[In the review below, Liston comments on the unique setting of director Richard Rose’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, adding that the two actors playing Katherina and Petruchio, while “very good actors,” were not well suited for these roles. Liston contends that as a whole, the production failed to spark enthusiasm.]

The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Richard Rose, sets and lights by Graeme Thomson, costumes by Charlotte Dean, Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario, 10 June 1997, two hours fifty-five minutes.

The Taming of the Shrew is so popular, despite its apparently politically incorrect message, that it frequently gets some kind of updating to make the production stand out from others. For the Stratford Festival Theatre's 1997 production director Richard Rose, omitting the Christopher Sly plot, set the play in New York's Little Italy (or Little Padua) in the 1960s, evoked first by a banner picturing the Statue of Liberty (while a ship's horn sounded), and then by about six lighted mini-buildings carried in on poles—the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, for example. (Camelot opened the Festival Theatre after extensive refurbishing over the winter, so spectacle seemed to be prominent in designers' minds.) Tranio arrived in a red car from the fifties, with tail fins, carried around his waist, and in a later scene several such cars were carried on.

As the immigrant Petruchio (Peter Donaldson), dressed in a shabby suit, told Hortensio of his father's death, both men crossed themselves and then spat off to the side, a routine repeated another time or two in the production. Later in the same scene, Grumio (Stephen Ouimette), in motherly fashion, spat on his master's face to wipe it clean for Petruchio's meeting with Baptista. Nothing if not homey, this production. Yet it suffered the fate common to productions that require the actors to speak in accents: the Italian often slipped, at times into Irish.

Katharina (Lucy Peacock) wore a black dress, accented with a red scarf to suggest her fire; the tamer Bianca (black-haired, rather than the usual blonde) wore a bell-shaped pink dress. But for the scene (II.1) in which Kate bullies her sister for knowledge of her suitors, set on a bed, Bianca wore the costume of the French-maid of porno fantasies, a black dress with white apron, while Kate was in a black slip. In short, it was a bondage scene. This motif carried over into Kate's meeting with Petruchio later in the scene: when she struck him, he carried out his threat to cuff her (220) if she struck him again by handcuffing her to him, effectively restraining her rebellious nature, at least for the moment. Before the scene had ended, she was crawling along the floor with her cuffed arm back between her legs, dragging Petruchio along in a chair on casters. She had been reduced to his horse, his ox, his ass, his any thing.

The wedding was very much a media event, among other things. Petruchio and Grumio arrived dressed as cowboys in chaps. Kate screamed offstage when she saw Petruchio, but marry him she did. The priest had to shield the statue of St. Anthony from Kate's garter, which Petruchio threatened to shoot at it, sling-shot fashion. Before leaving the astonished wedding party, Petruchio was careful to collect his fees from Bianca's suitors for his efforts on their behalf. A call for Alitalia ended the scene, as Petruchio and Kate left for their honeymoon at his villa in the old country.

Interpolated visual imagery dominated the production. St. Antonio's Brass Band processed across the stage a couple of times, most tellingly just as Hortensio and Tranio had abandoned their suits to Bianca. The band was leading a corpse to its final rest, and the Widow dropped a handkerchief for Hortensio. As the stage cleared, Bianca and Lucentio (as Cambio) appeared briefly above, disheveled, buttoning up. Before the play had ended, most of the men, including the Pedant and Baptista, had made cameo appearances in the same window, in various states of undress, with women (sometimes two) similarly unattired.

Marilyn Monroe made an appearance as a model, with her dress being blown up during the tailor's scene. The tailor—or rather designer—a black homosexual fop, had entered with the enhancement of a smoke machine. If truth be told, Kate rather enjoyed the bullying of the tailor, and her conversion to Petruchio's way of seeing the world began with his declaration that ‘'tis the mind that makes the body rich’ (IV.3.172), a little before the sun-and-moon scene, which was set in and just outside an Alitalia aircraft.

The final scene reinforced what earlier scenes had established: money was important always. Hortensio bet on his Widow's obedience with money from her purse. Having won his wager, Petruchio was careful to collect his winnings.

Kate's delivery of her advice to froward wives was ambiguous. She began with a touch of coyness, and clearly she had come to enjoy playing Petruchio's game. Yet there seemed to be no sense of irony in her delivery, so whether she had totally accepted Petruchio's ‘aweful rule, and right supremacy’, was not fully apparent.

Katharine and Petruchio finally had their turn in the window above, a married and bedded couple (the bed standing upright), happy, sharing the money that Petruchio had so lovingly earned.

Despite all the gimmickry, however, the production didn't really catch fire. Peter Donaldson and Lucy Peacock, two Stratford veterans and very good actors, are not ideally suited for the roles of the apparently rough-and-tumble Petruchio and the fiery Katharina that he had to tame to his obedient and ultimately happy wife.