Review: Kiss Me Kate

It is one of the most complex and expensive shows to stage and director, Jo Davies, achieves the numerous scene changes with a smooth and slick efficiency. The play within a play relates the problems that befall the touring company who are presenting Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

As the story progresses the events on stage become all too familiar with the private lives of the actors, further confused when two crooks turn up demanding payment of a gambling debt.

Opera North’s customary mix of opera singers and stars from London’s West End musicals has this time not quite worked out, the vocally excellent Jeni Bern, in the leading role of Kate, rather too stiff and starchy for the Shrew, and Quirijn De Lang not quite in the mould of a swashbuckling Petruchio.

That left the door wide open for Tiffany Graves to steal the show as the sexy Lois Lane, dancing and singing her way superbly through the show-stopping Why can’t you behave and Always true to you darling in my fashion.

There is not a weak link anywhere in the rest of the cast and with the luxury of an opera orchestra, the American conductor, David Charles Abell, has here recreated the original Broadway score.

Further performances at the Grand Theatre tomorrow night and 24, 30 & 31 October, before touring to Newcastle, Salford and Nottingham.

David Denton