“Kiss Me Kate”: Spirit Still True (in Its
Fashion)
By BEN BRANTLEY
Forget about turkey for the moment, both the kind that's
eaten for Thanksgiving and the kind that closes on
Broadway. It is ham that's being served, without apology
and with lots of relish, in the mouthwatering new revival of
"Kiss Me, Kate," Cole Porter's sybarite's delight of a musical
about battling egos in show business.
As presented by a preening cast led by Brian Stokes Mitchell
and Marin Mazzie, who wear a spotlight as though it were a
dressing gown and vice versa, this "Kate," which opened last
night at the Martin Beck Theater, proves that ham can
indeed make a banquet if the spices are zesty enough.
Avoiding the attitudes that are anathema to lively revivals of
vintage musicals -- reverence and condescension -- the
director Michael Blakemore and the choreographer Kathleen
Marshall have shaped a show that is broad, brazen, often
shameless and finally irresistible. The production, which
doesn't seem to have a thought in its giddy head beyond
entertaining us as much as it's entertaining itself, feels like
one long ear-to-ear grin.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Brushing up their Shakespeare:
from left, Michael Berresse,
Marin Mazzie, Brian Stokes
Mitchell and Amy Spanger in
the revival of the Cole Porter
musical "Kiss Me Kate."
It had been looking recently as though some Cromwellian
moratorium had been placed on musicals that existed purely
to please, what with shows leaning toward either the robotic
(both "The Lion King" and "Saturday Night Fever" seem to
be looking, in different ways, to a time in which human
actors will be unnecessary) or the solemnly preachy
("Ragtime," "Parade"). But following on the flying heels of
this season's "Contact," Susan Stroman's blissful paean to
dance as a life force, "Kiss Me, Kate" asserts that there is
still a place for sophisticated, grown-up fun in the New York
theater.
Not that this "Kate" is a groundbreaker like "Contact," with
its choreographic narrative, or the revival of "Chicago," with
its glittering minimalist production. Even in 1948, when the
show opened, few reviews made claims for "Kate" as a
masterpiece of innovation, despite the cleverness of its
two-tiered structure, which parallels a Broadway-bound
performance in Baltimore of Shakespeare's "Taming of the
Shrew" with the backstage love-hate affair of its stars.
"All you can say for 'Kiss Me, Kate' is that it is terribly
enjoyable," wrote Brooks Atkinson, the critic for The New
York Times, who felt the musical was unlikely to join the
immortal ranks of revolutionary works like "Show Boat" and
"Oklahoma!" The Critics' Circle Award that season went to
"South Pacific," a show with a social conscience that was in
the "organic" tradition of "Oklahoma!"
Yet "Kiss Me, Kate" turns out to have staying power in ways
that other "terribly enjoyable" musicals from the first half of
the century ("The Boys From Syracuse," for example, and
even "Annie Get Your Gun") have not. It's not just its
top-drawer Porter score, which ranges from the luxurious
minor-key masochism of "So in Love" to the
double-entendre-laden bounciness of "Always True to You
(in My Fashion)."
"Kiss Me, Kate" also wallows happily in the romance of
actors as an enchanting, infuriating breed apart,
self-created, self-worshiping gods on their own Olympus.
After all, Sam and Bella Spewack's book, which has been
tweaked here and there in ways that never betray the
show's original spirit, was partly inspired by the highly
dramatic behavior of the American theater's married
monarchs, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. And there are
few things an actor enjoys more than playing an actor who
behaves badly beautifully.
This sensibility is conveyed not only by the evening's
splendidly robust leads, Mitchell and Ms. Mazzie as the
tantrum-prone divorced couple who are reunited as
scrapping co-stars in "Shrew"; it also filters into every
character part. And when two Damon Runyonesque
gangsters (gloriously embodied by Lee Wilkof and Michael
Mulheren) suddenly find themselves, for arcane reasons of
plot, onstage and in costume in the play within the play, you
can see them getting drunk on limelight. That intoxication is
what the show celebrates.
Blakemore and Ms. Marshall channel actorly narcissism into
a steady stream of high spirits, even through long stretches
of (deliberately) awkwardly delivered Shakespeare and
some jokes that frankly fall flat. Those who know "Kiss Me,
Kate" only from the stilted 1953 movie version may be
startled by the raw vitality on tap here. While the
production definitely comes from another time, it also turns
the past into a vital present.
The perspective is beautifully reflected in the fine
contributions of Robin Wagner (sets), Martin Pakledinaz
(costumes) and Peter Kaczorowski (lighting), which create a
sumptuously colored palette that somehow seems tinged
with a hint of sepia, suggestive of hand-tinted photographs.
Wagner's big, bravura designs, which shift seamlessly
between the Elizabethan settings for "The Taming of the
Shrew" and the glamorously gritty behind-the-scenes world
of a Baltimore theater, never overpower the people who
inhabit them.
The stage has been carefully conceived as a showcase for
showing off. That high-rising triple-level view of backstage
stairs and walkways (which brings to mind the David
Merrick production of "42nd Street") is put to very specific
choreographic use by a frighteningly agile performer named
Michael Berresse, who scales it like a human fly in the show's
most inventive dance routine.
Such acrobatics are of a piece with the overall tone of "Kiss
Me, Kate," which never shrinks from the overstated gesture.
Mugging, clowning, overemoting and operatic vocal
embellishments have all been encouraged, yet only rarely do
these things slip into sloppiness.
The expansive performance style, of a silly looseness
contained by theatrical discipline, perfectly matches the
prankster aspect of Porter's songs, with their impish satire
of familiar forms (as in the Viennese waltz "Wunderbar")
and outrageous innuendoes and rhymes. (Who else would
team "Sanka" with "Bianca"?)
The voluptuous Ms. Mazzie, who verged on statue stiffness
in her roles in "Passion" and "Ragtime," unbends in delicious
ways here. As Lilli Vanessi, the stage diva turned movie diva
now making a stage comeback (Hollywood got fed up with
her hysterics), she is as much a theatrical caricature as a
Hirschfeld sketch, drawn in big, looping lines that capture
the essence of a real personality.
She flirts perilously with grotesqueness, making faces that
turn her marmoreal beauty into splenetic ugliness. Her
outlandishly entertaining take on that great exercise in
animosity, "I Hate Men," which here includes a vivid
simulation of giving birth, goes over the top, for sure. But it
doesn't go out of control. And when Ms. Mazzie needs to
switch to a lyric sincerity, for "So in Love" and "I Am
Ashamed That Women Are So Simple," her soprano
shimmers like polished silver.
As the rakish actor-manager Fred Graham, Mitchell, the
original Coalhouse Walker of "Ragtime" and the womanizing
record mogul in the Encores concert version of "Do Re Mi,"
confirms his status as a rarity in American theater these
days: a bona fide musical matinee idol with a sly sense of
humor. It took him about 20 minutes to grow into his full
presence the night I saw him; but once he did, he was
unstoppable.
His command of the trickier elements of Porter diction, as in
the multilingually rhymed "Where Is the Life That Late I
Led?," is impeccable. And when he stands center stage in
midsong, flexing his majestic baritone while his arms reach
for the heavens, he seems to enfold the whole audience into
an embrace as generous as it is self-admiring.
It seems fitting that a backstage musical should have its
fresh young star in the making, and this production's comes
in the intensely centered person of Amy Spanger, who plays
Lois Lane, the saucy cabaret performer making her
theatrical debut as Bianca in "Shrew." She gets three of the
evening's best songs ("Why Can't You Behave?," "Tom, Dick
or Harry" and "Always True to You"), and she lands each of
them with a sharp-edged sensuality that turns her
gold-digging archetype into something newly minted.
Ms. Marshall, who emerged as a choreographer to watch
with her work for the Encores series at City Center, brings a
crisp and flavorful wit to the novelty numbers "We Open in
Venice" and "Tom, Dick or Harry." Her Agnes de Mille-style
ensemble sequence, "Too Darn Hot," led by the engaging
Stanley Wayne Matthis, though a show-stopper, seemed to
me a tad protracted. And I wish that she and Blakemore
could have brought more vigor and focus to the evening's
first number, "Another Op'nin' Another Show," which is
better in concept than execution and scarcely prepares us
for the treasures that lie ahead.
Nonetheless, this "Kate" is definitely more than the sum of
its parts. The individual numbers and performances don't all
have the high sheen that, say, those in the revival of
"Chicago" had when it first opened. But it possesses a
wonderfully heady momentum that doesn't let up, and it is
to the show's credit that you remember it less for individual,
heightened moments than as one exhilarating whoosh.
Well, there is one particular sequence that is now forever
pasted in my memory. That's when Wilkof and Mulheren, as
a couple of hoods who have been hanging around backstage
to collect on a gambling debt, deliver their farewell song
before a drop curtain.
That song is "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," a bawdy guide
to using scholarly references for picking up women, and
these gentlemen sell it with priceless deadpan panache. As
they metamorphose from mere thugs into gleeful (if still
grim-faced) vaudevillians, it becomes clear just how potent a
virus the theater bug is. By that time, of course, the
audience has already been thoroughly infected.
PRODUCTION NOTES
'KISS ME, KATE'
Music and lyrics by Cole Porter; book by Sam and Bella
Spewack; directed by Michael Blakemore; musical direction
by Paul Gemignani; choreography by Kathleen Marshall;
sets by Robin Wagner; costumes by Martin Pakledinaz;
lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; sound by Tony Meola;
orchestrations by Don Sebesky; dance arrangements by
David Chase; fight direction by B.H. Barry; wigs by Paul
Huntley; production supervision by Steven Zweigbaum;
production manager, Arthur Siccardi; associate
choreographer, Rob Ashford; associate producers, Richard
Godwin and Edwin W. Schloss; general management, 101
Productions Ltd. Presented by Roger Berlind and Roger
Horchow. At the Martin Beck Theater, 302 West 45th
Street, Manhattan.
WITH: Brian Stokes Mitchell (Fred Graham and Petruchio),
Marin Mazzie (Lilli Vanessi and Katharine), Amy Spanger
(Lois Lane and Bianca), Michael Berresse (Bill Calhoun and
Lucentio), John Horton (Harry Trevor and Baptista),
Adriane Lenox (Hattie), Stanley Wayne Mathis (Paul),
Michael Mulheren (Second Man), Lee Wilkof (First Man)
and Ron Holgate (Harrison Howell).
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