Kissing off Kiss Me, Kate!

Roundabout Theatre Company

Right after Corbin Bleu finished his ‘Bianca’ number in Kiss Me, Kate!, my companion leaned over and, laughing, said over the applause, ‘This play is so stupid!’ and together we laughed and applauded Mr. Bleu’s wonderful performance.

I hadn’t ever thought about it before because I have loved Kiss Me, Kate! since I was a boy, having discovered the movie on television, making me a lifelong fan. I suppose my friend was right: after all, who on earth would believe two gangsters dressed in Shakespearean drag, hanging out onstage to hold hostage an unwilling leading lady? And who would believe a chorus boy gambling away ten thousand dollars could get away with signing the signature of a famous actor on an IOU? And who would believe that a company of actors would use 10 minutes of their 15-minute intermission to sing about how hot it is, all the while working up a sweat by dancing, the very thing they’ve been doing all night for a living?

Anyone in 1948 going to see a musical comedy, that’s who.

Of course, there are implausibilities in this play – it’s a musical comedy, the place where all suspension of disbelief must occur. This play is no more or less believable than a play where Venus comes to life or a leprechaun comes in search of his stolen gold. If you compare Kiss Me, Kate! to other classic musical comedies it is quite tame. Naturally, there are flaws in the 70-year-old script – audiences in 1948 either didn’t notice the flaws or didn’t care about them … after all, it was a different time. Those flaws, though, become hyper-visible when a production of Kiss Me, Kate! isn’t good enough to hide them, which is what is happening at The Roundabout Theatre on Broadway right now. In fact, not only have they made the flaws in Kiss Me, Kate! visible, they have magnified them and put a spotlight on them with poor artistic choices.

I recognize the trend today in trying to update old plays, trying to make them accessible for today’s audiences, and the change in societal points of view and political correctness. I remember in 2003 when Flower Drum Song was revived on Broadway and a completely new story was created for the classic musical in an attempt to make it less racist. The revival did not fare very well, closing after 194 performances with lukewarm response from critics and audiences. The most recent revival of Carousel took all focus off of Julie Jordan and placed it solely on Billy Bigelow, and for the first time in a long time people really saw that Bigelow was a wife beater – and audiences were appalled. So when the creative team of Kiss Me, Kate! decided to do this play, they also decided to take out anything misogynistic that would offend women in the era of MeToo. The only thing is they also took out the basic premise of the play’s source material The Taming of the Shrew.

The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss Me, Kate! have parallel storylines: a husband who is trying to change his wife from a harridan to a sweetheart. Kate and Petruchio are the characters being played by Lilli and Fred in the play-within-a-play. Both male characters attempt to lord it over their wife, and though the wife fights back, in the end, the man gets his way. If you are interested in empowering women with your musical theatre, there is NO winning with Kiss Me, Kate!. If you want to do a play about strong women who aren’t pushed around, don’t do Kiss Me, Kate! and don’t do The Taming of the Shrew. In Shrew, Katharine comes around and tells the court that she is ashamed that women are so simple. In Kate, Lilli comes back to the show and Fred, with her closing number ‘I’m Ashamed that Women are So Simple’ (changed here, substituting the word ‘Women’ for the word ‘People’). In both instances, the woman succumbs to the man. If you don’t want to see the woman succumb to the man, then do The Color Purple. Do The King and I. Do Waitress. If, however, you are concerned about sending a powerful message to the women in your audience about strong, empowered women, Kiss Me, Kate! is working against you.

Still, The Roundabout wanted to do Kiss Me, Kate! so they brought in Amanda Green to re-do the Spewack’s book and all she did was make the play incohesive. The most glaring incongruity is when they changed the famous spanking scene into a brawl between Lilli and Fred, where she kicks him in the ass repeatedly, while he lays not one hand on her, the result being a completely unconvincing second act where Lilli complains of not being able to sit down, even though the worst that was done to her is that Fred picked her up and held her over his shoulders. I’m all for suspension of disbelief but you have to give people something with which to work. This entire play is a catfight without claws.

If you are going to do Kiss Me, Kate!, you simply have to do it. Put a little faith in your audience, don’t pander to them, tell them this is a play set in 1948, look and see what it was like, and appreciate how far we’ve come. Give them a museum piece. When you monkey around with the authors’ original intent you take the teeth out of the play and leave your audience with a great score that they can listen to at home on their Echo Dot. The only thing left to give them is something visual to look at.

Well, that they did.

Roundabout Theatre Company

Kiss Me, Kate! is gorgeous. With David Rockwell’s sets, Jeff Mahshie’s costumes and Donald Holder’s lighting the play is a feast for the eyes. These things simply serve as a setting for the jewel: some of the prettiest actors you’re likely to find on a stage anywhere, doing astonishingly good work. The dance corps enters during the very first number and it is hard to know where to look. They are so well dressed and well coiffed (by David Brian Brown) but it’s more than how they look, it’s the way they present themselves and hit their marks, the confident way each of them owns the stage and the role they are playing. It is a joy to watch them, indeed a thrill, especially when what is happening on the stage is some of the breathtaking acts of terpsichore they create. My favorite moments in the play were these ensemble dance pieces, even though at times choreographer Warren Carlyle seems to be testing the dancers by giving them entirely too much busy movement to fit into the 8 bars they are given to dance. The Act Two opener ‘Too Darn Hot’ is as good as any ensemble dance number I’ve seen in 39 years of Broadway theatre, with James T. Lane leading the troupe with sleek, sophisticated finesse.

It was positively electrifying, but then so were two other dance numbers that blew my mind – the rather dirty ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ (made deliberately more dirty by Mr. Carlyle’s choreographic overemphasis of the word ‘Dick’) and the oft-forgotten ‘Bianca’, made beautiful by Mr. Bleu’s brilliance. Anyone who saw Bleu’s star turn in Holiday Inn knows that on Broadway in a pair of dance shoes is where Corbin Bleu belongs, so the ‘Bianca’ number is designed to excite the devotees but it also serves to bring new fans to the fold. However, as spectacular as Bleu is, in any situation, he has some real competition from Will Burton and Rick Faugno in the ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ number. All three men are mad sexy with wildly different dance skills, all put to the test by their solos in the innuendo-laden number, with Mr. Faugno emerging as the hoofer to watch. The night that I saw the show the audience reacted with verbal validation for the Broadway veteran’s smooth and silky solo, truly a sight to behold, making this my favorite number in the show, even if it was not the favorite for the rest of the audience. No, their favorite was the ever popular ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’.

I have a feeling, somewhere in my daydreaming heart, that Cole Porter wrote Kiss Me, Kate! just so he would have a place to show off the song ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’. It is the song the audiences go to see Kiss Me, Kate! for, and the night I was there you could feel the excitement as the anticipation overtook the people who knew it was time for this eleven o’clock novelty number, executed to schmacty Vaudevillian perfection by Tom McGowan and John Pankow, expertly cast as the Statler and Waldorf of Kiss Me, Kate!. This was a promise fulfilled that left the theatergoers as joyful as the Corbin Bleu numbers left me.

As for the rest of the principal cast in Kiss Me, Kate!, I wish that they fared as well as Corbin Bleu but I am sad to say that, for me, they did not.

Stephanie Styles is a quintuple threat. Not only can the Broadway freshman act, sing, and dance, she is movie star pretty and she has real star quality when she is onstage. Unfortunately, at some point, the decision was made for her to play Lois Lane as a gold digging bimbo with a Betty Boop accent. While previous versions I have seen of Kiss Me, Kate! present the role with some depth and character, this Lois Lane is completely vapid, devoid of any discernible thought processes or scruples, with that cartoon character voice to match. Where was the focus on empowering women when this decision was made? It leaves us with a once memorable character being reduced to one dimension and one note with no chance of understanding what she is saying, thanks to the high pitched squeak emitting from her mouth.

I’ve greatly enjoyed Will Chase in the past, particularly in Something Rotten, The Story of My Life and High Fidelity, but I found him completely out of his element as Fred Graham and Petruchio. I’m not sure if he is just so contemporary that he wasn’t able to fit into the box provided by a period piece or if he simply lacks the grandiosity to embody either of the two roles he is playing in this show. While he is certainly handsome and has some big notes, he is almost completely lacking in the over-the-top pomposity needed to bring Fred Graham to the stage. When he was onstage I found myself jockeying back and forth between being sorry for him or being bored with him, a true shame, because he is clearly a very talented man – one who simply said yes when somebody offered him a job for which he is unhappily wrong.

Roundabout Theatre Company

And now we come to the subject of the magnificent Kelli O’Hara. I believe that everyone has a Kelli O’Hara moment. Mine was The Bridges of Madison County, which I saw five times and from which I still have never recovered. I have seen almost every one of her Broadway shows and some of her appearances at The Metropolitan Opera. It can be said that I am a fan, in fact, it can be said that I am besotted by Kelli O’Hara. I love her and I always will. But asking Kelli O’Hara to play Lilli Vanessi is like asking Audrey Hepburn to play Margo Channing. At one point Fred shouts that Lilli has the worst temper in show business. I never, not once, saw any temperament out of Lilli. I saw some righteous indignation by a woman who was being underappreciated and treated badly. I saw some defiance from a woman who deserved more than she was getting. Not one shred of temper did I see, even when she diatribed over and over about the spanking she had been given by her tyrannical ex-husband, a spanking that must have happened offstage, the same place where her tantrums occur. No temper. All is not lost, though, because no matter what mistaken path director Scott Ellis took Kelli O’Hara on when working on this piece with her, just being in a room when Kelli O’Hara sings is worth the price of a ticket. Center stage, the Tony Award recipient stands, as beautiful a woman as a person is likely ever to see, dressed in opulent costumes, acting chops on full display, singing ‘So In Love’ and it is impossible to keep a grip on reality because this is the moment that we all go to the theatre to see. This is musical theatre Nirvana and it is in this moment when you forget that Kiss Me, Kate! is a dinosaur, an outdated, flawed play that some people call stupid. I won’t call it stupid because Kiss Me, Kate! and I have a longstanding relationship and I am not ready to break up with it over a misplaced need for modern-day sensibilities in a seventy-year-old play.

I like going to the theatre and I like going to the museum.

Sometimes it is possible to do both things from the same seat in the eleventh row.

Kiss Me, Kate! runs about 2 hours 30 minutes with one 15-minute intermission. The show’s run has been extended through June 30, 2019.

Roundabout Theatre Company

 
Playing at Studio 54 • 254 West 54th Street, NY 10019

 
Check our Ticketmaster link for ticket availability.