Party like it’s 1999

Another op’nin, another revival of Kiss Me, Kate. The Crucible‘s Christmas musicals are usually worth looking forward to, and this one is no exception. In terms of execution, it’s up there with their (stunning) revivals of My Fair Lady and Show Boat, and that’s very high praise indeed. Rebecca Lock’s thrillingly-sung Lilli Vanessi is a glorious creation, there’s a tight 11-piece band giving an impeccable account of Cole Porter‘s impeccable score, Matt Flint’s choreography is a dazzling, showstopping joy to watch, and director Paul Foster carefully negotiates the minefield that is the show’s book and manages to make the central relationships touching as well as funny. It’s great, it’s running another week and a half, you should go.

You can feel a ‘but’ coming, can’t you? It’s nothing to do with anyone in the cast or the creative team. The reason I hesitated to book a ticket is simply that this production is using the rewritten version of the book created for the 1999 Broadway revival (which played in London a couple of years later and has been released on DVD), and I really don’t love this version of the script. For that revival, Sam and Bella Spewack’s original book (built around The Taming of the Shrew, and if you’re reading this you probably don’t need a synopsis) received an uncredited rewrite by John Guare (and one wonders how Mr. Guare might feel about another playwright providing uncredited rewrites on a revival of The House of Blue Leaves or Six Degrees of Separation after his death but before the work is out of copyright), and it isn’t an improvement. It’s not a disaster on the level of the revised script for the recent London revival of Chess, but it’s broader and coarser and less subtle than the original script, it turns Harrison Howell, Lilli’s fiancé, into (even more of) a caricature (explicitly a caricature of General MacArthur), it misguidedly shoehorns in From This Moment On, which is a perfectly lovely song but one that doesn’t belong in Kiss Me, Kate (yes I know it was in the film, don’t @ me), to give Howell something to sing, and it doesn’t solve the material’s central problem, which was just as big a problem in 1999 as it is now, which is that the world has changed and it’s far more uncomfortable than it was in the late 1940s for us to laugh at a story of a man establishing dominance over a woman by (among other things) spanking her.

The trouble is, the original 1948 book also presents problems these days, and I mean on top of the spanking. As last year’s Opera North revival showed, the original book offers a trip straight back to 1948, and not just in terms of casual sexism. It’s significantly less cartoonish than John Guare’s rewrite – it would have to be – but it’s also, in places, glacially slow, and it would certainly benefit from some judicious trimming. On the other hand, it doesn’t include Guare’s witless rewrite of the Harrison Howell scene, or shoehorn in a Porter standard that wasn’t written for this show and doesn’t work in it. I can see why people choose the 1999 script, but the original, for me, is richer.

And having said all that, this revival really is terrific. The sparks fly between Rebecca Lock’s Lilli and Edward Baker-Duly’s Fred, Amy Ellen Richardson is a fine, funny Lois Lane, Dex Lee is a devilishly charming Bill, Layton Williams burns up the stage in Too Darn Hot, and there are memorable contributions from every member of the company, whether it’s Cindy Belliot’s spectacular high belt in the opening number or Simon Oskarsson’s equally spectacular trumpet playing at the top of the second act. For the first show I’ve seen in 2019 (it wasn’t going to be the first, but news headlines in the weeks before this opened convinced me that perhaps my first show of 2019 should not be a story about a journey to Hell), Paul Foster and his company have set a very high bar for the rest of the year.

And it’s also given me a new item for the top of my theatrical wish-list: can somebody please cast Rebecca Lock as Lily Garland in a revival of On the Twentieth Century? Pretty please? With sugar on?