Michael Tanner

Please let’s have more musicals like this Kiss Me, Kate at Opera North

Plus: does Wozzeck work in concert? Zurich Opera's one-night stand at the Royal Festival Hall certainly did

issue 10 October 2015

Opera North’s new production of Cole Porter’s masterwork Kiss Me, Kate has been so widely and justly praised that I wonder whether there is much for a week-later reviewer to add. It’s not as if the work needs much exegesis or critical commentary, though it may be worth pointing out that what we hear in Leeds amounts to a new critical edition, in which the conductor, David Charles Abell, has played a major role. Musicals have been treated with as little respect as Italian operas were in the 19th century, with arias and whole scenes added or subtracted according to the taste and abilities of the performers, the management’s judgment of the initial reception, and the casualness with which manuscripts and orchestral parts have been handled. So Abell has an alarming tale to tell of chances lost and coincidences redeeming them, of tap-dance routines only recently discovered — all the makings, really, of the plot of a musical involving the disinterment of an earlier musical, with scholars fighting for grants and attending conferences in desirable places, etc.

Kiss Me, Kate already involves a musical-within-a-musical, in that the leading pair are played by a divorced couple. This gives rise to some confusion, at least if you’re not trained in opera plots, since it’s often hard to tell whether the conflicts we are witnessing are taking place between Petruchio and Kate, or between Fred and Lilli. I gave up minding fairly early on, after a study of Ethan Mordden’s excellent article in the programme book, and previously his superb account in his authoritative six-volume history of the American musical — why is this writer, encyclopaedic and fascinating both as musical commentator and brilliant novelist, so little known in the UK? The main thing is that this lengthy show, clocking in at slightly more than three hours, has enormous élan and a satisfyingly maintained sense of period.

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