And what a romantic night it turns out to be. Willful Petruchio (played by tall, bearded Jack Birdwell) and his pretty, petulant Katharine (Donjalea Reynolds Chrane) meet, fight, marry, fight, make up and make a lovely couple. This feather-light production, directed with giddy doses of slapstick by Abigail Crabtree, softens Kate and Petruchio's chattering battle scenes and adds some clever twists. Crabtree and her designers have transported the action to the Gibson-girl era of the 1890s, and the period trappings froth things up. Jaunty music-hall tunes by Dennis Davenport introduce the scenes. Ladies in leg-o'-mutton sleeves announce the locations--"Meanwhile, back in Padua"--with vaudeville signs scripted in curlicues. All of Shakespeare's familiar gimmicks, the switched identities, unmarried sisters, worthy suitors, worried fathers, stumbling clowns, are intact, but they tumble forth from a cast dressed in confectionary costumes done in cupcake colors.
Pretty as it is, this Shrew takes its time catching the audience's full attention. The first 20 minutes, before the first real glimpses of Petruchio or Kate, involve a stage full of peripheral characters and many mouthfuls of exposition. Grumio and Gremio are easily confused. And which one's Hortensio and which one's Lucentio?
As the evening glides into what the French call "le bleu," the silky moments between day and night that color everything blue-gray, the mind too easily wanders from the talky business at hand. During the opening scenes of the play, competition comes from the rising hums of locusts in the park's tall trees, the scents of mimosa and cedar in the breeze, even the flickers of citronella candles on neighboring picnic blankets. All that intoxicating atmosphere makes concentrating on the Bard's convoluted speeches early in Act 1 just about impossible.
So give it time, pour another glass of Shiraz and tune back in as darkness falls. Everything becomes clear soon enough in Shrew, one of Shakespeare's most familiar, most done and redone comedies. In this spoof of marriage contracts and feminine stereotypes, Petruchio, the dowry chaser, accepts a challenge to "tame" angry Katharine Minola, a rich man's daughter whose younger, prettier sister, Bianca (Denise Pacific), can't marry her beloved, Lucentio (Justin Martindale), until Kate weds first. Kate keeps that from happening by keeping men at bay with torrents of verbal abuse and a tendency to lob objects at their heads.
In too many interpretations of Taming of the Shrew, Kate is played so shrilly that she's hard for anyone to love. She can so easily come across as a shrieking nutcase bruised emotionally by paternal neglect (Daddy favors Bianca) and a near-psychotic distrust of men. In this Shrew, however, things are different. Chrane avoids the obvious and makes her Kate funny and likable, a little bit of a klutz and, eventually, more than willing to succumb to Petruchio's considerable charms. Chrane's performance has one annoying flaw: her tendency to gasp audibly between lines, as if she has the hiccups. Otherwise, she's delightful. As for Birdwell's Petruchio, well, if he's not as memorable as he might be in the role, he's certainly more handsome in that kilt and leather kneeboots than most classical actors need to be.
This is a lovely play, but not one of Shakespeare's most quotable works. Among the few standout phrases to emerge from Shrew are "Thereby hangs a tale" and "I'll not budge an inch," not exactly on par with "To be or not to be..." (return next week for the review of the Shakespeare Festival's Hamlet). This play's importance lies in its bold explorations of female virtue and male domination. Kate rebels against the conventional requirement of the time that women remain modest, silent and obedient. She roars for attention and isn't above kicking someone in the keister to get it. Good for her. Imagine how this played for audiences 400 years ago.
Petruchio "tames" Kate by zeroing in on her need for control. In the best scene in the play, and the best-played scene in this production, the newlyweds return to Petruchio's house in the country, where the groom pretends that everything must be just so for his "perfect love." The meat is burned, so he doesn't let Kate eat a bite. The new dress she loves looks wrong, so he sends it back. The bed is made badly, so he denies her sleep. Shockingly cruel to his servants (who appear to be in on the ruse, another nice touch by director Crabtree), Petruchio attempts to "kill a wife with kindness." He smothers Kate with charm and compliments. Confused but flattered, she has no choice but to shut up and fall in love.
Shakespeare makes it clear that Kate isn't really a shrew, just misunderstood. Then at the end, he confuses us by having her spout a final speech about how a woman who is "forward, peevish, sullen, sour" must bend to the will of her "loving lord." Has she turned submissive? Or is it Kate who has tamed Petruchio into loving a difficult, strong-minded woman? Shakespeare leaves it to us to decide the moral of this story. But if that's too much work for a summer eve, lie back on the blanket and watch the moon rise.
Over at the Music Hall at Fair Park, nothing quite so magical is going on in the road company of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. That doesn't matter a whit to the scores of squirming moppets occupying the rented green cushions atop the $60 seats. These little victims of several years' indoctrination from the hit cartoon movie clutch their tattered Belle and Beast dolls and happily sing along with songs that stick in the brain like taffy. Days later, tunes from this "tale as old as time" will still be playing on the mental turntable till the strains of "It's a Small World" seem like a welcome alternative.
That's how the puppetmasters at Disney, those experts at the deceptively squishy hard sell, like it. Repetition is the key to kids' entertainment, and the live actors onstage in this show mimic, almost gesture for gesture, the movements of their animated counterparts. How humiliating that must be, even backed up by a fat road-tour paycheck.
In a Disney product, if it works once, do it again and then bring it back later as a reminder. In Disney's politically correct musical fairy tales, characters make the same jokes a jillion times, and the big songs repeat more often than a garlic sandwich. In Disney's Beauty and the Beast, there are no fewer than six repeats of various tunes throughout the show, four doubling up in the first act alone. This musical has more gratuitous reprises than Carol Channing's career.
At more than two and a half hours (90 minutes just for the first act), this show also goes long for big-budget children's theater (and that is, after all, all it is). The first half of Act 2 grinds away slowly with too much blather among the feather duster, Babette (Tracy Generalovich), Lumiere, the talking candelabrum (Rob Lorey), and Madame de la Grande Bouche (Monica M. Wemitt), who is some sort of laundry hamper or stereo cabinet.
The enchanted castle bursts the seams with talking furniture and dancing cutlery in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. A witch's curse has brought the pantry contents to life and turned a handsome prince (Roger Befeler) into a hairy troglodyte. The only hope for the cursed utensils is for a pretty girl to fall in love with the Beast, which will restore the furnishings back to human form. Meanwhile, until Belle (Jennifer Shrader) can be coaxed to love Beast, the salt cellars, sugar bowls, teapots and flyswatters remain imprisoned in a sort of Bed, Bath & Beyond set to music.
Beyond that, there's not much to this silly show. They pretend there's a message about inner beauty and true love and how a smart woman can change a troubled man into a prince, but we all know that's a crock (hey, where was the dancing crock?). Some good stage effects and sparkly fireworks wake up the tykes after the slow parts. Huge pieces of scenery slide around with cinematic speed, and at the end, when the Beast turns back into a pretty boy, they spin him like a whirligig midair. That's pretty cool.
But great music? No. Great acting? Dancing? No. No. Pity these actors a little for spending months on end dressed up as blenders and butter knives. For this they went to Juilliard. On the night reviewed, there was an announcement made that the role of the Doormat was being played by an understudy. Being the understudy for the role of the Doormat in a Disney musical serves as the very definition of "doormat." Some dreams die hard.
