Now marking its 35th anniversary, Opera North has dipped again into the endlessly inventive and deep well of American musical theater with its production of Kiss Me, Kate, the first show of the company’s season to open at the Lebanon Opera House.
Cole Porter’s 1948 musical, based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, has an exuberant, witty score with inventive, tongue-twisting lyrics, but the book, by Broadway and Hollywood veterans Bella and Sam Spewack, shows its age with ham-fisted jokes about women and their desirability, and how to bring them to heel — spanking and hitting not discouraged.
However, if you can ignore that aspect of the musical, what you’re left with is Porter’s real subject, which is show business.
Kiss Me, Kate has the classic structure of a show within a show: A theater troupe opens its musical version of The Taming of the Shrew in out-of-town previews prior to bringing it to New York. The divorced stars, Lilli and Fred, are cast as Kate and Petruchio, and the couple’s own contentious dynamic naturally finds its way into the skirmishes between Shakespeare’s leads.
The production skates as gracefully as it can over the dated elements of Kiss Me, Kate while playing up the sophistication of Porter’s razzle-dazzle word play, which reaches its zenith in such standards as Brush Up Your Shakespeare, Where Is the Life That Late I Led and I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua.
Forget the me-Tarzan, you-Jane love story between the two leads, Fred and Lilli, which is not exactly perfunctory but seems to go through the motions of what’s expected — a few love duets, some snappy repartee, a few misunderstandings and an unsurprising reunion. This isn’t an overarching, tender, Rodgers and Hammerstein love story, where lovers surmount significant barriers to be with one another.
The love duets Wunderbar and So In Love have beautiful, soaring melodies, but Porter seems more at home with such teasing, sexy, we-know-exactly-who-we-are songs as Why Can’t You Behave? or Always True to You in My Fashion.
What really gets Porter’s blood going is another opening, another show, the smell of the grease paint, the roar of the crowd, the drumming sound of tap shoes and lights flooding the stage. That’s the love affair, that’s what makes your heart thump and skip.
Which is precisely what this production delivers, particularly under the baton of Louis Burkot, who brings verve to the score, bringing out its jazzy elements and mid-century swing by highlighting the big-band sound of the brass and percussion. I’m always reminded during the Opera North season, as if one needs reminding, that there is no real substitute for live music, and live singing.
The troupe bringing us Kiss Me, Kate has some standouts, beginning with Naomi Louisa O’Connell as Lilli/Kate. O’Connell, born in Ireland of Irish and German parents, is in her first season with Opera North, but let us hope that it is not her last. She has a supple, bright voice and star quality, but perhaps more important, for this piece, she has comic chops, that extra something that makes you pay attention when she comes on stage.
So does Katherine McLaughlin in the dual role of Bianca, Kate’s younger sister, and Lois, the actor playing Bianca. It takes a smart actor to play the perennial role of the dim bulb, which Lois is. As her foil, Bill and Lucentio, Luke Hawkins has a terrific tap number in the second act, which deservedly earned him a round of applause Saturday evening. Choreographer Antoinette DePietropolo seamlessly incorporates the dance numbers into the whole, and they’re one of the real pleasures of the production.
Brothers and seasoned stage veterans Bob and Jim Walton are given the plum assignment of the two gangsters who get to sing one of the cleverest songs in the American musical repertoire, Brush Up Your Shakespeare, and they handle it with the wink and nod of practiced vaudevillians.
Jeffrey Grover, who plays Lilli’s fiance, a general who barks orders and wears dark sunglasses, a la Douglas MacArthur, is good for some laughs, although some of the Spewacks’ jokes about the well-known animosity between MacArthur and Harry Truman may be lost on younger audiences. Since the audience is there for the music, not the comic schtick, it doesn’t really matter.
George Dvorsky, in the roles of Fred and Petruchio, seems to come alive when he seesaws between the two men in the musical within the musical. Fred is, let’s face it, a rather wooden creature. But when Dvorsky plays off Fred against the ebullient Petruchio, he seems to relax into the dual roles with ease.
By the time he gets to Where Is the Life That Late I Led, in which Petruchio bemoans settling down when he’s enjoyed a merry-go-round of liaisons in Milano, Taormina and Pisa, Dvorsky has the bearing of a leading man.
Despite the creakiness of aspects of the book, Director Evan Pappas, who has worked at Opera North previously on Evita, Daughter of the Regiment and West Side Story, has the sense to just let it be, rather than trying to update it to the point where it becomes a completely different animal.
When Kiss Me, Kate revels in the antics of theater people, it has the pizzazz of a slightly naughty, amiable burlesque routine. As the saying goes, there’s no business like show business.
Remaining performances of
Correction
Soprano Naomi Louisa O’Connell made her first appearance with Opera North this summer in a lead role in Kiss Me, Kate. An earlier version of this review in one instance referred to an incorrect venue for her performance.