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Take a Sentimental Journey Back to the 1950s in A Noise Within's "Shrew"
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Steve Weingartner and Allegra Fulton. Photo by Craig Schwartz.
How serious can you be when you hear Dean Martin singing "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie" and there are a few Three Stooges-like antics?
That's the kind of mental space to which director Geoff Elliot takes us in A Noise Within's production of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" in Glendale. Set in the 1950s with all the right fashion cues by costume designer Soojin Lee, we're still in Italy (Padua to be exact), but this is post-World War II, during the reign of June Cleaver visions and before the women's movement.
Baptista (Apollo Dukakis) is an old-fashioned father. He wants his eldest daughter, Kate (Allegra Fulton) to marry before his younger daughter, Bianca (Jane Noseworthy). That might seem simple until you see the angry Kate.
Dressed in a brown suit jacket and brown loose trousers, she has a mannish quality--in a Katharine Hepburn sort of way. Her sister is pretty in a pastel peach dress with pumps. The brown-haired wren versus the blonde canary.
This is not to say that Fulton resembles the slim, athletic Hepburn. Fulton has strong, angular features, a characteristic that is emphasized by her scowling. Her match is Steve Weingartner's Petruchio. Weingartner is bald, with a large head and almost over-sized hands. He also has an impish smile which, along with a few Stooge-like gestures and actions along the way (usually involving Alan Blumenfeld as Petruchio's Grumio), softens what can sometimes be perceived nowadays as the abusive aspect of the taming of this shrew.
In contrast, Noseworthy as the much sought after Bianca is small-boned and blonde and her eventual match, Antonie Knoppers as Lucentio, is tall and slender with a full head of wavy medium brown hair.
Antonie Knoppers and Jane Noseworthy. Photo by Craig Schwartz.
Director Geoff Elliott has successfully sidestepped the problem of staging this particular Shakespearean comedy, making is more digestible to the liberals and feminists amongst us. Kurt Boetcher's set design suggestions a light airiness instead of solid confining spaces. Just be warned you might leave the theater humming "Mambo Italiano" or "I Got You Under My Skin."
"The Taming of the Shrew," A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd. Glendale. Plays in repertory. $15-$44. Ends May 17.
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