Music and Lyrics: Cole Porter
Book: Sam and Bella Spewack
Director: Bartlett Sher
Cole Porter’s 1948 Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate, the first-ever recipient of a Tony Award for Best Musical, was his first attempt at the then-new form of the book musical, where the songs are tightly integrated into the heavily-plotted story.
The story in question is of an actor-producer-director, Fred Graham (Adrian Dunbar), who has hired his ex-wife, Stephanie J. Block’s Lilli Vanessi, to play Katharine to his Petruchio in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew (coincidentally, The Globe’s new version opened on the same night as the Barbican musical). The tempestuous onstage relationship boils over into their backstage lives, where a misunderstanding causes Lilli to believe Fred may be trying to win her back; further confusion causes two hitmen (Nigel Lindsay and Hammed Animashaun) to pursue Fred for a gambling debt accrued by the show’s juvenile lead, Bill (Charlie Stemp).
Sam and Bella Spewack’s book is great fun despite plot strands such as Bill’s gambling being dropped as soon as possible. But Act I spends a lot of time setting up both the backstage shenanigans and the onstage Shakespearean drama, resulting in everything feeling a little bit flat.
Central to this is a lack of passion between Fred and Lilli. Dunbar has a great ability to mine lines for comedy, and his singing voice is decent rather than outstanding, but his scenes with Block never really smoulder in the way that suggests there is any semblance of passion underneath the couple’s bickering. Block, meanwhile, has a phenomenal voice (especially noticeable in Act I’s So in Love) and is able to embody the spirit of the great leading ladies of the era.
Despite opening the show with the bustling ensemble number Another Op’nin’, Another Show, the first act has little to offer in the way of Porter standards. While that does at least give room for Animashaun and Lindsay’s comedy hoodlums to make their presence felt, it is not until Act II that everything slots into place for a collection of the show’s – and musical theatre’s – best-known and beloved numbers to get an outing.
The second act kicks off with the musical’s centrepiece, Too Darn Hot, where the cast and crew really get to demonstrate Anthony Van Laast’s blistering choreography. Jack Butterworth, otherwise limited to a small role as Fred’s assistant, gets the chance to lead a phenomenal routine with such frenetic charisma that he overshadows even Stemp, whose aptitude for the material nevertheless shines through in a thankless role that never quite utilises his talents as a leading man.
The show never quite lives up to that sequence again, although Georgina Onuorah gives a warm, sultry and wry spin to Always True to You in My Fashion. Both musically and comedically, the highly camp Brush Up Your Shakespeare provides Lindsay and Animashaun the opportunity to grapple with Porter’s unapologetically corny rhymes (“Just declaim a few lines from Othella/And they’ll think you’re a hell of a fella”), a number that harks back to the Vaudevillian style of older musicals that came before.
But as with The Taming of the Shrew, there is a problematic depiction of women at the heart of Kiss Me, Kate. Dunbar pitches Fred’s opening monologue to his audience before the play restarts perfectly, noting the difficulties with the source material and dripping with sarcasm that so much has changed in their present-day 1940s (and, tacitly, our 2020s). But still, the capitulation of Katherine is mirrored in Lilli’s own arc, as she suddenly forgives everyone in time for a happy ending finale.
Such structural difficulties are perhaps more glaring now, thanks to 75 years of musical theatre development since this show first picked up its Tony Award. But despite some great musical orchestrations by Don Sebesky (with additional dance arrangements by Gareth Valentine), it feels like this production of Kiss Me, Kate doesn’t quite fire on every cylinder. Apart from the eponymous Act II opening number, it’s just too darn tepid.
Continues until 14 September 2024
