The Midnight Train Crossing

Yes, it's time once again for another Milwaukee Shakespeare Play review. The last one that I'll be seeing til next season, seeing as how they do three a season and I'm not interested in the third one.

Apparently, based on what I read off of sparknotes, (and the Directors Notes), Taming of the Shrew has potential to be a really controversial play. Certainly it gets feminists up in arms.
As for me, I thought the play was totally awesome.

To do a quick summary (of this version of it) a man named Christopher Sly gets very very drunk and passes out. His friends decide to play a trick on him and dress him up as a nobleman, hoping to convince him that he simply dreams that he was a poor man.
As they plan this out, a traveling player company arrives, and the group of friends decide to have them do a play for Sly. They bring the players in on the gag.
A character named Barthol'mew is talked into dressing up as a woman and pretending to be Sly's wife.
When Sly awakes, he is very confused, but finally they convince him that he is indeed a nobleman and has been having a ‘mad dream' for the past fourteen years.

Then, the company of players puts on a show called Taming of the Shrew. The play-within-a play is about a man with two daughters, Katherina and Bianca. Bianca is the younger daughter, lovely, fair, sweet tempered, and all that jazz. Katherina is the elder, and she's the shrew from the title. A lot of people are in love with Bianca, including a young man named Lucentio. The problem is, their father, Baptista insists that Katerina be married first.
Lucentio plots with his two servants, Tranio and Biondello a way for him to get close to Bianca. Lucentio pretends to be a tutor, while Tranio pretends to be Lucentio. Confused yet?

But there's still the problem of Katherina. So when a man named Petruchio arrives to court Katherina, all of Bianca's suitors (and her father) regard him as a godsend. Soon Petruchio and Katherina are married, and Petruchio begins to ‘tame' her. He does this by acting completely mad and not letting her eat or sleep or pretty much have anything she wants until she submits to him.

The identities of Lucentio and Tranio are sorted out and Lucentio and Bianca marry. At their wedding feast, a changed Katherina and Petruchio show up, and astonishingly, they are getting along quite well. Lucentio and Bianca, on the other hand, have a fight.

At the end of the play-within-a-play, Sly approaches his "wife" announcing that he now knows how to "tame a shrew", and she smacks him, knocking him out.
When he comes to, he sees the manager of his company, who tells Sly that it was all a dream.

Other stuff happens, but that's not important :)

I'm very glad that I always read the sparknotes before I go see any Shakespearean play. It definitely makes it easier to follow.

As always, the first impression is given by the set. This was the most elaborate set I'd seen yet by this company.
The ground of the stage was filled with what looked like gravel, or sand, or maybe sawdust... well you get the idea. Then, there was a stage for the players to perform on. A structure on one side of the second stage was to represent the house, complete with balcony and a moveable staircase leading up to it.
I saw the set and thought "ooh cool"

As soon as the play-within-a-play started, they put a lot of emphasis on the fact that it was a play. There was quite a bit of overacting and silly accents, as well as playing around with the props, in such a way that it was clear that they were indeed props. For example, a cut out of a fire. One of the players set it down to ‘warm' one of the others, who proceeded to turn it around to face him.

Many of the characters were wearing very outlandish costumes, and there was a great deal of cape swirling. Luciano in particular, liked to walk around holding his cape stretched out on one arm.

The trio of Luciano (Ryan Lindberg), Tranio (Nicholas Harazin) and Biondello (Miki Johnson) were my favorite characters. I think that the only reason that I could keep Luciano and Tranio straight was because I had seen Nicholas Harazin in Winter's Tale and I remembered what he looked like.
It seemed to me that Tranio was the brains of the operation, Luciano was too much in love with Bianca to think clearly. This leads to some amusing physical comedy as Tranio prevents Luciano from doing stupid things, like walking into various elements of the set.

Luciano, in the guise of Cambio, the scholar, courted Bianca in Latin, the two of them communicating secret messages in rather amusing fake Latin. Okay, so I don't know Latin enough to be sure, but I'm sure that it takes more than one word in Latin to say "as I told you before, my servant is pretending to be me, so I can court you"

Meanwhile, Tranio, in the guise of Luciano chases off the other suitors and makes arrangements with her father. However, Baptista insists on meeting Luciano's father, Vincentio. Tranio is confident that he can find someone to play the part, and then, as he goes off to search, an amusing thought crosses his mind, and a bad pun:

And that's a wonder: fathers commonly
Do get their children; but in this case of wooing
A child shall get a sire

I suppose that I did like Tranio a bit better than Luciano, for Tranio had all of the funny parts. But both actors did a brilliant job at their parts.

In search of someone to play the part of the man to play the part of Vincentio, Christopher Sly (Jake Russo) jumps up from his place as a spectator, grabs a script and joins in - awkwardly. Biondello had to prompt him a bit, but then he was taken off stage, got costumed as the false Vincentio and returned, having memorized his lines.

He joined Tranio in flaunting around, holding his cape out dramatically.

Things were going along fine until the real Vincento (Patrick Lawlor) shows up. Tranio and the false-Vincento accuse him of being an imposter, and so they call for the police to come arrest him.
A guard leaps (literally!) Onto the scene

Sly takes this seriously and drops character to yell out "No one shall go to jail!"
Vincento drops character to tell him that it's only part of the play.

This show was billed as being done "as performed in Shakespeare's day" which meant, an almost all male cast.
The only female in the cast was Biondello, played brilliantly by Miki Johnson. She was one of my favorite characters.

At first, she lurked around on the sidelines, providing the sound effects for the players. It was rather interesting to watch her with bells and sticks, and at one point, a horn.

Bionello goes along with the plot between Lucentio and Tranio, but definitely has a mind of his own.

Her shining moment, to me, was during the wedding of Katherine and Petruchio. Petruchio is several hours late, and Biondello rushes in to report that he is coming.
And then, Biondello (Johnson) gives a brilliant speech about Petruchio's appearance. (He's dressed very bizarrely, in mis-matched clothes)
I've copied and pasted the speech here, but I've split it up where she paused. It will lose some of it's effect being written and not heard, but just know that she said all of this really really fast. Fast enough that when she was done, she got applause.

Why, Petruchio is coming,
in a new hat
and an old jerkin;
a pair of old breeches thrice turned;
a pair of boots that have been candle-cases, one buckled, another laced;
an old rusty sword ta'en out of the town armoury, with a broken hilt, and chapeless; with two broken points:
his horse hipped with an old mothy saddle and stirrups of no kindred;
besides, possessed with the glanders and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of windgalls, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten;
near-legged before, and with a half-checked bit, and a head-stall of sheep's leather, which, being restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been often burst, and now repaired with knots;
one girth six times pieced,
and a woman's crupper of velure, which hath two letters for her name fairly set down in studs, and here and there pieced with pack-thread.

I was so very impressed!

Bionello also arranges for Luciano and Bianca to elope, not trusting in Tranio's plan to get an old man to pretend to be Luciano's father. (For Baptista wants to meet Luciano's father first).
That was also an amusing scene, for Bionello went to the real Luciano to report Tranio's plan, and then added that there was a church nearby with a priest on call 24-7, hoping that that's enough of a hint for Luciano.
It isn't of course, so Bionello has to tell them straight out to elope.

It seemed that out of the plotters here, Bionello was the smartest, although nobody really listened to him on anything.

I admit I was more interested in the secondary story, with the saga of Luciano, but since the play is called "The Taming of the Shrew" I should talk about that too.

I did like Katherina, played by Michael Gotch. She had the best expressions when Petruchio (Matt Daniels) was trying to woo her. It's hard to describe, but for the most part it was a "You've got to be kidding" look.
To add action to the play, when Katherina and Petruchio first meet, they trade insults, and as they do so, both pick up swords and begin to fence.
Michael Gotch did not do Katherina in a falsetto, he spoke normally, and yet, I was able to forget that Katherina was being played by a guy, and could easily think of her as a "she".

One of the scenes that has to do with the "taming" takes place in Petruchio's home, where he has his servants prepare a dinner for the two of them. For some odd reason, the dinner seemed to consist of shoes. Perhaps the players didn't have the proper props.
Katherina sits down to eat and Petruchio angrily declares that the food is burnt and will not do, and he starts throwing it around.
For the next few minutes, as Petruchio goes off on a tirade, he and his servants are tossing the food (the shoes) and the plates to each other.
There were maybe six people basically playing catch with close to ten different things, and they didn't drop any of them!
It was another scene that got applause when they finally caught all of the things.
Again, it doesn't work as well to read about it, but it was so awesome to see.

So all together, I liked the play a lot.
Like that's any surprise :)