The Taming of the
Shrew Shakespeare Santa Cruz, 2004
Rob Pratt - Metro Santa Cruz
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has
remained one of the playwright’s best-loved works for the tart language between lead characters Kate and
Petruchio, even though it promulgates ideas about the roles of husbands and wives that make contemporary
audiences wince. In the opening show of the summer 2004 season, Shakespeare Santa Cruz presents a
classy new vision of Shrew…that manages to sharpen the cutting
battle-of-the-sexes wordplay while blunting some of the objectionable Elizabethan ideas about a wife’s
duty to her husband.
Director Tim Ocel has trimmed out Shakespeare's opening scene
“play-within-a-play” conceit and placed Shrew in post-World War II and
pre-Cold War America. Ocel’s vision is highly cinematic, playing on a minimal set by Kate Edmunds done
in shades of gray like a black-and-white film.
B. Modern’s crafty costumes work like colorization added to black-and-white
scenes in the movie Pleasantville. As characters open their minds to new
possibilities in life, their aspects morph from shades of gray to vibrant color.
The visual effect and Ocel’s shrewd direction smooth out many of the rocky
ideas about the subjugation of women to male dominance in Shakespeare’s text. This Shrew looks and plays like a screwball comedy; the battle of wits between the
sharp-tongued Kate and the uber macho Petruchio echoes legendary exchanges between Katherine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy (even though Robertson Dean, who plays Petruchio, looks more like Robert Mitchum).
Ocel creates a beautiful moment even when the play has concluded. After the
women exit following Kate's climactic speech, the men lounge in well-appointed parlor as Gregg Coffin’s
jazzy soundtrack rises from the sound system. The men are completely oblivious to the women’s movement
that within two decades will upset the well-ordered world of dominant husbands and obedient wives in
America of the late 1940s.
As usual, Shakespeare Santa Cruz has assembled a stellar cast. Dean, in
particular, is a brilliant choice for Petruchio. He’s a phenomenally good actor whose big, muscular
physique and natural ease onstage make Petruchio look as if he could take on half of the patrons in the
outdoor Festival Glen in a Greco-Roman wrestling match and still deflect Kate's well-aimed verbal slings
and arrows in unfaltering iambic pentameter. Blaire Chandler as Kate is small and wiry like a rapier,
and with a mere malevolent glare she generates shock waves that rush from the stage and rattle among the
trees.
Morgan David and Cody Nickell as the lovers Bianca and Lucentio in the more
traditional romance that parallels Kate and Petruchio’s are also very appealing. Supporting players are
likewise top-notch. SSC veteran Mike Ryan and bottle-blond Lucas Alifano earn many laughs as servants
who conspire with Lucentio in the wooing of Bianca.
Robertson Dean
The Taming of the Shrew
Shakespeare
Shakespeare Santa Cruz
2004
Photo: r.r. jones