<b>THE TAMING OF THE SHREW</b> Festival Theatre/Stratford Festival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Stratford Festival
Through October 10
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW Festival Theatre/Stratford Festival

“The Taming of the Shrew” may be the most controversial of Shakespeare’s plays, a look at Kate (Deborah Hay) and Petruchio (Ben Carlson).
He’s a rich Italian aristocrat and she’s the older daughter of a rich Italian aristocrat and is considered an impossible human being.
The question at the end of the play is whether Kate has changed or has simply decided it’s simpler in her time to be subservient.
The idea that a woman should be submissive to her guy is controversial to our society and certain religious groups and certainly isn’t common in the theater community.
Of course, you can argue this is all a sham, as the staging of the play is to persuade the drunken Christopher Sly (Carlson) that he’s a noble and the play about to be staged is about him.
The play is rooted in two medieval customs, control of dad over marriage of children and the need to marry them off in sequence, especially the daughters.
Still sound familiar?
Baptista Minola (Peter Hutt) has a long line of candidates from younger daughter Bianca (Sarah Afful), who can’t be married off until Katherina is married and there is the problem of much of the play.
Kate is universally perceived as a shrew and that’s a black mark in the marriage market.
So, the big effort is to get her married off so Bianca can be married and happy.
The entire play is borderline farce with all of the strange acts of Petruchio and the double switches and plotting and strange things going on as Petruchio seeks to break Kate.
In the end, he may or may not have and you can discuss it on the way out of the Festival.
The most fascinating thing about the production is the backstory, with Hay and Carlson married in real life and immediately agreeing to the casting when asked.
Director Chris Abraham does a nice job matching the comedy of stage events and the view of courtship which a lot of audience members were uncomfortable with.
There’s also Julie Fox’ set on a fairly narrow thrust stage of the Festival Theatre.
Abraham is working with a top-to-bottom strong cast, especially Hay and Carlson, along with Hutt and the suitors for Bianca, Lucentio (Cyrus Lane), Hortensio (a wonderful Mike Shara), Gremio (Michael Spencer-Davis) and Lucentio’s servant Tranio (Tom Rooney).
There’s one of the tricks of the plot among those people.
The comment about Shakespeare is that he’s universal and modern.
You can agree with that about this show and you can certainly argue about what the playwright possibly intended as a happy ending, with weddings.
This production of “The Taming of the Shrew” is strong and worth seeing, as long as you realize there are certainly some Elizabethan ideas in the script.

A.W.