Kiss Me Kate! @ Barbican Theatre, London
There’s one thing, and one thing only I’m interested in…and that’s Adrian Dunbar singing…
And he does! as well as dancing and rocking some old timey thigh high boots! Kiss Me Kate is charming and joyful and very, very funny. It also has a great revolving set so you can literally go behind the chaotic scenes at any point — where there is always something happening. The cast also wander along a balcony and down the fire escape stairs. Marvel at Georgina Onuorah’s Bianca nonchalantly wiggling a semi-farthingale down those stairs! Enjoy the show from the heights of the balcony and you’ll get the bonus of seeing the cast get into position before they put on a show of puttin’ on a show.
This musical is not about the big dance set pieces, so much as the songs. It’s a musical about a musical about a play — and there are outbreaks of full-on spoken Shakespeare as we go into The Taming of the Shrew, before launching ‘sucking with diesel’-style back into another song. Not only is this about glamourous former stagey couple Fred and Lilli and their will they-wont they relationship, but there is also an ‘and a wee donkey’ moment too. Who knew Shakespeare and Cole Porter could do Line of Duty?!! Bartlett Sher, that’s who!
Catherine Zuber’s costumes are sumptuous, luxurious and old Hollywood, with the Shakespeare old-timey ones heading towards the comic. The now is very New Look. Stephanie J. Block as Lilli sounds beautiful, with a stunning range, and looks glamourous, torn between Dr Who Peter Davison doing American and ex-husband Fred ‘ Hastings, just like the battle’ Graham, whose name…and theatre…is about to be misused by a gambling colleague and theatre-crazed debt collecting gangsters. Georgina Onuorah as Lois Lane (!) lights up the stage, belting her big number and utlising the full stage.
Best of all are the stage-struck, literature appreciating gangsters, Nigel Lindsay and Hammed Animashaun, who charmingly get trapped on stage and launch awkwardly into a song and dance routine. We ‘brush up on our Shakespeare’ with some terrific rhymes, as they are passed canes and bowler hats and keep on going, growing in confidence, until there are jazz hands and high kicks! They also force everyone to act — at gunpoint. ‘Cos no-one makes mugs of them…
The stage is wonderfully utilised — with a cat walk thrusting out into the audience, for gangsters to heckle us to clap from, or Lois Lane to sit down on for a rest as she sings ‘Always True To You In My Fashion’ to a naffed off Bill. We really feel part of it, as do the orchestra who peek visibly out of an inset in the stage and heckle the gangsters into song and dance. Ofcourse Davison’s General Harrison Howell is a former flame of… Lois Lane…
In the movie version I’ve seen, there were more jazz inspired dances such as ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’. I was hoping for more dancing from Charlie Stemp as Bill Calhoun/Lucentio — instead he’s more of a comic romantic lead and gets some awful wigs. Lest you think we will be left holding a sprat when we should have been holding a mackerel, this is not that show. Instead he does get his moment, along with Jack Butterworth, as the whole cast let rip in a noirish jazz riff of ‘Too Darn Hot’. It’s very West Side Story ‘Jets’ inspired. Overall, it’s about the songs , not the dance breaks — but they are all ‘cooking with gas!’ Dunbar and Block have great chemistry and are lovely together duetting in ‘Wundebar’.
Jude Owusu is charming and dynamic as Harry Trevor/Baptista (father of the screaming Kate and genteel Bianca) and such is his stage presence that I wish he was on stage a whole lot more.
The ending is abrupt — but who cares as it’s been such a marvellous stagey journey?! Enjoy too the moment when Adrian Dunbar addresses the audience to apologise for the torture of Kate in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.
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