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by Cole Porter, directed by John Doyle

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

June 8-October 30, 2010

“Wunderbar”

With the right director at the helm, the Stratford Festival can still works wonders.  That is the case with its new production of Cole Porter’s classic 1948 musical “Kiss Me, Kate”.  The director is John Doyle, most famous, perhaps, for his radical re-imagining of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” in which the singers playing instruments also became the orchestra.  His “Kiss Me, Kate” is not so radical but it glows with such intelligence it makes shines like new.

Doyle’s “Sweeney Todd” deconstructed the musical so that its component were always visible to the audience.  In “Kiss Me, Kate”, which constantly shifts between actions backstage and onstage, that kind of deconstruction is already built in.  Fred Graham is trying out a musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” in Baltimore starring himself as Petruchio and his ex-wife, Lilli Vanessi as Katherine the Shrew.  Meanwhile, he has been flirting with former nightclub chorus girl Lois Lane, whose boyfriend Bill has loss $10,000  gambling and signed an IOU with Fred’s name.  While the show is playing, two gangsters become involved onstage as they try to enforce payment from Fred.  The conceit of Porter’s musical is that we form the audience when musical within the musical is onstage but that we watch the backstage actions through the invisible fourth wall.

Doyle pays attention to details other directors of this musical often overlook.  The first song of the onstage players states, “A troupe of strolling players are we”.  Directors who make this musical within a musical an elaborate production ignore the basic fact that the stage show is put on in makeshift fashion by itinerant actors.  Doyle and his ingenious designer David Farley, however, never let us forget this point by using simple painted backdrops and having members of the cast also play parts of the set, such as men dressed in flower-covered trellises who hold the ladder that Kate uses to climb to her upstairs window.  

Doyle and Farley have nudged time of the setting up slightly from 1948 when Porter’s musical opened on Broadway to about 1953 when it was first made into a movie by George Sidney.  Farley has chosen a palette of bright yellows, greens, blues and pinks very much like those of Fiesta dinnerware whose height of popularity was in 1948.  He combines eye-popping colour-combinations familiar from early colour movies like the Sidney film with the fantastical shapes of a 1950 Disney cartoon like “Cinderella”.  The results are whimsical and hilarious 1950s interpretations of Renaissance costume.  The merchants who visit Katherine already have their wares displayed on the “shelf” projecting from the waist of their cartwheel farthingales.

To emphasize the “show” in show, Doyle often has the cast changing into costume or into street clothes during songs, thus pointing out that the street clothes onstage are, of course, also costumes.  He provides an audience from members of the backstage crew for songs that are usually performed alone.  During the musical within the musical, Doyle constantly breaks the fourth wall by having the actors interact with the audience.  The most notable instance of this is in the big number he and choreographer Tracey Flye create for “Tom, Dick, or Harry”.  Chilina Kennedy as Bianca goes out into the auditorium to watch Kyle Golemba, Jaz Sealey and Mike Jackson try to impress her with their dancing as Gremio, Hortensio and Lucentio, but she not only comments on her own lines (“I just said, “dick.”) but introduces each of her stage suitors by their real names and ad libs comments about what the actors are like in real life.  The fourth wall has never been shattered in so uproarious a fashion and the number became a true show-stopper due to the massive, prolonged ovation it received. 

The show has a very strong cast.  Juan Chioran and Monique Lund are ideal as Fred and Lilli.  Their sniping at each other has the quality of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick--they profess to detest the other so much that you are not surprised that the opposite is true.  As Petruchio, Chioran is very funny at showing how his age doesn’t allow him to follow through on the athletic moves of his own blocking.  Lund is also a fine physical comedian as when as Kate she struggles with her farthingale in climbing down a ladder.  Both capture the glamour, pretense and secret knowledge of past failure that make these characters so rich.

The complementary couple is Bill Calhoun played by Mike Jackson and Lois Lane played by Chilina Kennedy.  Jackson is a good performer but he simply can’t match the charisma and energy of Kennedy.  Anyone who saw Kennedy as the dumb blonde in “The President” at the Shaw Festival in 2008, will know how deliriously funny she can’t be.  Well, here she is a dumb brunette and is just as funny.  Kennedy and Jackson’s attempts at classical acting as Bianca and Lucentio in thick New Joisey accents would be more amusing if one hadn’t seen Richard Rose’s dreadful New Jersey dialect “Shrew” at Stratford in 1997.  Kennedy not only knocks us out with “Tom, Dick or Harry” but with her other big Numbers “Why Can’t You Behave?” and “Always True to You in My Fashion”.

Steve Ross and Cliff Saunders are great as the two gangsters--Ross big and round, Saunders short and thin.  They get laughs from the pair’s every attempt at euphemistic circumlocutions euphemism for gruesome deeds.  Both detail step by step how the two get hooked into the magic of show business.  Their big number, the famous “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”, gains from the restraint Tracey Flye has used in her choreography.  The small synchronized movements gets far more of a laugh than big gestures would while emphasizes the wit of Porter’s endlessly inventive lyrics. 

Kristian Truelsen is appropriately officious as General Harrison Howell, the man Lilli thinks she wants to marry, but who reveals that his views of women and wifely duty are no different from Petruchio’s.  Doyle gives him lines to make a dig at current US activists who indulge in their right to display firearms openly.  More surprising, Doyle assigns him the song “From This Moment On” from Porter’s 1950 musical “Out of This World” that was used in the 1953 film for a different purpose.  Truelson carries it off but it is odd to have such a great song sung by such an off-putting character.

The only number in the show that is not all it should be is the Act 2 opener “Too Darn Hot”.  Singer Josh Young is too darn careful in his singing and movements for a song that demands a sly attitude and loads of lascivious energy.  Flye’s choreography is also not as inventive here as it should be.              

Doyle begins the show quietly with individual members of the backstage crew gathering onstage before the overture contemplating “Another Op’nin’, Another Show”.  He ends the show quietly too with Jordan Bell as a star-stuck boy reprising the song to himself--a fine way to wind down the action and volume after all the raucousness of the show. 

The primary flaw with Doyle’s direction is that it is too forward-facing.  He directs the action as if it were still on a proscenium stage that happens to be missing its side walls--a common mistake for first-time directors on the Festival stage.  For the best view you will want to sit in the sections on either side of the centre aisle.  Other than this, with great performances from Chioran, Lund and Kennedy, with direction as smart as it fun and with one of the best scores of any musical, Stratford’s “Kiss Me, Kate” is one summer musical you won’t want to miss.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Juan Chioran and Monique Lund. ©David Hou.