WONDER BARD
Cole Porter’s musical takes a while to warm up, but once it does it’s Too Darn Hot!
Kiss Me, Kate (London Coliseum) Verdict: Hail, King Cole ★★★★✩
Julie (Royal National Theatre) Verdict: Souped-up Strindberg ★★★✩✩
TOO DARN hot, went the music as we began a pulsating second half of Kiss Me, Kate. At which the woman beside me shivered and reached for her wrap, such was the chilling gale from the London Coliseum’s air conditioning.
It so happens I prefer a cool theatre, but the hugeness of the auditorium and the orchestra pit’s gulf between stalls and stage seemed to cool the mood. A stodgy first-night crowd for this lamentably short London run.
Opera North’s production of Cole Porter’s great Shakespearean skit is an opulently musical evening. It is marred only by lifeless spoken passages and a sluggish start.
Some opening ‘funny’ business with a character who wants to go to the dentist interrupts the luscious overture. The pace conks out almost completely in scene 3. I was about to call the RAC to summon some jump-leads.
But Porter’s tunes — So In Love, Where Is The Life That Late I Led — and his brilliantly inventive lyrics rescue the enterprise, as does the singing. Wunderbar it is, indeed, by the end.
We are backstage in a Forties Baltimore theatre where a hammy troupe is performing The Taming Of The Shrew.
Shakespeare’s comedy of a spirited woman being quelled by love is mirrored as the troupe’s leading man, Fred, jousts with his tricky star actress Lilli.
Along the way, two comical mobsters arrive to collect a debt they think the philandering Fred owes them, and Lilli is courted by a friend of the U.S. President.
Quirijn de Lang is suitably raffish as Fred. Stephanie Corley makes an almond-faced, full-bloom Lilli. Balancing them is a younger couple, fellow thesps Lois Lane and her broke beau Bill.
I was initially unsure about zoe Rainey and Alan Burkitt as these two but doubts were dispelled in the second half, Miss Rainey extracting bags of fun from Always True To You In My Fashion. Handsome Mr Burkitt wows with a balletic version of the song Bianca.
Yes, its storyline may, by today’s Calvinist standards, be a mite chauvinist, but that is alleviated a little with I Hate Men. ‘ He may have hair on his chest but, sister, so has Lassie.’
Some of the gags creak — ‘the doctors call it magnesia’, says one character, meaning to say ‘amnesia’ — but who can resist a show with the ingenious wit of Brush Up Your Shakespeare, delivered by the pintanda- half duo of mobsters (Joseph Shovelton and John Savournin). By the end, even the coldest audience will embrace this Kate.
MISS JULIE (now shorn of its ‘Miss’) has been given a chic reworking at the Royal National Theatre. Polly Stenham’s version of Strindberg’s 19th- century Scandinavian classic is good-looking and agreeably short. But it has lost some of the shadings that make the original satisfying.
Spoilt heiress beds her family’s chauffeur/security guy, in the process wrecking his engagement to the household’s cook. The affair also drives heiress Julie towards self-destruction.
That glum plot is given plenty of glamour in Carrie Cracknell’s production. Vanessa Kirby is persuasive as the coked- up minx. Eric Kofi Abrefa, who has biceps thick as tree boughs, is her hunky lover.
I could have done without prolonged disco-dance scenes, which are a blatant attempt to fill the big Lyttelton stage.
And is Thalissa Teixeira too attractive as the cook? To achieve tragic force, the show needs a greater sense of law of the jungle, of the man using both women for his selfish ends. But there is a stylish sense of theatre here and the acting shines.