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Opera North’s revival of Cole Porter’s 1948 meta-musical take on ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ has the pleasing quality of stumbling across an old film one afternoon and thoroughly enjoying it, for all its obvious datedness.
‘Kiss Me, Kate’ follows the backstage adventures of a fractious company of actors, trapped in a ropey stage musical version of Shakespeare’s problematic comedy. Egotistical male lead and director Fred (Dutch baritone Quirijn de Lang, probably a touch too likeable) has got himself into a sticky love triangle. He’s pursuing Lois, the young actress playing Bianca (Zoë Rainey, the night’s funniest turn). But a billet-doux intended for Lois goes astray and is sent to Fred’s old flame and current leading lady Lilli (Stephanie Corley). The results are not pretty, especially when Lois’s boyfriend arranges to have some dimwit gangsters shake Fred down.
Jo Davies and Ed Goggin’s revival doesn’t really attempt to update the show, which has songs and score by Porter and the book by Samuel and Bella Spewack. Indeed, quite the opposite. With Porter’s lavish music, Colin Richmond’s lavish costumes and the lavish vocal talents of Opera North, it aims for an immaculately old-fashioned, golden-age-of-Hollywood vibe. And it basically succeeds.
Still, the years have not been totally kind and few of the jokes land; the idea of what ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ is trying to do is often funnier than the terminally gentle execution. Michael Frayn’s ‘Noises Off’ or even West End sleeper smash ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ have done this sort of humour a lot better. With slightly more energetic direction and physical comedy, ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ might have been overhauled to come up to their standard, but it really hasn’t. And its tame interactions with Shakespeare’s gaslighting comedy feel feeble in the #MeToo era. (It doesn’t help that the sort of twee, OTT style of Shakespearean performance it’s sending up has virtually dropped out of living memory.)
One of the great things about golden age musicals was that if the composer had a good song, they’d get it in regardless of whether it strictly had any bearing on the plot. Here the show’s most famous and best number, ‘Too Darn Hot’, isn’t so much crowbarred in as inexplicably marched on at gunpoint. But it’s utterly glorious, a whirl of wonderful melody and percussive, tap-led choreography with the sort of abandon that’s missing elsewhere.
This production is an agreeable and loving restoration; but really, ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ could do with something closer to reinvention.