First of all I must state that I am a great fan of Welsh National Opera. Some of the best nights I have spent at the opera have been at their performances. I look forward to all their shows and I would rate them second only to Covent Garden. I think they are original, daring and innovative so I was very curious to see how they would work outside their, if not comfort zone, then certainly their usual pastures. It seemed an odd choice for a leading international opera company to do an old Cole Porter Broadway musical. Playing alongside Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice in their Shakespeare400 strand, Kiss Me Kate was either a let’s-have-a-bit-of -fun, devil-may-care choice or a very shrewd one (geddit?). Kiss Me Kate is, of course, a musical adaptation of the bard’s The Taming of the Shrew, so far so good, but does it deserve a place in the WNO’s repertoire? On balance, I think not.
For a start, it’s not the best musical of its era. The book is not top notch and there are long passages, especially the sequences of Shakespears’s actual text – for those of you who don’t know, Kiss Me Kate is a show within a show – which are too long. They are never as funny as they are intended to be and consequently they are never very successful. The plot and character development could be much better and a lot of the songs seem almost arbitrary and out of place – I still think of Too Darn Hot as being from South Pacific. Secondly, this production was an odd mix (or, if one was being brutal, clash) of style and performance. The majority of the cast had been bussed in from the West End musical stage and were all excellent. But the show’s two main characters were played by opera singers and the chorus, some smaller parts and the director were all opera. It’s not that the opera lot weren’t good; it was that very often you could see the join.
Having said that, in fact Quirijn de Lang was an excellent Fred/Petruchio who sang beautifully, acted well and looked good. I really enjoyed his performance throughout. The bulk of the comedy was also provided by two opera singers, Joseph Shovelton and John Savournin, as the two caricature gangster gunmen. They performed as though the parts were especially written for them and their rendition of Brush Up Your Shakespeare was undoubtedly one of the evening’s highlights. Loved ’em.
But for me it was the artists from West End that should get all the plaudits. Landi Oshinowo, as Hattie, got the show off to a rousing start with Another Op’nin’, Another Show and she contributed to Too Darn Hot in which Max Parker as Paul also excelled – it was pity we didn’t see and hear more of him. But for me the star of the show was Alan Burkitt as Bill Calhoun/Lucentio. His dancing was sublime and his singing and acting were outstanding. He brightened up all the numbers in which he was involved but his Bianca was a real show-stopper and he was a joy to watch.
Although the chorus provided the proverbial wall of sound, there were perhaps too many of them and, if anything, they were sometimes a bit too heavy and operatic. Overall the show often lacked the pizzazz and energy that we have all come to expect from the big musical shows. The orchestra, under the baton of James Holmes, rose to the task but occasionally failed to provide the required oomph.
Was it a good idea for one of the world’s best opera companies to present a raunchy Broadway musical? Was it a good idea to lay off its own singers and effectively import virtually an entirely new company for this one show? All in all, and it pains me to say so, I think not. I think top quality opera companies, which WNO undoubtedly is, should stick to what they know and do best. If they ever decide to do The Mousetrap or Madame Butterfly on Ice I, for one, will be giving those shows a miss. On balance, Kiss Me Kate was probably not a very shrewd move. ★★★★☆ Michael Hasted 15th October 2016
