Cole Porter’s songs were famous for their polished wit, sophistication and adult innuendo. His heyday was the 1920’s and 1930’s. He belonged to an era when songs were introduced for themselves rather than for the advancement of the plot or characterisation.
His career had been in decline since the arrival of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Comedy writers Sam and Bella Spewack had to bully him into writing the lyrics and music for Kiss Me Kate. He thought a musical based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew too esoteric and highbrow for the commercial Broadway stage.
Today, Kiss Me Kate is generally considered Cole Porter’s masterpiece and was the first show in which he made a real effort to integrate the songs and the story. Premiered in 1949 he won a Tony award for best musical. The show has often been revived since then. The present production is directed by Bartlettt Sher and choreographed by Anthony Van Laast.
The action is set on-stage and back-stage during a performance of a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. The situation of the wisecracking and quarrelling actors playing the wisecracking and quarrelling Kate and Petruchio was based on the off-stage quarrelling of the famous Broadway husband and wife team, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.
The dove-tailing of the two stories is neat and audiences, who do not know The Taming of the Shrew, may well be surprised to learn just how much of Shakespeare’s original dialogue has been retained. Cole Porter’s lyric for Kate’s final song lifts Shakespeare’s degrading, subservient soliloquy almost word for word.
The lead roles are played older than usual by Adrian Dunbar and Stephanie J. Block. Dunbar, best known for his performance on television in Line of Duty, is making his musical theatre debut and is an unexpected choice, lacking the bravura Porter’s songs and Shakespeare’s dialogue need. Block, the American Boadway musical star, a Tony award winner, has the requisite show-biz stamina and is much more at ease and confidently. delivers one of the show’s high spots, belting out I Hate Men.
Other high spots include Jack Butterworth leading the company in Too Darn Hot, the dance number which opens the second act, and Georgina Onuorah singing Always True To You in My Fashion with brio.
Hammed Animashaun and Nigel Lindsay are the pinstriped, Runyonesque gangsters who sing the vaudeville number, Brush Up Your Shakespeare. Its numerous automatic reprises get the biggest laughter and applause. The song is repeated by the whole company in the curtain call.
The weakness of Sher’s production is that it takes far too long to get started and that the Shakespeare scenes are poorly acted and uninventively directed. It is also disappointing, that having cast Charlie Stemp, he should have been given so little to do.
An interesting phenomenon is that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew remains extremely popular despite the fact that it can so easily offend and outrage modern audiences.
It is perhaps necessary, in these woke times, to point out that Kiss Me Kate is not Shakespeare, it is just a silly screwball farce, a musical, which nobody takes seriously and needs no apology, however ironically expressed by the actors on stage. The physical and verbal abuse is slapstick comedy and nothing else.
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