March 23, 2019
Kiss Me Kate delivers a surprisingly bumpy ride, in the harsh light of post-Woke and post #MeToo.
Unlike certain classics—the current Fiddler in Yiddish comes to mind—it isn’t richer upon revisit; in fact, upon its last
revival, it even lost its status as the one Cole Porter show that didn’t
require any script meddling to stay in the canon. The minor libretto tinkering of the
previous Broadway production has been retained for this new staging, under the
direction of Scott Ellis at Studio 54; but it’s not enough to camouflage how
much, in terms of sexual and social politics, the comedy of Kiss Me Kate is will past its sell-by date. Oh, you can have lots
of debates about the fitness of certain classic musicals for contemporary
revival in the wake of Woke and #Me Too. And I’ve had them. (I’ll argue
passionately, for example, on behalf of A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum as one of the best farces ever
constructed, whose naughtiness is borne of harmless vaudevillian buffoonery.)
But the excesses of KMK are a lot harder to look upon benignly, because at the very
core is the imbalance provided by the Shakespeare play which provides its
inspiration, and is the basis for the musical within the musical, The Taming of the Shrew. No matter how
much agency you give the women, or how clownish and fatuous you make the men,
in either the backstage or onstage stories—and in this production, all of that is
taken to the max—there’s an unsettling, subtle undercurrent of smarminess to
the double entendres, exacerbated by a roster of
characters who exist in an era where casual sexism is a norm. If you ask me the
qualitative difference between KMK and
Forum, I’d say it’s that, in being a
farce about a man who wants to be free, Forum contains a universal objective that
informs the style and proportion of all the other choices. But KMK, in being only a comedy about romantic/sexual
negotiation, and having no deeper thematic resonance, can’t quite grab onto timelessness, and the artifacts of the
era in which it was created weigh it down just enough so that the attempted
frothiness seems forced.
Indeed,
as Kate/Lilli, Kelli O’Hara proves
herself a far defter comedienne than her previous roles might have indicated.
She grabs the role, with all its inherent flaws, and wears it like a trophy
robe. But the roaring exuberance of the attack draws attention to its
necessity.
Not
that all other hands don’t also give it a spirited go. And not that it’s
anyone’s disaster; if you take a couple of deep breaths and knock some sense out of your head, you can go with
intention. But you may also feel as if you’re witness to a farewell engagement.
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