‘Kiss Me, Kate’: As Fresh as a Slap in the Face

It’s pretty plain by now that Alan Paul, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Associate Artistic Director and resident musical genie. knows his way around a Broadway musical. More than that, he has a gift for getting to the heart of  a show and lets you see it beating and beating some more.

It’s a kind of knack that Paul’s got, and we’ve already seen it in his productions of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (2014 Helen Hayes Award for Best Director of a Musical) and “Man of La Mancha.” Now, he’s gotten his hands on “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter musical from 1948, with a pedigree that’s equal parts high class poodle and back-stage mutt.

What’s evident is that Paul, as a director, is something of a swain when it comes to what appears to be a life-long passion for the  musical. He’ll bring out the best in the form by returning to its original charms and bring them out with gusto—like someone energetically and with love rubbing an old dusty bauble found on the road and returning it to its million-dollar diamond status to the point that it looks brand new, kissed for the very first time.               

“Kiss Me, Kate,” although it hasn’t been performed very often, is very familiar material from very familiar veins. It is, after all, based on Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew,” an endlessly entertaining—if sometimes politically incorrect—battle of the sexes as implied by the title.  There is some of Cole Porter’s most dazzling works—witty and funny, to be sure, like Noel Coward set to music at times, but also passionate, fiery, even jazzy.  There is the classic MGM movie version of the show in which Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson starred, and in which some pretty terrific dancers named Ann Miller, Bobby Van and, yes, Bob Fosse tapped, legged and danced their hearts out.

Best of all is that in Paul’s hands, “Kiss Me, Kate” is a hands-down love letter to show biz, to the impulse in people to charge out of nowhere and holler, “Hey, I know, let’s put on a show.” Here are the usual and unusually talented suspects like a star with an ego, a diva with a temper, a leggy, blonde hoofer, a bunch of guy dancers who could jump through the ceiling and land softly, stage hands and dressers and guys with rolled up newspapers and sleeves, a couple of mobbed-up bill collectors  and even a pipe-smoking general with eyes on a blonde and the White House.

These are the ingredients, the materials of many a musical—“Guys and Dolls” comes immediately to mind—and Paul treats them as if they’re lucky charms, never seen by man or woman ever before. He lets us experience them anew. The effect is like being hit repeatedly in the head with a soft rubber duck. It knocks you around, but you jump up for more.

This is not musical theater in the vein of “Carousel” of Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Stephen Sondheim. This is theater as a party, a screwball comedy,  where everybody has an ace up his sleeve. It’s a show, within a show, about putting on a show.

Here we have Fred Graham and Lili Vanessi, once married but now divorced, joining edgy forces to put on a production of “The Taming of the Shrew” in an out-of-town opening in Baltimore, where, as we all know, it’s just too damn hot. They hate each other so much that you know it’s true love. There’s also Lois Lane, the jazzy blonde playing Bianca, involved with Graham and her boyfriend, a profligate gambler named Bill Calhoun (the terrific Clyde Alves),  who plays Lucentio.  There is also a General, who looks more than vaguely familiar and who’s engaged to Lili, and First Man and Second Man, two spiffy (who wears spats anymore?) guys looking to collect a debt.

And there’s music and dancing, dancing and singing and, gosh, that fellow Alan Paul is sure in love with this stuff—and so am I.   Paul is the delirious guiding hand to this, and Christine Sherrill and Douglas Sills carry the show with their comic timing, their terrific voices and uncommon stage presence, not to mention comedic timing.  They can even make a song like “Wunderbar,” which is straight out of the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette McDonald songbook, seem sweetly new, not to mention the almost uncharacteristic (for Porter) passion they bring out in “So In Love.”

But watch what happens: out comes Robyn Hurder, an epitome of what I like to think of as Broadway Babies, proof why gentlemen prefer blondes, singing the almost demure “Tom, Dick or Harry,” then in the second act,  blasting out “Always True to You in My Fashion,” an out-and-out vamp of a song, which Hurder as Bianca-Lois delivers with call-back oomph.  Earlier, the second act opened with a “Too Damn Hot,” full of dance solos, rhythm and some blues, a whole backstage cast number that builds and builds to the point where the hope persists that it may never end.

This is also true for the famous “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in which Bob Ari and Raymond Jaramillo McLeod—they could both pass for Nicely Nicely Johnson—work their way through a soft shoe, while navigating their way through Porter’s blissful rhymes  (“Othello-good fellow”).  They come back again and again, until at last they don’t, which is oddly disappointing.

Shakespeare gets his due here—the scenes from the actual “Shrew” are done adroitly to much laughter and amazement, a result which we’re sure, was also achieved in London in days of old.

But then, in Paul’s hands, with Porter’s help, all this everything old is new again.

“Kiss Me, Kate” runs through Jan. 3 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall at Sixth and F Streets NW.