Watching the vintage musical KISS ME KATE, currently playing a two week run at the vast Coliseum Theatre as part of a national tour by Opera North, is a very old fashioned experience for the best and worst reason.Let’s start with the good stuff. The show, which is about a divorcing couple feuding as they star in a Baltimore production of a musical based on Taming of the Shrew, has a fantastic score by Cole Porter.
It was written in 1948 when American popular music embraced both jazz and operetta and the musical numbers juxtapose both styles. The central pairing have songs which wouldn’t sound out of place in light opera whilst a younger cheating couple and other members of the theatre troupe have jazz infused numbers. The show they’re performing within the show combines the two, with grand musical themes tickled by cheeky swing segues. There’s even a dash of vaudeville for two inept gangsters prowling back stage to collect a gambling debt.
The bad news is that pretty much all the humour comes from humiliating and even battering women which sits uneasily in our own more enlightened century. It helps that the two main females are so feisty but none the less they are constantly being threatened with or receiving a spanking whether it be playful or administered as punishment.
As the audience filed out at the interval I heard a young woman behind me ask her friend how such a show got revived in 2018 and why? The rest of the appreciative audience were predominantly, like me, over 50 and it’s hard to think it has much appeal to younger ticket buyers who, unlike me, don’t already know and love it from previous notable West End revivals and a famous film.
I don’t always enjoy Opera North productions when they visit big London Theatres. They often looked cheap and under resourced and sure enough the curtain goes up on a set full of gaping black holes where scenery should be. But over the course of the evening the comparatively low budget completely won me over because it had forced director Jo Davies and designer Colin Richmond to think ingeniously.
Scenes which are normally played on lumbering trucks representing neighboring dressing rooms here play out on in soft light (Lighting designer: Ben Cracknell) with little scenery, as if we’re at the side of the stage with the actors. The opening number of Act two, often set in a back stage alleyway or on the theatre roof, in which the cast sing about the heat, usually in a full set of new costumes, plays out with the actors in their Act One clothes simply trying to cool down where we left them before the interval. These clever stylish decisions not only save money but liberate the action form the way it’s traditionally done helping veterans like me to see it afresh. Let’s give the ropey costumes the benefit of the doubt and presume that they’ve been purposely designed to look like the cut–price touring musical performed within the show.
The warring divorcees are often played by older stars and it’s also refreshing to see the relatively young pairing of opera singers Quirijn De Lang and Stephanie Corley, they look and sound great, the singing throughout is terrific, even if they could speed up the wisecracks and don’t quite have the embattled heft of a long term couple. Alan Burkit as a rakish fellow star and his on/off girlfriend played by Zoe Rainey are quite superb. Rainey’s rendition of the song “Always True to You in my Fashion” is a master class in how to deliver old-school musical comedy.
I recommend you catch this production. You’re unlikely to get a chance to see KISS ME KATE again and this is one of the most interesting stagings of it that I’ve seen.
