It was with some mild trepidation that I took my seat for Welsh National Opera’s Kiss Me, Kate. The musical has always been on my B list and would be on the Z list were it not for Cole Porter’s most wonderful songs. I have similar qualms about opera singers performing these songs. A skit by French and Saunders of Montserrat Caballé singing Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky springs to mind.
The plot mirroring the plot of the play that the troubled troupe is performing leaves me cold and I have little sympathy for any of the characters. While the vast amounts of slapping in the work also jarred to my modern sensibilities in a tale about women learning to be compliant, I couldn’t help feeling it was the two lead players both actually deserve. The musical can benefit from, and sometime does, some pruning as certain scenes do drag and aren’t really worh watching as this is after all, a vehcle for Porter’s songs and the zippy dance routines.The end is also crazy – the feisty Kate sees the light and becomes the dutiful female. No wonder the rest of the cast look baffled. Nowadays she would have sued her ex husband for assault and gone off with the rich old suitor and taken the cute dancing boy Paul with her for when hubbie nodded off (a trait alluded to in one of the second half less enjoyable scenes that slows down the momentum of the work).
Apart from the fabulous Too Darned Hot most of the best songs and music are in the long first half and then the second races along broken up by some humour and one pretty spectacular tap dance routine from Alan Burkitt.
But here we have a show that is as wonderous as WNO’s last musicals dalliance, Sweeney Todd, was a why? Jo Davies’ has created what I would regard as one of the best West End style shows that has ever graced the Donald Gordon stage thanks to meticulous designs from Colin Richardson, sharp direction, singing that while not perfect was certainly as good as you could want, and dance routines that frankly count as some of the finest I have been lucky enough to have seen.
Rosie Hay, Quirijn de Lang and Max Parker
Jeni Bern and cast
John Savournin and Joseph Shovelton
Amelia Adams-Pearce
The joint production with Opera North was first scene on that company’s touring circuit and transfers to WNO as smoothly as dancer Max Parker’s gorgeous dance style. It would seem much of the cast is as Leeds with some role splayed by WNO chrous members.
Back to the singing, well, yes I still found it a little problematic listening to opera singers Quirijn de Lang and Jeni Bern as Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi singing Cole Porter but “So in Love’ when sung by one then the other was still magical and their waltz nonsense “Wunderbar” fun. Jeni Bern had masses of dramatic presence with “I Hate Men”, for example, and it is not her fault that character is drawn poorly by Porter, making the denouement highly unsatisfactory. I would love to hear them both in Mozart roles.
members are more suited to the stage musical roles such as worldly and not so ditzy Bianca and hopeless gambler Lucentio, Amelia Adams-Pearce and Alan Burkitt, and both again contribute to this production’s star attraction – the dance routines.
Landi Oshinowo as Lilli’s assistant Hattie is fabulous and she kicks off the pulse racing tempo of the block buster routines with “Another Op’nin’, Another Show”. Her work with sensational Max Parker, Fred’s assistant Paul, in “Too Darn Hot” brings the house down.
John Savournin and Joseph Shovelton delighted the audience as the two not too right debt-collecting hitmen who find themselves roped into the plot, both on and off stage, and deliver a polished rendition of “Brush up your Shakespeare”. It is still that 400th anniversary after all.
Yet it was the footwork that made this show a great success and I doff my cap to Will Tuckett for sexy and scintillating choreography that just kept getting better and better from the blockbuster “Another Opening, Another Show” too a “Too Darn Hot” that was breathtakingly good.
From the vast list of WNO debuts in the cast list it is obvious that a cast of musicals hoofers to use the term from the musical itself have been recruited to give us a darned hot show. As with other opera houses now presenting musical as well as opera, the question why still hangs over the entire venture. At least with this show WNO gives audiences a good enjoyable night out with no gimmicks, no intellectual posturing, not grasping for novelty and innovation – a bit of a rarity in recent times and no doubt the purists and funding bureaucrats will be raising an eyebrow.
Gareth Jones conducts a lively, razzamataz, jazz hands waving performance of Porters’ score.
Until Saturday, December 10.
wmc.org.uk