Kiss Me Kate

Ahead of their staging of Kiss Me Kate this month, Nancy Pellegrini talks to the director-choreographer of Australia’s Brave Touch Productions about the genius of Cole Porter

The success of this summer’s Mamma Mia may be kick-starting home-grown musical theatre (we hope), but China’s audiences are still hankering for the ‘real thing’, musicals with mega-watt smiles and English lyrics. This month, Australia’s Brave Touch Productions joins forces with Hebei Silang Performance Agency to present Cole Porter’s classic musical, Kiss Me Kate.

While the musical itself is less well known, Porter’s songs stand alone, such as ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show’, ‘From This Moment On’ and ‘Too Darn Hot’. The story is a play within a play, where feuding couples struggle to keep their emotions in check while mounting a production of The Taming of the Shrew.

Characters Fred and Lilli, who play Petrucchio and Kate within their production, are divorced, but – naturally – still in love. Wannabe star Lois is involved with Bill but she’s still stringing Fred along, as well as being the former paramour of General Harrison Howell, a war hero-cum-politician currently engaged to Lilli. We see laughter, tears, fights and flowers delivered to the wrong woman, not to mention two surprisingly erudite gangsters trying to collect on Bill’s gambling debt.

‘Fred and Lilli are my favourite couple in musical theatre, because they’re so realistic,’ says director and choreographer John Michael Burdon. ‘Their emotions and actions are understandable but also humourous and sometimes sad. Also, Kate is known as a “backstage musical”’, he continues. ‘Audiences are interested in seeing behind the scenes.’

Cole Porter called Kate, along with Anything Goes, his ‘perfect’ musicals, and Burdon agrees. ‘The music is jazzy and a lot of fun, it fits the storyline well, and there are huge dance numbers,’ he says. ‘It combines classic Shakespeare and musical theatre.’

More importantly for Porter, Kate was a triumphant comeback from tragedy in a previously unblemished life. Unlike contemporaries George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, Porter hailed from privilege and married money. While strictly a union of convenience to mask his homosexuality, wife Linda Lee Thomas had left an abusive husband and was content with social status and a passionate friendship.

But after forever changing America’s musical theatre landscape with songs such as ‘Night and Day’, ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ and countless others, in 1937 Porter crushed both his legs in a riding accident and spent an agonising decade undergoing treatments, surgeries and finally amputation. And although he composed ‘At Long Last Love’ just hours after his accident, his later work fell short of critical expectations, and several shows were outright flops. But just as the theatre world was relocating him to has-beenistan, he came back with a vengeance. Kiss Me Kate premiered in 1948, followed by Can Can, Silk Stockings and the film High Society, cementing his place in musical theatre history.

A long time Porter fan, Burdon founded Brave Touch Productions in 2010 to bolster Australia’s musical theatre sector. ‘I am proactive in providing more opportunities for Australian performers; in particular, for them to perform overseas,’ explains Burdon. To help achieve these goals, Kate’s audition announcement called for an all-Australian cast of varying experience. ‘There are many people in the industry that deserve to perform professionally, but have not had the chance,’ he continues. ‘Having professionals and talented amateurs working together benefits everyone.’

With a number of future China tours in the works, Brave Touch prides itself on making ‘bold choices on classics that enhance the work and challenge the status quo’. For example, their premier production of Romeo and Juliet (where arguably anything different is good) saw the Capulets and Montagues as feuding vampire families. ‘But sometimes if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it,’ he adds. ‘Some productions, like Kiss Me Kate, are perfect the way they are.’ Porter would agree.

Kiss Me Kate is at the Shanghai People’s Theatre from Wed 28 to Oct 3.