'The Taming of the Shrew' (Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, D.C., 2007)

[On 3 April, I posted a report by my friend Kirk Woodward on the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate.  In my introduction to the post, I mentioned that I’d seen a Washington, D.C., production of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in 2007 and that I’d written a report on it.  It predated Rick On Theater, so I’d never posted it on the blog.  I suggested that I might pull it from my archives and run it on ROT—so here it is. 

[You’ll see that I had some serious problems with the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production, but you’ll also find that I express my difficulties with the play itself, which was the point of both Kirk’s report and my remarks.]

I spent ten days in Washington, D.C., through the Thanksgiving weekend because there were several art exhibits and some shows that seemed worth visiting.  (And we’ve just come out of a stagehands strike that shut down most of Broadway since earlier this month.)

I took my usual bus (the “Kosher bus”) down on Friday morning/afternoon, 16 November 2007, and on Sunday, 18 November, we went downtown to the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre to see The Taming of the Shrew.  (The Shakespeare has just opened a new space, Sidney Harman Hall, essentially around the corner from the Lansburgh, which is débuting with a pair of Christopher Marlowes, Tamburlaine and Edward II.  Mom and I saw Edward II when I came down for another visit at Christmastime; a report exists which I may post on ROT sometime in the future.) 

The production, which received a pretty good review in the Washington Post and some anticipatory good press in advance of the opening because director Rebecca Bayla Taichman staged a highly praised production of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House for the capital city’s Woolly Mammoth company in 2005, had several problems, but first I should admit that I have trouble with Shrew to start with. 

Okay, I know we’re not supposed to judge a work from the past by current standards, but I’ve never really been able to get around Petruchio’s treatment of Kate in order to tame her.  I’m not sure this analogy will go over real well, but I’ll float it anyway: I once had a dog who got uncontrollably violent when he met another dog.  I spoke to a trainer and her analysis was that she needed to take him away for a time, but I had two choices of outcome.  She could break him entirely of his hostility, but he’d be spiritually broken.  Or she could make him manageable; he wouldn’t be out of control but he could never be let alone with another dog off his leash. 

We decided that the second option would be best for the dog (and for me)—but Petruchio seems to have gone for option one.  And for far less cause.  (Now, I’m not really comparing a woman to a dog—please don’t start that—though Petruchio does use animal-training techniques to “break” Kate.) 

I also understand that Shrew is a comedy—but if you play it entirely for laughs, then you make fun of what amounts to domestic violence.  If you make Kate so shrewish that she seems to need taming, in order to try to justify Petruchio’s behavior, then she ends up not just a strong-willed and independent woman but a truly insane one.  If you play her as a sort of protofeminist (which I maintain is what Shakespeare wrote, though she, of course, is way out of her time in the Renaissance), then Petruchio’s actions are all unwarranted (and even, by our standards, criminal). 

Those aren’t really funny situations.  We don’t even make fun of drunks anymore.  So, maybe I’m just a stick-in-the-mud.  Okay, no maybe about it—I am; but I’ve never been able to reconcile this dilemma.  I don’t have the same problem with the racism of Othello or the anti-Semitism of The Merchant of Venice, but the sexism of Shrew defeats me.  So, sue me!

Now, given that small problem (!), let me try to evaluate as theater what I saw, not as social commentary.  Here goes.

I’m going to start backwards—for me, anyway—and talk about the acting first.  Overall, the acting just wasn’t what I’ve grown to expect from the STC.  I won’t say the cast were grad-school level; they were better than that, but they were closer to Off-Off-Broadway than Broadway.  They were all technically competent, but it seemed as if they didn’t really believe their own characters.  No one seemed human—there was no blood flowing in anyone’s veins.  The worst problem stemming from this failure is that neither Kate (Charlayne Woodard) nor Petruchio (Christopher Innvar) conveyed strong enough personalities to pull off the roles. 

Woodard was spunky and loud and active on stage, but she had no intestinal fortitude.  (She was no Renaissance Kate Hepburn, f’rinstance.)  Woodard’s a thin, small woman so she needed to do something to project inner strength—and she didn’t.  The same acting fault made Innvar especially work overhard to seem gruff, but he couldn’t pull it off as far as I was concerned.  Ironically, I remember saying the same thing about Rex Smith in a Kiss Me Kate I saw in D.C. some years ago—he’s just not a powerful persona.  Now, leaving aside my problem with Shrew, this kinda left a biiiig hole right in the center of the production.

I’ve never seen any of Taichman’s directing before, so I don’t know anything about her work with actors.  I have to assume, however, that this was her fault since it pervaded the entire cast.  Either she cast actors incapable of giving strong and committed performances, or she misdirected them, or both.  What she has to take full responsibility for, though, is the concept of the production, and boy did I have problems with that, from the philosophical/thematic concept to the design.  I’ll start with the overall theme because it touches on the design decisions anyway.

Taichman’s idea was that Shrew is all about marriage as commerce, and there is textual support for this notion.  After all, Petruchio has “come to wive it wealthily in Padua,” a line Innvar actually sang to the Kiss Me Kate tune.  (Just to make sure we didn’t miss this point, the first thing in the program was a three-page essay by Literary Associate Akiva Fox called “The Business of Marriage” which began with the sentence, “In The Taming of the Shrew, marriage is nothing personal; it’s strictly business.”)  

This focus generated two problems for me, however.  First, if marriage is brokered for profit and commercial advancement, then Kate’s rebellion is all the more justified.  If she resists being bartered to the wealthiest suitor or sold off to the man who makes her father the most enticing promises—the scene in which Lucentio (Michael Milligan) and Gremio (Louis Butelli) bargain for the hand of Bianca (Lisa Birnbaum) is performed as an auction with each suitor one-upping his opponent’s last offer while Baptista (Nicholas Hormann) knocks the final bid down with a gavel—my response is a forceful, “Right on, Sister!” 

You wonder—or at least I do—why the women don’t all go on strike, à la Lysistrata.  (There is, in fact, a Jacobean sequel to the Shakespeare, The Tamer Tamed by John Fletcher, which posits this.  The RSC brought it to D.C. three years ago in rep with Shrew, but it’s a terrible play; I posted a short report on this production in “Some Classics from the Archives,” 19 February 2019.)  If a director had taken this same theme and put all the characters in Middle Eastern dress, we’d all be aghast at the barbarity of it, wouldn’t we?  So, Taichman’s main production point undermined her own text.

The other reason this concept bothered me was the way Taichman and her designers (Narelle Sissons for the set, Daniel Baker and Ryan Rumery for the sound, in particular) pressed it on stage.  The principal stage element was a long (plexi-)glass wall which served mostly as Baptista’s house.  It was obviously modeled on the front of a large department store or some other such emporium, with a revolving door in the center and two large box-like display windows stage right and left.  Scenes were staged within the window boxes—that auction of Bianca took place with one suitor in each box, a little like a TV game show of yore. 

Over the top of this glass wall hung a large billboard-like painting of a woman in a red dress, reminiscent of the Vargas drawings in Playboy in the 1960s and ’70s (I only read it for the articles, obviously); she was lounging provocatively on her side.  (This billboard was replaced from time to time with a banner reading “Congratulations Baptista” in Italian—when Bianca was “engaged” and later when the three brides were married.  It is, of course, the father who profited from this deal, not the brides.) 

Aside from the fact that this expanse of plexiglass and steel looked somewhat cheapjack, what I objected to was the obviousness of the imagery.  Like Taichman’s inclusion of the up-front essay in the program, the director underlined her idea rather heavily throughout the show.  The Playboy-like billboard commodified women, and every time someone articulated a plan to broker a marriage, there was the sound of a cash register just to make sure we got the point again.  There’s nothing wrong with Taichman’s concept logically (dramatically, as I said, it did undermine the comedy), but did she have to smack us over the head with the idea? 

I’m reminded of New York City’s Theatre for a New Audience production of Merchant with F. Murray Abraham last March which was set in a high-tech Wall Street.  (I posted my report on this Merchant on 28 February 2011.)  It was also all about money and commerce—Portia’s contest for her own hand in marriage was a treasure hunt of sorts, another TV game show—but all the elements of the money-grubbing and love for sale were embedded in the production, which was actually enhanced by the plan and its—admittedly very clever—execution.  All the smart phones, PDA’s, laptops, designer clothes, and expensive accessories helped make the point that money made this world go ’round.  No one had to hold up a sign saying, “It’s the money, stupid.”

I never got to like the set for Shrew.  The plexiglass enclosure looked somehow unfinished, as if we were watching a late dress rehearsal.  Petruchio’s house, which was essentially the stage without the glass wall, was all draped in red curtains and ropes.  (Red was a focal element in the design; one Washington Post article before the opening discussed the color scheme.)  I don’t really have any objections to mixing periods or styles, but I didn’t see the reason that the Baptista/Padua set was post-modern and cold, while the Petruchio/Verona set was almost Victorian (with a huge medieval chandelier). 

In addition to its look, that plexiglass wall forced all the action for the Padua scenes—the bulk of the play—downstage, except for the ones Taichman played inside the glass boxes.  These latter, of course, were played at the extreme sides of the stage; we were sitting in the far left of the house, so scenes played in the stage-right box were obscured.  The center third of the wall was little used for playing—it served almost exclusively as an entrance/exit through the revolving door.

(The costumes, by the way, were sort of ’80s Italian to my eye.  Set designer Sissons, however, made reference to “a Fellini-style motorcycle with a sidecar” in which Petruchio rode onto the stage, which would be ’50s/’60s.) 

That red color theme also confounded me a little.  (It also appeared prominently in Miranda Hoffman’s costumes—as well as in the Vargas billboard.)  Red is the color of sex.  (We’re talking costume theory here—let’s not get carried away!)  It’s a hot color.  Commerce and business is cold.  (It’s color tends to be green, a cold color—or maybe gold and silver, which are metallic and hard.) 

If you’re going to make a point that this is a world up for sale to the highest bidder, even to the marriages of your daughters, then sexiness strikes me as an conflicting force.  Glass and steel—the principal materials of the main set piece—is a cold, harsh image.  Auctioning off your daughter is a cold-hearted act, not a passionate one.  Red, hot sex was not a prevailing dynamic here, and using it for a central design element was contradictory.  (It also wasn’t borne out in the acting—no one on stage was especially passionate.  That may, of course, have been an acting failure, however—though I don’t think so.)

I don’t think that my impressions of the production were off base.  In an interview at the time she started rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew, Taichman said, as quoted in a local publication, “Instead of ironing out the play’s contradictions, I want to open and stretch them out.”  The director continued, “And like all truly great theatre, [the play] should present these contradictions in the truest, rawest ways without explaining them away.”  I read these statements after having seen the production.  I don’t see how this approach benefited the performance.

[The Taming of the Shrew ran from 25 September to 25 November 2007 at STC’s Lansburgh Theatre on 7th Street, NW, in downtown Washington.  The production received four Helen Hayes Award nominations (Washington’s local Tonys): Outstanding Set Design, Resident Production (Narelle Sissons), Outstanding Lead Actor, Resident Play (Christopher Innvar), Outstanding Director, Resident Play (Rebecca Bayla Taichman), and Outstanding Resident Play; it didn’t win in any of the categories.

[I wrote this report before I started including a survey of published reviews.  I won’t give the same detailed summaries I do now, but here are some reviewers comments: Calling the production “smashing,” Peter Marks of the Washington Post felt that director Taichman “blazes her own dazzling trail with one of the most politically freighted plays in all of Shakespeare.”  He added,” What she confidently unveils in this chic, funny and marvelously acted modern-dress production is a divinely contemporary, off-center comedy that embraces the play's contradictions and shortcomings, its wisdom as well as its absurdity.”  Of the lead performances, Marks wrote, “And when in this world of mysteries and delights Innvar and Woodard seal their mutual admiration with a kiss, all definitely feels right with it.”

[In the Washington City Paper, Trey Graham acknowledged that Shrew is a “knotty” comedy, due to “that uncomfortable stretch in the second act” that “more civilized modern-day Shakespeare fans tend to find those scenes a little worrisome.”  Taichman’s production “feels knowing and worldly and witty, smart and seductive and even a little rueful now and then.”  In his opinion, the director “comes at [the play] not with a chair and a whip, thank heavens, but with a coo and a wink.”  Of the leads, Graham said, “Charlayne Woodard makes a pint-sized pit bull of a Kate, . . . playing opposite Christopher Innvar’s strapping, hirsute brute of a Petruchio.” 

[Kate Wingfield described STC’s Shrew as “modern but with a twist: This is a Shrew in the here and now but it is also a 1950s movie poster come to life, a Fellini-esque dream and an MTV video all rolled into one.”  Wingfield saw the production as “first and foremost a fun, frivolous and happy parody.”  The reviewer, however, found that Woodard “never quite fully connects with the rest of the character, especially when she comes to love Petruchio,”  who, “try as he might, . . . can’t get the chemistry going with Kate.”

[The Washington Diplomat’s Lisa Troshinsky warned that Shrew “is brutally misogynist, which none of the characters oppose,” and that Taichman’s production “does nothing to gloss over the play’s brutishness, instead fanning the flames of controversy that the script has evoked over the years.”  Troshinsky reported that Woodard, “a dynamic spitfire,” portrays “Kate as both an aggressive, independent feminist and a vulnerable daughter who suffers under her father’s callousness”  and felt that Petruchio was “forcefully played by” Innvar.

[On the website Frederikcksburg.com, Lucia Anderson declared that “Taichman's ‘Shrew’ dazzles and delights” and that the director “is having a blast with” the play.  She found that “Taichman concentrates on the fun that bubbles throughout this play, skipping merrily over any dark shadows.”   Innvar “plays the dashing Petruchio to perfection, while” Woodard “gives a vivid performance as the tempestuous Katherina.” 

[Taichman “summons up [some] creative tricks,” asserted Roy Meachum on The Tentacle, a Frederick, Maryland, website.  “Director Taichman has turned out a splendid example” of Shakespeare’s tactic of replacing” sensibility with nonsense.”  “But ,” felt Meachum, “she left relatively untouched the play's most important characters.”  Meachum found that Innvar “brings more testosterone to [Petruchio] than any player I’ve ever seen” and Woodward “radiates a very strong female glow of her own.”

[It looks like the Capital area reviewers all disagreed with my sense of the production.  Although, it sounds to me as if they all swept any contradictions under a rug.  I guess I get to be the odd man out in this instance.]

'Kiss Me, Kate'

by Kirk Woodward

[Longtime contributor to Rick On Theater Kirk Woodward feels much the same way about the classic musicals as I do.  I’ve copped to my inability to be critical of them many times on this blog, but in “A Broadway Baby” (posted on 22 September 2010), I spelled it out: “I can’t be very critical about those classic musicals—I love them too much from my childhood.  They’re like theatrical comfort food to me—I hardly see any faults.”  Kiss Me, Kate, the 1948 Cole Porter musical based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, was one of the classics with which I grew up, courtesy of my father’s original-cast recordings.  We used to listen to them all the time, particularly during dinner. 

[I’ve seen many productions of Shrew, but the only one whose report I published on ROT (on 21 November 2009) is one I saw at Staunton, Virginia’s “Shenandoah Shakespeare” in 2003.  (I saw another interesting take on the play in 2007 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and I have a report in my archives, but haven’t used it on the blog yet.  Maybe I will one day soon.)  I’ve only seen one stage production of Kiss Me, Kate, however.  Coincidentally, it was the National Tour of the 1999 Broadway revival Kirk mentions having missed to his regret.  I saw it in July 2001 at Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, directed by Michael Blakemore with Rex Smith (replacing Brian Stokes Mitchell) as Fred Graham/Petruchio and Rebecca York (in for the late Marin Mazzie) as Lilli Vanessi/Katharine.  The interesting thing with respect to Kirk’s report below is that, except for playwright John Guare’s “only two noticeable alterations,” producer Roger Berlind kept to Sam and Bella Spewack’s original Tony-winning book.  (“Why fix what ain’t broke?” asked director Blakemore.  “Why can’t you behave?”)

[The Roundabout Theatre Company, as you’ll read, took a different tack.  I’ll let Kirk tell you about the current revival and you’ll see the dilemma the company and Kirk faced.  ~Rick]

I was excited when I heard that the Roundabout Theatre Company would be presenting a revival of the musical comedy Kiss Me, Kate beginning with previews on February 14, 2019, and opening March 14, 2019, for a limited run.

I grew up on the original cast album of Kiss Me, Kate on 78 RPM records, featuring Alfred Drake (1914-1992), Patricia Morrison (1915-2018), Harold Lang (1920-1985), and Lisa Kirk (1925-1990). I love the music of the show’s composer Cole Porter (1891-1964), both generally, and in particular in Kiss Me, Kate.

However, the only time I’ve seen the show was a production in London in the 1970’s that lacked the verve typical of a Broadway show that the original production (which opened on December 30, 1948, and ran for 1,077 performances) must have had. I also saw the unsatisfying 1953 movie, which begins with a “frame story” including a character named “Cole Porter,” who looks nothing like Cole Porter but does resemble the composer Irving Berlin (1888-1989).

For reasons I can’t understand, I missed the 1999 Broadway revival of the musical starring the magnificent Brian Stokes Mitchell (b. 1957), for which I have been kicking myself ever since. So as I said I looked forward to the Roundabout’s production with anticipation. I saw it at a preview performance on February 27, 2019.

Kiss Me, Kate is one of Broadway’s great success stories. Cole Porter’s career was at a low point in the late 1940s; he had written several undistinguished scores and a couple of outright flops, and according to a number of sources was generally considered “finished” in the business.

Most of the cast and production team for Kiss Me Kate were either new to their jobs or relatively unknown. According to George Eells’ biography of Cole Porter The Life That Late He Led (1967), it was extremely difficult to raise enough money to finance the show, which ended up with seventy-two backers, an extremely large number for that time.

Unexpectedly, the show required almost no rewriting during rehearsal, and no revisions in its out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia – an unheard of phenomenon up to that time and seldom heard of since. By the time the show reached Broadway, word was out that it was virtually perfect.

Porter was hailed for his greatest score, and the production won five Antoinette Perry Awards, popularly known as the Tonys, including Best Musical and Best Composer and Lyricist (Porter).

In Kiss Me, Kate a theater company is trying out a musical version of the play The Taming of a Shrew by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), and the strife between the leading director, producer, and actor in the play and his leading lady, also his divorced wife, mirror the strife between Shakespeare’s characters Petruchio and Katherine (Kate), the “shrew” of the Shakespearean title.

You have undoubtedly noticed the word “shrew” twice in the previous paragraph and perhaps you thought that it was inappropriate, or wondered how acceptable a word it is today, or some similar idea. If so, you are thinking along with the folks at the Roundabout, who, according to an article in the program by Olivia Clement, realized that

while the plot is alive with onstage romance, backstage passion, and a hilarious dash of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, moments in the show are still – and maybe a little uncomfortably – rooted in the era in which the show was written.

In this age of the # MeToo movement, “moments” may be an understatement. Both the “frame” story of the acting company, and Shakespeare’s play itself, present dominating males with strategies for “taming” the women they love that range from dubious to downright objectionable.

Did Shakespeare intend his protagonist, Petruchio, to be admired or loathed? Considering how many aspects Shakespeare can embody in one character, I am tempted to answer “both.”

And Shakespeare does frame his story, just as the musical frames its story: for a joke, a group of well-to-do people pick up an unconscious drunk on the street and, when he wakes up, attempts to convince him that he’s actually a Lord and has forgotten his prosperous past. The main story of The Taming of the Shrew is presented to this unfortunate for his entertainment.

I would say that Shakespeare’s frame story doesn’t help us a great deal in justifying the Punch-and-Judy violence and male presumption of his play-within-a-play. Of course we only have the words in the script, and no indication how those words were played – simply as knockabout farce, or with whatever degree of compassion?

The musical Kiss Me, Kate has the same kind of problem with its frame story. The protagonist, Fred Graham (played by Will Chase), is actually perhaps one of the less objectionable males in the story. Yes, he is a loud, domineering director and producer, and yes, he misleads his ex-wife romantically.

But his counterpart in the subplot, Bill Calhoun (played by Corbin Bleu) is a compulsive gambler who sleeps with everybody. Men in general are seen as motivated by sex (as flat-out stated in the number “Too Darn Hot”).

However, to tell the truth, Calhoun’s female counter part Lois Lane (played by Stephanie Styles) is equally problematic, apparently attaching herself to multiple men at one time, as long as they have money. And Petruchio does beat, mistreat, and “tame” Kate. A fine crew!

Amanda Green (b 1963), a composer and lyricist best known perhaps for the musical Hands on a Hardbody (which ran on Broadway in 2013), was brought in to tidy up the more controversial phrasings in the score. (The playwright John Guare made revisions in the script for the 1999 version. It should also be noted again that I saw the show in a preview performance, and that further changes may have been made since I saw it.)

Green alters one of the more blatantly sexual rhymes in the song “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” and weaves around the line in “Bianca” that goes “You’d better answer ‘yes’ or papa spank-a!” However, she makes relatively few changes compared to those in the movie version (1953).

The most spectacular change in the lyrics comes at the end of the show. Both Shakespeare and Porter have Kate sing

            I am ashamed that women are so simple . . .

which in the current production becomes

            I am ashamed that people are so simple . . .

At this point I find myself wondering if I’m taking the whole thing too seriously – or if the Roundabout is. In any case, the temper of the times is generally unforgiving, and one does wonder why the Roundabout decided to present the show at this particular moment in history. Perhaps the decision was locked in before, say, Harvey Weinstein was forced to resign?

If I were directing Kiss Me, Kate today, I would be tempted to add one more frame story to the show, beginning with a scene (or voiceover) in which Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi, his “Kate,” reminisce about  their earlier days in theater, when times were so different – thereby, perhaps, at least serving notice that the behavior shown in the play is not being endorsed.

And I would make the look of the show considerably more down-at-heel, and make it clear that the Shrew production at the core of the show isn’t really very good.

I believe that Porter suggests this in his lyrics – compare, for example, the performers’ genuine angst in the opening song of the frame story, “Another Opening, Another Show,” with the superficial repetition in the play-within-the-play’s “We Open In Venice,” or the wit of “Always True to You In My Fashion” with the blatant repetition of the word “dick” (which is actually over-emphasized in the current show) in the song “Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

Nevertheless, I suspect the Roundabout is typical in making the play-within-the-play look as good as the play around it. (The sets are designed by David Rockwell, and the costumes by Jeff Jahshie.)

Perhaps the changes I suggest would “distance” the more controversial elements of the show and make them more palatable. Perhaps not. Perhaps they wouldn’t be necessary! Reviews for the Roundabout production were largely positive; the website Show-Score.com reports only 3% negative reviews, for an average review score of 80.

I was particularly interested to see what Jesse Green of the New York Times thought of the show. He can be counted on to highlight the social issues of a show, and he does refer to “the elements of the original Kiss Me, Kate that rankle our sensibilities today – its gender stereotypes and wife-slapping argument for womanly submission.”

But he feels that “the authors’ take on marriage is more complex and insightful than we may recall,” and he feels that “a few changes in emphasis and one major revision [which I referred to above] allow us to enjoy it in a new light, as a two-way ‘taming,’ distorted not by malice but through the mocking filter of farce,” and he refers to the revisions as a whole as “completely successful.”

Green does suggest that the inventiveness of the production begins to flag in the later part of the second act, and I agree, though for different reasons. He feels the choreography loses its inventiveness; it seems to me in particular that the song “From This Moment On” (first added in the movie version) stops the story (although the brilliant arranger, Larry Hochman, embeds a wonderful musical joke in it), and for some reason, at least when I saw the show, the song “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” which ordinarily stops the show in two senses, fell flat.

The Roundabout’s production of Kiss Me, Kate reminds me that the classic musicals of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, despite their appeal, are not “easy” to stage. They are greatly a product of their times, and the times have moved on. I believe the effort to stage one successfully today is often likely to be just that – an effort – but when (for example) it has at its heart a strong theatrical idea and a glorious Cole Porter score, we shouldn’t stop trying.

[I once interviewed for a directing gig for Shrew.  I had a devil of a time inventing a concept that would accommodate the noxious sexism of the play.  This was back in the ’70s or ’80s, long before the current #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, and I failed to come up with anything I could justify (or live with).  Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.  (I think I tried to make Petruchio a Mafioso—but that only added another layer of negative stereotyping on top of the sexism and chauvinism!  Not only didn’t I get hired, but I couldn’t commit to the Mafia concept enough to convince myself it was a good idea.)]

Dispatches from Israel 7

by Helen Kaye

[Last spring, my friend and frequent ROT-contributor Helen Kaye sent me a couple of her Jerusalem Post reviews, but I was so loaded on the blog at the time that I couldn’t shoehorn them in for posting until now.  As late as this is, I’m running Helen’s “Dispatches from Israel 7,” the latest in her occasional series of drama notices from Tel Aviv, where she lives, Jerusalem, and frequently elsewhere around the country.  Below are presented Helen’s assessment of a Hebrew translation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and a British Play, Daytona by Oliver Cotton, both produced in Tel Aviv by Bet Lessin.]

The Taming of the Shrew

By William Shakespeare

Translated by Dori Parnes

Directed by Udi Ben Moshe

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 10 January 2016

Scrumptious, irreverent, farce with an edge! This is a 21^st century Shrew to revel in from A – Z and back again.

It starts with a nifty monologue by Yossi Segal on how it’s the guys’ turn in these our “anything you can do I can do better,” days and never lets up for 100 captivating, rollicking minutes.

Dori Parnes has worked his usual sleight of hand with Shakespeare’s text. His wordplays, puns and other verbal pranks preserve Shakespeare’s spirit via up-to-the-minute Hebrew that has the audience in stitches.

Then there’s Udi Ben Moshe’s rib-splitting visual pranks as well as his thoroughly smart take on what this play’s about (won’t be a spoiler – sorry!) that carries through to Lily Ben Nahshon’s enclosing set of doors and revolving panels, Orna Smorgansky’s apt-to-all-times costuming, Adi Cohen’s clever music and Keren Granek’s no-nonsense lighting.

We all know the story. Rich merchant Baptista (Ilan Dar) has two daughters; blond Bianca (Agam Rodberg), a sweetie (?), and redhead Katarina (Maya Dagan), the shrew. Until Kate marries (a remote possibility), Bianca cannot, and who in H… would marry Kate? Enter Petruchio (Yuval Segal) and we’re off!

Shrew is all about Kate and Petruchio, so you’d better make sure you have good ones. Dagan and Segal have us rooting for them from the getgo.

Dagan’s Kate is bruised and bruising, violent and vulnerable, smart and smarting. When we meet her she’s in riding pants and a shirt, mean as an adder, and unloved to boot. We watch, enthralled, as she succumbs oh-so-gradually to being loved and to the elation of partnership.

Yuval Segal’s Petruchio is a riot from his s*#t-kicking grin to his beef-cake swagger compounded by Israeli macho. He transforms too, from gold-digger (“I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua)” to joyous appreciation of endless possibilities, getting there with more changes than a chameleon.

Not that the other actors are standing about. We have Vitali Friedland’s yummy, slippery Grumio, Yaniv Biton’s ebulliently posturing Tranio, Ilan Dar’s gorgeously clueless Baptista, Agam Rodberg’s fleety flirty Bianca, Mordy Gershon’s marvelously inept Hortensio among the splendid rest, not forgetting the delicious cameos by Yossi Segal and Albert Cohen.

This is a Shrew with brio in shovelsful, but you know what it has most of? Ease and fun!

*  *  *  *

Daytona

By Oliver Cotton

Translated by Yosef el Dror

Directed by Alon Ophir

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 16 March 2016

They’ve made a life for themselves after That Time. What happened Over There is never talked about. Not ever. This evening in 1986 Elli (Liora Rivlin) and Joe (Rafi Tavor), now in their 70s, are rehearsing to Frank Sinatra’s “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” for tomorrow evening’s Seniors Ballroom Dancing event. They’ve won cups that are squashed on a shelf in the living room of their modest Brooklyn apartment. It’s not the cups, it’s the dancing, you see, and in a bit Elli is off to get her dress for the competition.

Then Billy (Avi Oria) arrives. No luggage, but enough Chinese takeout for a small army. He’s all smiles, talking a mile a minute, apparently oblivious that Joe’s welcome is, shall we say, lukewarm. He’s on the run after putting three deliberate and lethal bullets into one Franz Gruber in the swimming pool at his vacation hotel at Daytona, Florida; SS Franz Gruber, now blameless Chaney, formerly a sadistic killer at Stutthof  concentration camp, and whom Billy recognized because of the birthmark on his neck.

After all, where else would he go?

Now? Now he arrives, 30 years after disappearing without a word, demanding his brother’s help.

Yes, Billy and Joe are brothers. The relationship between them and with Elli, when she returns, is the meat of Cotton’s tight family drama. You have to gulp a bit, here and there, but dramatically, theatrically it works. Orna Smorgonsky’s set and costumes – lots of beige and browns - and Nadav Barnea’s lighting add to that.

Director Ophir has wisely elected to avoid pathos, reflected in the actors’ speaking reticence. We get the sense (as it should be), that there’s so much they’re not saying and this adds real punch to their performance.

Rivlin’s Elli is tightly reined in. Even when she spills her guts – and she does – she doesn’t raise her voice; her voice and body are barely there, she holds with effort onto Self. Oria’s Billy is at once overwhelmed at the enormity of what he’s done yet convinced of its correctness and he lets us see the conflict. Rafi Tavor as Joe is more volatile. Of the three, he’s the one who’s managed to grip at life more securely but Billy’s arrival shakes him to the core and Tavor does a gorgeous job with that.

The gulp or two aside, Daytona has heart.  Its humanity holds us.

[Helen’s previous contributions to ROT include “Dispatches” 1 through 6 on 23 January 2013, 6 August 2013, 20 November 2013, 2 June 2015, 22 August 2015 (which also includes an article Helen wrote on the Israel Festival), and 6 October 2015.  (I also posted another of Helen’s JP reviews, Molière’s Tartuffe, on 2 November 2014 as a Comment to “Dispatches 3.”) ROTters might also enjoy looking back at ”Help! It’s August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010; ”Acre (Acco) Festival, Israel,” 9 November 2012; “Berlin,” 22 July 2013; “A Trip to Poland,” 7 August 2015.]