Summary 
Brilliant 1930s cartoon version of the problematic comedy is cleverly updated to gangster-laden pre-war New York City and is filled with human skyscrapers, mechanical chickens, a tiny ocean cruiser, even a manic go-cart car chase. Superbly directed and with expert comic performances, the production plays like The Sting, with the supposedly tamed Kate joining an older Petruchio in a surprise scam of rich new husbands. Memorable entertainment, colorful and charming, that remains true to a difficult text.
Design
Directed by Richard Rose. Set and lights by Graeme Thomson. Costumes by Charlotte Dean. Compositions by Louis Apllebaum. Sound by Jeff Riches.
Cast
Jonathon Crombie (Lucentio), Keith Dinicol (Tranio), John Gilbert (Baptista), Richard Curnock (Gremio), Lucy Peacock (Katherina), Benedict Campbell (Hortensio), Cynthia Dale (Bianca), Peter Donaldson (Petruchio), Stephen Ouimette (Grumio), Shawn Wright (Curtis), Bernard Hopkins (Pedant).
Analysis
Richard Rose's inventive take on The Taming of the Shrew at the Stratford Festival of Canada's expansive Festival Theatre is a hugely entertaining farce with Shakespeare reset to 1930s New York City gangster-lands. Rose presents the problematic battle of the sexes as a cartoonish spin on pre-war Hollywood mobster sagas and approaches the titular taming - and the majority of the play - with the tongue-in-cheek ingenuity and exuberance of The Sting. Eliminating the Christopher Sly induction shortens the production, which is set in "New Padua," an inner-city New York neighborhood that bristles with immigrants and gangsters and street policemen in a colorful parody of Little Italy. In a charming image, actors dressed and lit like towering skyscrapers stand tall within billowing stage fog as Lucentio and Tranio emigrate into the harbor aboard a tiny SS Antonio ocean ship.
The Baptista home in Rose's Taming of the Shrew is almost decadently wealthy, and Rose makes astute observations about American materialism with the greed of the money-hungry gangsters and the fashionable excess of Baptista and his beautiful daughters. Their household plays like a screwball romantic comedy from the 1930s, the white-bearded Baptista strutting in a three-piece black business power suit, the young Bianca sexy and kittenish in a dress with fishnet stockings, and Lucy Peacock's stomping angry Katarina in form-fitting black pants and a flaming-red silk blouse. The sisterly conflict is cartoon violence, with Peacock's Kate beating a pajama-clad Bianca with her own teddy bear before Baptista can intervene.
Peter Donaldson's laconic Petruchio, an older and wiser tamer with a hangdog expression and salt-and-pepper hair and beard, arrives to complicate matters with a scattering of bizarre - but still quite amusing - cackling mechanical chickens in feather-strewn wicker cages. After confidently accepting the challenge to woo and wed the socially superior Katarina, Donaldson's Petruchio finds his initial offer - featuring a decided lack of financial security - rejected by Baptista, who smashes a basket of eggs over Petruchio's head. The dour Donaldson's Petruchio, clearly out of his social class as indicated by his rumpled sack-cloth suit, tangle of thinning white hair and ungentlemanly ways, is also considerably older and more tired-looking than Peacock's fiery and ready-for-fisticuffs Katherina. He seems no match for Kate, especially after his fast-paced verbal wars with Grumio result not in a servant being put in his place but a broad-shouldered New York beat policeman with a nightstick being summoned. But tame Kate he does, handcuffing himself to her and relaxing in a wheeled desk office chair with a bemused smile on his face as she struggles and thrashes, flailing him in rolling circles about the stage in the comfort of the chair.
Rose's directorial hand is masterful, casting an array of colorful characters into a manic mix of delightful design elements and incidental music, crafting an entertainment that remains true to the spirit of the original text. The cast, led by Donaldson's hangdog Petruchio and Peacock's whip-crack Kate, never goes too far or stretches a moment too long - to the credit of Rose - even September-deep in a long summer run. Donaldson's Petruchio continues to bumble along out of his element, wearing an absurdly out of place western cowboy home-on-the-range costume to his own wedding. So outlandish and offensive are Petruchio's sartorial choices that an unnamed male guest succumbs to a chest-grabbing heart-attack...which of course creates an opportunity for Hortensio to step in and woo the grieving widow and add another familiar couple to the multiple-wedding celebratory conclusion. Donaldson's Petruchio expertly removes Kate from her element as part of his taming process - the couple "fly" back to the old country within an Alitalia jet airliner with a row of passengers jostling in their tiny seats, attended by a leggy stewardess - and the resplendent Katarina gleams among the rag-clad and threadbare servants scuttling about Petruchio's ramshackle Verona home.
Humorous touches and rich attention to detail - right down to the tough-guy accents and gum-chewing dames - define the breakneck-paced production, like the tiny little onstage go-carts that serve as brightly colored 1930s automobiles - one of them a long black limousine - in a frantic cartoon-style car chase scene, the participants peddling furiously, their knees pumping high in the air. Other flourishes flash past at a frenzied pace - Luciento swilling from a bottle of Aqua Velva; Biondello concealed like Oscar the Grouch within a street garbage can to mutter his sardonic commentary; Grumio warning the Pedant to "play along" in a gravelly rasp much like Marlon Brando's Don Corleone in The Godfather - but Rose never lets his tightly paced production veer out of control, even when the white skirt of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike blows up around her from a sewer grate during the 4.3 tailor scene.
The extremely satisfying conclusion - Rose's twist rising quite organically from the modernization of the production - comes as the increasingly crafty Kate is revealed to be involved with the sly Petruchio in a devious money-grabbing scheme that scams the other proud new husbands. Jonathan Crombie's Lucentio reveals himself as noxiously willing to humiliate the pixie-cute Bianca for a chance at winning some cash in a less-than-friendly wager, and the sneaky snot Hortensio furtively roots through his wife's unattended purse in an effort to find some money to offer in the same wager. Peacock's Kate, however, revels in the climax of the get-rich-quick-scheme, her long 5.2 observation on husbands and wives and marriage a delicious rubbing-their-nose-in-it as she and Petruchio then embrace and fall backward upon their wedding night bed with wads of flying cash scattering and swirling around them. And in a typical Rose touch, the fluttering green bills feature the likeness not of an American president but that of Richard Monette, the artistic director of the Stratford Festival of Canada. An expertly mounted and cleverly creative production.