Good, clean, Cole-some entertainment.
Lately, all things past get their retro-props in the pop-culture present (even without the blessings of yesteryear-yenta VH1) and this is The Summer of Cole.
Immortal composer Cole Porter is the subject of the delightful De-Lovely (opening this weekend, see review on page 33), accompanied by an all-star soundtrack CD (reviewed in last week's Weekly). Now Nevada Theatre Company has mounted a dewy-fresh Kiss Me, Kate, in which Porter transformed Shakespeare into a song-and-dance man, for Spring Mountain Ranch's Super Summer Theatre season, under the stars.
Glancing back at last summer's adrenalized Oklahoma! and Smokey Joe's Cafe, and now Kate, this once-creatively moribund series is fast becoming a seasonal must-see, and at least partially blunts the kvetching (by this kvetch, among others) that Vegas theater companies rely far too frequently on overused vehicles with a half-century's mileage on 'em, while overlooking newer models. Say, those less than four wars old.
Not that this Kate invalidates the kvetching, but it embraces a vital caveat: If you're going to fall back on remember-when, make it memorable in the here-and-now.
Director Deanna Duplechain delivers a crisp, if musically trimmed translation of this cherished show-within-a-show, which gallops along for an intermission-less 100 minutes. (Nearly 10 tunes have been axed from the admittedly long-winded score, with at least one, "I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple," refitted as dialogue.) But the best of the best songs remain—"So in Love," "Another Openin', Another Show," "Too Darn Hot," "Brush Up Your Shakespeare"—rendered by a top-down talented cast.
Kate famously follows a traveling theater troupe staging Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in Baltimore in 1948, as the backstage, love-you/loathe-you bickering of the once-hitched lead actors (Simon Relph as Fred Graham/Petruchio and Tracy Blackwell as Lilli Vanessi/Kate) parallels their onstage, Bard-penned barbs. Meanwhile, a pair of black-suited, elocution-challenged thugs merrily menace Graham (it's a musical comedy, after all) for an unpaid IOU, actually the debt of a fellow actor, who forged Graham's signature.
"Another Openin'" launches the action, staged as an eight-minute playlet beautifully introducing the characters. From that number on, powerhouse performers Relph and Blackwell mark their territory as iron-willed, leather-lunged (and comedically capable) combatants, their pesky, lingering love still peeking through. He's pomposity and testosterone set to music on "I've Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua" and "Where is the Life That Late I Led?" She'd rattle the rafters if the joint had any on "I Hate Men." They coo cozily on "Wunderbar," and in separate takes, raise goose bumps on Porter's exquisitely romantic, "So in Love."
In a knockout supporting turn, Rosemary Willhide is mania in motion as brassy Lois (and Shrew's Bianca), a characterization that's part Betty Boop, part Rosie Perez. Wired and witty, she's a hoot leading the rambunctious "Tom, Dick or Harry" and proclaiming monogamy, more or less, in "Always True to You in My Fashion." Keith Dotson hits another highlight as the furiously fleet-footed point man on "Too Darn Hot," the ensemble putting out behind him on that classic set to a jungle-boogie beat. And as those huggable pugs who don ridiculous Shakespearean threads and hit the stage to keep an eye on their star mark, Steve McMillan and Bill Johnson, billed as "Man 1" and "Man 2," are Runyon-esque pixies. Mistakenly wandering into the show-within-the-show, the duo's singsong exuberance on the clownish "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" fulfills the tune's vaudevillian charm.
Wholesome and Cole-some, Kate plants a juicy one right on the kisser.