SFist Reviews: 'Taming of the Shrew' at CalShakes

The music and the set design in this latest production are both terrific -- with various tough-love jazz standards and mashed-up Madonna woven throughout, and a spare set with a second story platform, punctuated by a spiral staircase and an Eames armchair, which becomes the ivory tower of the fair Bianca, Kate's younger sister (played with Marilyn Monoroe-like hilarity by Alexandra Hendrikson). The show opens with a great dance number too, featuring all the talented men of the cast and introducing Bianca, as a stylized stripper, and Katherine as a reluctant, rage-filled sex symbol. And thoughout, Cooper's direction shines through for its cleverness, comic timing, and a desire to make of this play an edgy romantic comedy with a strange, out-moded premise.

The performers are also, all of them, terrific. Slate Holmgren lends some chaotic sympathy and sexiness to Petruchio; and as Katherine, Erica Sullivan is angry and willful without being shrill, or tiresome. She even has moments in the second act, where she's supposed to have transformed from impossible shrew to obedient wife, of believable, tender honesty. And as is par for the course with him in CalShakes productions, the hilarious Danny Sheie can't help but steal every scene he's in as Gremio, one of Bianca's suitors -- and it's clear that Cooper let him go nuts with the mincing and general scene-stealing.

But in the end, the play is what it is: an anachronism. The cast tries heartily, but fails, to gloss over Katherine's bizarre transformation -- not to mention the part where her new husband starves her into submission -- and her famous final-act monologue in which she pledges, and justifies, her undying obedience to her husband. We're meant to understand that she does this out of love, but the edits made to the script in this case do an even less convincing job than did the film version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of making the case for Petruchio and Katherine's falling in love. We get that they're attracted to each other, but we never really understand where Katherine's rage goes, or when. One minute she's determined to destroy everything in her path, her sweet sister included, and the next she's become a willing slave to a man she finds alluring and sexy. Betty Friedan is still not amused.