Petruchio (Eric Hissom) and Kate (Jean Tafler)

The Taming of the Shrew

By William Shakespeare
directed by Jim Helsinger
Grand Gala Opening of the Margeson Theater (300 Seats)

No storm in nature rails like the fury of Kate. Self-centered and demanding, Kate meets her match in Petruchio, who vows to tame her. First, he insists that she is the embodiment of gentleness and patience, then he magnifies her dreadful behavior. The result is a sparkling, boisterous comedy set during the Italian Renaissance and performed in classical commedia dell' arte style.

Beautifully designed, brilliantly staged and brightly performed Shrew!

The Orlando Weekly
By Al Krulick
Published 12/6/01
Pictured: Petruchio (Eric Hissom), Kate (Jean Tafler), Bianca (Sarah Hankins) and Lucentio (Richard Width)

The Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival opened its new Ken and Trisha Margeson Theater this past weekend with an absolutely captivating, wildly antic and thoroughly engaging production of "The Taming of the Shrew," the Bard's naughty, bawdy comedy about the battle of the sexes. Director Jim Helsinger's madcap, commedia del l'arte style, filled with broad physical comedy, lewd double entendres, and over-the-top comic characterizations, seems to mirror the joy and high spirits that the company must be feeling in finally having its own permanent, indoor home.

And what a home it is! The theater's $3.5 million renovation at the John and Rita Lowndes Shakespeare Center turned the old Orange County Historical Society Building into a state-of-the-art, 350-seat, thrust-stage house that is large enough to accommodate Shakespeare's most expansive shows, yet intimate enough to encourage a warm involvement from its onlookers.

The set, the sound and the lighting are all excellent and, in its opening show, Helsinger took full advantage of designer Bob Phillips' trap-door-filled, colorful, playing area; James E. Cleveland's cartoon-inspired soundtrack; and Eric Haugen's circuslike illuminations. This Shrew was not only one of the best and funniest I've ever seen, but its production values also were the sharpest and most creative I've witnessed in 10 years as a Central Florida theatergoer.

The superb cast was up to the show's frantic pace, which simply didn't let up from the first joyful cacophony to the final bit of "shtick" some two and a half hours later. By stressing the script's visual potential, Helsinger wisely overcomes an inherent problem in staging any Shakespearean play for a modern audience: its incomprehensible language and allusions, which may have been understood by his Elizabethan contemporaries but are too often lost on today's crowds.

So, Helsinger has his spirited troupe fly about the stage like the Three Stooges on steroids. With acrobatic aplomb and split-second timing, the frenzied actors engage in nonstop pratfalls, sight gags, funny faces, clown routines and brilliantly brought off comic fight scenes, all proving that action does speak louder than words. And, in this case, much, much louder!

Prominent in the cast are the two leads, Eric Hissom as Petruchio, the gentleman from Verona out to "tame" his shrewish bride, and Jean Tafler as Katherina, "also known as Kate the curs'd." Once again, Helsinger manages to solve a thorny problem: how to present a 400-year-old piece to a modern, politically correct audience. By having his heroine emerge "tamed" but not broken by play's end, he gives us a battle of equals. The acceptable arrangement of power-sharing satisfies the play's needs, as well as our own.

Special mention must go to the brilliant clown work created by the entire ensemble, but especially to Christopher Patrick Mullen as Tranio; Brad DePlanche as Grumio, and Arik Basso as Biondello. All three of these hugely talented performers have moments of unbounded exultation. Their level of expertise in knowing just how far to go -- and then going even farther -- exhibits the kind of training and experience that is, all too often, not seen on our local stages.

Other performers who make the most of their lesser roles are company veteran Richard Width as the lovesick Lucentio, Edmund J. Kearney as Baptista, Tom Pickett Taylor and Kermit Brown as unsuccessful suitors Hortensio and Gremio, and the stentorian-voiced Ron Schneider as Vincentio, a wealthy citizen of (everybody lean to the left!) Pisa.

"The Taming of the Shrew" is a comic masterpiece that needs a strong and wise company to bring out its true potential. The Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival is more than a match for this timeless work. Beautifully designed, brilliantly staged and brightly performed, it is a theatrical jewel which shines and satisfies. Rush to see it -- and if you have to knock someone over to be first in line, just make sure the sound effect is turned up loud!

A Sumptuous New 'Shrew'!

By Elizabeth Maupin
The Orlando Sentinel
December 5, 2001

Petruchio's feet are hurting.

He has pulled off one of his tall suede boots, and now he has to get the blasted thing back on. So he asks the closest person for help -- a man sitting in the front row at the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's new Margeson Theater, who obligingly helps Petruchio pull up his boot and sends him on his way.

The festival's latest production of The Taming of the Shrew can be described as many things -- absurd, affecting and even frenetic to the point of exhaustion. Yet it's the ingenious ways Shrew's actors use their wonderful new theater space that make this show different from all the ones that have gone before.

When a cast member wanted to commune with a theatergoer outside at Lake Eola, where the festival has performed nearly all of its Shakespeare since 1989, that actor had to descend a flight of steps from a high stage to the audience as if he were crossing a moat. At the Margeson Theater, the stage is floor-level, a foot or two from the seats, and the cast practically performs in the audience's laps. If an actor has a particular lap in mind, as one of them does in this production, all he has to do is sit.

In director Jim Helsinger's new staging of Shrew, the audience is part of the show: An actor is likely to turn up right next to you, or behind you; he may appear from a magic box at your feet, and if you're lucky he'll give you a kiss. Watching the cast members cavort on the three-quarter thrust stage, you find yourself checking out the faces of the theatergoers on the other side of it: When they're laughing fit to split, you're inclined to laugh that way too.

Helsinger has based this Shrew, one of Shakespeare's first comedies, on commedia dell'arte, the 500-year-old Italian performance style that might better be described as The Three Stooges in tights. The Stooges and their cousin Road Runner are everywhere in Helsinger's show: in the way Petruchio manages his servant Grumio by wrenching his neck, in the way a furious Kate morphs into a raging bull, in the cartoon sound effects that accompany every piece of shtick.

Some of those jokes are almost as old as Shakespeare (the one-legged tilt, for instance, that everyone performs when anyone mentions Pisa), and some of them grow old quickly. But Helsinger keeps so many things popping all around you that you don't have time to catch your breath.

Pictured: Petruchio (Eric Hissom) and Kate (Jean Tafler)

Shrew has become something of a quandary for directors and for Shakespeare lovers as well. The familiar story of the wild woman and the blustery man who bests her means different things to modern audiences than it did in Shakespeare's time, and today's directors bend over backward trying to find ways to make Kate's so-called taming acceptable.

Helsinger hasn't found anything especially new to say on the subject. But he and his lead actors, Eric Hissom and Jean Tafler, do capture an emotional intensity, a shared ferocity, that each of them recognizes in the other. The show looks and sounds sumptuous in its intimate new theater. And Helsinger's strong cast finds humor in nearly everything they do.

Look at the way Christopher Patrick Mullen, as the extravagant servant Tranio, launches himself balletically about the stage, or the way Brad DePlanche, as the hearty Grumio, swallows all his hard knocks and goes pluckily on. Listen to the way Kermit Brown's Gremio speaks with a Porky Pig stutter, or the way Arik Basso's Biondello sounds like a teenage slacker, or the way more than one actor speeds headlong through his lines when he doesn't really have anything important to say.

Notice the deliberate silences of Edmund J. Kearney, whose sense of comic timing makes the most of Baptista Minola, Kate's frustrated father. And count the contestants when Kate and Petruchio arm-wrestle: It takes four or five men to keep this woman down.... Tafler and Hissom, despite all their grand exaggerations, do get to the quiet heart of their characters, who are more alike than anyone else knows. Hissom's flamboyant Petruchio can woo the audience all he wants, but there's a steady eye behind all his shenanigans. When he praises Kate, she greets it just as steadily, even though she's dumbfounded to be praised.

And when the two of them sit side by side, each of them with one shoe off to soothe their aching feet, and they share each other's misery as if they weren't the ones causing it, a little electric shock runs between them and out into the audience. These two are falling in love. All of the carousing in the world can't compete with that.

A COMEDY ROMP AND A PALPABLE HIT

TheOtherOrlando.com
by KELLY MONAGHAN
posted: 12/14/01

The Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival has inaugurated its brand new $3.1 million dollar theater in the heart of Orlando's culture gulch in Loch Haven Park with a production of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" that is a good old-fashioned, unalloyed hit.

"Shrew" tells the politically uncorrect tale of Petruchio, a swashbuckling rogue who woos and weds, not for love but for wealth. To make matters worse, he tortures and torments Kate, his unwilling bride, into what contemporary fundamentalists would call "gracious submission." By play's end, the proto-feminist of the play's title is preaching masculine supremacy and singing the praises of life as a stay-at-home wife. No one in his right mind would write a play like that today!

Director Jim Helsinger has wrapped his production in the madcap style of old Italian commedia dell' arte with a touch of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure thrown in for good measure. At first I was afraid this was a signal that he didn't trust the material but I needn't have worried.

Helsinger and his talented, well-trained company, are in complete control here and the over-the-top treatment not only illuminates the text and the conventions that underlie it but also provides an ironic distance that allows a contemporary audience to hear Shakespeare's message afresh.

The lead roles are legendary star vehicles (Burton and Taylor played Petruchio and Kate after all), and Eric Hissom and Jean Tafler are up to the task. Hissom delivers a high voltage performance that never flags or descends to rant, while Tafler makes the transition from raging shrew to submissive (but still spunky) helpmeet both believable and touching.

One of the production's best conceits is playing Lucentio and Bianca, the play's stereotypical romantic lovers, as besotted ninnies. Richard Width and Sarah Hankins run with the idea and make it pay off beautifully. Helsinger has also done an excellent job in working with the low comic characters. Brad DePlanche as Grumio, Petruchio's long-suffering manservant, Christopher Patrick Mullen, as Tranio, and Arik Basso as Biondello are all excellent.

The show is packed with zany bits of business, pratfalls, sound efffects, and interaction with startled audience members and it all works beautifully. The audience I saw the play with was enthralled and often doubled over in hysterical laughter. They gave the company a well-deserved standing ovation.

The sets by Bob Phillips and costumes by Jack Smith were also first-rate. Indeed, the opening of this new theater marks a watershed event in Orlando theater. O-Town now has a resident professional company that can hold its head high in the company of much more established regional rep companies. I was especially pleased to note that many of the actors in the show have been with the Shakespeare Festival for several seasons. Orlando residents will have the great pleasure of getting to know a fine company of actors and watch them grow and flourish in a variety of roles. Visitors to Orlando can be assured of seeing top drawer Shakespeare when they tire of theme park fluff.

By all means, go see "Shrew." But hurry! The show only runs through December 23.

For reservations call 407-447-1700. Performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 7:00 pm, Friday and Saturday at 8:00 pm, and Sunday at 2:00 pm.

'The Taming of the Shrew' all tricks and colorful pranks

Daytona Beach News-Journal
Monday, December 03, 2001
By LAURA STEWART Fine Arts Writer

ORLANDO -- "The Taming of the Shrew," which opened Friday on the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's new main stage, was bold and brassy enough for the theater company's outdoor setting, on Orlando's Lake Eola.

Costumes and lighting were vibrant, sound effects electrifying and -- most crucial -- direction, by Jim Helsinger, bordered on the buffoonish. That was fun; the Shakespearean comedy that resurfaced in 20th-century guise as "Kiss Me Kate" begged for the camp twist Helsinger gave it, to cast its unavoidable sexism into the light of something more charming and entertaining -- eccentricity.

The comedy's story isn't entirely comic, after all. Katerina, or Kate (Jean Tafler), is a maniacal spitfire, the older daughter of rich Baptista Minola (Edmund Kearney) who is so violent and willful that she seems unbalanced. She taunts her pretty younger sister Bianca (Sarah Hankins), and causes trouble everywhere she goes -- even offstage, as indicated by ear-splitting sounds of fistfights and breaking glass.

But Baptista loves both daughters, and declares that sweet Bianca won't marry until her sister does. It's a brilliant commedia dell'Arte impasse: Even if anyone wanted Kate, her crankiness would make her defy the demand for marital submissiveness. To complicate the plot, a young Pisan gentleman arrives in Padua and bumps into Bianca. Lightning strikes, and to win her, Lucentio (Richard Width) trades places with his servant, Tranio (Christopher Patrick Mullen), and woos her disguised as a scholar.

It's all tricks and colorful pranks until another suitor, impoverished Petruchio from Verona, arrives. Bianca's suitors pay him to marry Kate so Bianca can marry. To do that, clever Petruchio (Eric Hissom) has to "tame" wild Katerina; to win audiences in these post-feminist days, Helsinger presents the process as a free-for-all in which Kate and Petruchio, who is at least as wild, tame each other through mutual respect.

That's the biggest trick of all, and one that almost works in a play that melds the venerable commedia dell'Arte tradition with such buffoonish modern icons as PeeWee Herman and the goofy, generic Surfer Dude. All the razzle-dazzle on and around the stage distracts from the archaic paternalism that pervades the play. When Mullen slips into his hilarious PeeWee-inspired impersonation or outlandish clowns run in and out of candy-colored sets, whimsy comes close to masking an underlying seriousness that, in the end, somehow transforms Kate and Petruchio into a conventional couple....

                                                                 Last Updated: 05/06/2007                    Copyright Orlando Shakespeare Theater