imbuing her show stopper - "I Hate Men!" - with venom, crawling down the ladder like a crab to glare at a man in the first row. During the song, she chews the scenery, blowing raspberries and making rude gestures, even punching a prop man and knocking him to the ground.
The appearance of Lilli's McCarthur-like military officer boyfriend - "I shall return!" - lends further complications to the twin romantic entanglements - he had apparently had a wartime dalliance with young Lois - as well as an opportunity for some easy Noel Coward jokes. General Howell's song - "From This Moment On" - is delivered with his nearby soldiers drawing and aiming their side arms, but the best of the supporting roles are the two out-of-place mobsters: "guns don't kill people...we do." They stumble self-consciously around the stage as Truth and Beauty, gradually fitting in and becoming part of the acting ensemble. They slowly get the hang of both the stage and Shakespeare - one cries, "get you hence, go to, go to" and the other replies, "come too, come too" - and after the show they are loathe to turn in their costumes: "clothes doth proclaim the man." Their duet "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" is the finest moment in Doyle's production, clever and funny and expertly staged. The mobsters utilize their great big-city tough guy accents, but sing like angels, dancing and swaying back and forth, their hats over their hearts as they are joined by almost the entire cast.
The mob's moratorium on collecting gambling debts provides a rather clumsy trigger for the happy-ending conclusion, then Fred dispatches Howell - "he's worse than me, he's a bad actor" - as Lilli again leaves him: "you walked out on me, once." Chioran's Fred sings a plaintive reprise of "So in Love" in hat and overcoat, his costume discarded and the show over, before singing "I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple." Lund's Lilli returns, all but in character as the shrewish Kate - "what is your will, sir?" - reuniting with her soon-to-be ex-ex-husband in a reprise of "Kiss Me, Kate." Doyle's production concludes happily with both couples united, and with its swinging Cole Porter score, his Kiss Me, Kate proves a colorful entertainment, more than only incidentally Shakespearean.