Kiss Me Kate, Barbican, review: Rollicking musical escapism for the summer
Kiss Me Kate at the Barbican, review and star rating: ★★★★
Stuffed with old-fashioned jokes that should probably have this show cancelled, hilarious comic sketches and some stunning pieces of choreography, Kiss Me Kate is a showstopper of a summer musical and much-needed feel-good energy amid this middling weather. It follows Follies and Anything Goes, further establishing the Barbican as an arbiter of taste for musicals.
Granted, the leading lady Lilli Vanessi is dragged non-consensually onto stage by two brutes, and she does punch her former husband, the male lead Fred, in the face, wonky moments by today’s standards. But they’re rather predictable complaints about a 75-year-old musical in an otherwise glossy production that burns with production value as well as feminist rage.
Lilli and Fred used to be married but following their divorce, the two actors are forced together to star in a production of The Taming of the Shrew. Fred is the morally corrupt producer who owes a debt to the local heavies. He gets a payout when the Shakespeare run is completed, hence Lilli, who plays the role of Kate, being dragged on stage against her will.
Bartlett Sher’s super-charged production feels like a response to recent critical reception about Sher being too restrained across recent adaptations of The King and I and My Fair Lady.
Featuring show-stopper versions of the original songs scored by Cole Porter, the whole piece is an energy hit. The real firework is It’s Too Darn Hot – about performing musicals in the summer in Italy – a blistering attack of high camp footwork. Lilli Vanessi’s I Hate Men, essentially a Golden Era diss track, is performed with hilarious snark and there’s cherished comedy value in Brush Up Your Shakespeare, a duet sung by the two gangsters in a sort of meta joke moment between set changes in the show within a show. The duo, played by Nigel Lindsay and Hammed Animashaun, pull of the kind of physical sketch comedy that is so much harder than it looks and can so easily feel flat.
Broadway star Stephanie J. Block commendably doesn’t dull Lilli’s rage, unwilling to let the wronged woman go down without a fight, despite the saccharine ending, and Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar pulls off that lecherous charisma that men like Fred trade in by instinct. Sure, there’s a world in which an updated script might flesh out the central pair’s story more, crafting an ending that does her justice, but that could be said for just about any 1940s sexist musical.
Put your morals in the cupboard and have a rollicking good time.
Kiss Me Kate plays at the Barbican until 14 September