[In the following review of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Roger Rees in 1999 for the Williamstown Theater Festival, Brantley deems Rees's style excessive in its additions and interpolations, but uncovers several positive elements in the production, including Bebe Neuwirth's convincing Katherina.]

American cinema audiences of the 1950's and 60's were thrilled to the marrow when Italian movies demonstrated that you didn't have to make nice to make love. Sniping, scrapping and thumb-bitting as foreplay? How exotic, how earthy, how passionate it all seemed when Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastrolani, or Anna Magnanl and anyone, were butting heads.

Marriage Italian Style, the name of the most legendary Loren-Mastroianni collaboration, might as well be the subtitle of the fast, furious and overstuffed interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew that runs at the Williamstown Theater Festival through Sunday.

Directed by Roger Rees, who plays Petruchio to Bebe Neuwirth's Kate, this very animated production of Shakespeare's prickly comedy of courtship reinvents Renaissance Padua as a cartoon version of the world of De Sica and Fellini. Neil Patel's eye-popping set is Pop neo-realist, with clotheslines festooned with soccer jerseys and alley walls featuring oversize ads for tomatoes and pasta. The rowdy young men and women who hang out in the streets wear clothes (by Kaye Voyce) out of “I Vitelloni.” And when Petruchio meets Kate, they rumble with Vesuvian menace and many hand gestures.

It is a clever, if not entirely original, approach to a classic that tends to trouble latter-day theatergoers. And while the wiry and brittle Ms. Neuwirth and Mr. Rees may not be obvious stand-ins for the robust Ms. Loren and Mr. Mastroianni, there are moments when this shrew and her would-be tamer bring a vivid, self-surprising pleasure to their hostile mating dance, as though each had finally discovered another person who speaks the same language.

Mr. Rees, it should be noted, wants to have his passion and apologize for it, too. Even as this Shrew styles itself as a giddy male fantasy of romantic conquest, there is the sense that neither Kate nor Petruchio is altogether easy with the roles they play.

The production also takes novel liberties with the Christopher Sly “induction” sequence, which frames Shrew as a play within a play, to emphasize that it is by no means advocating the work's approach to marital counseling. Further distance is provided by the what-the-heck merriment of the staging, which keeps the pace athletic (soccer is a dominant motif) and lets the supporting actors riff outlandishly, like fledgling trumpeters at a jazz club. There is some merit to all of these elements. But you do wish that Mr. Rees had edited them down. The show, which includes such shrill touches as an Elvis-impersonating manservant and a goggle-wearing domestic staff out of Monty Python, suffers from a surfeit of invention.

Its energy and its obvious eagerness to please keep the audience with it, but the production doesn't stick together. There are bright flashes of insight throughout, especially (and unexpectedly) from Ms. Neuwirth, but they are often obscured by the evening's dominating glare. Even basic clarity is sometimes sacrificed to maintaining a high adrenaline level.

Interpreters of Shrew, also the subject of a current production by the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park, have usually seemed embarrassed by it. James M. Barrie reconceived the work (for Maude Adams, who played his Peter Pan) along the lines of his own What Every Woman Knows, turning Kate into a sly, sweet manipulator of her obtuse master. When the German director Max Reinhardt did Shrew in 1909, it was as a commedia dell'arte style romp that made it clear no one was to take Petruchio seriously.

Mr. Rees incorporates both of these traditions, and then some. The program for the show features academic quotations on topics like “inward aggression,” “parental deprivation” in Tudor-Stuart England and “negative reinforcement.” It is best to ignore these, or you will really be at sea.

The production begins with a late arrival's disruption of the audience. That's Mr. Rees, doing a boisterous take on Christopher Sly, the drunken taverngoer, for whom the story of Shrew is performed in Shakespeare's original. (Theatergoers unfamiliar with the play are unlikely to know what's going on.) In this version, Sly is arrested by a tough, night-stick-wielding police officer, who happens to be played by Ms. Neuwirth.

Like much of what follows, this prefatory scene has an appealing verve, but it isn't altogether thought through. Mr. Rees is clearly better at plumbing individual moments than at connecting them. And he indulges his actors in ways that finally serve neither them nor the play. When the servant Blondello (Sam Breslin Wright) describes the arrival of Petruchio on his wedding day, it turns into an applause-milking standup performance (with interpolations) that eclipses Mr. Rees's subsequent entrance.

A certain license for excess must be allowed summer theater. And Mr. Wright's Blondello, along with his fellow servants Grumio (David Aaron Baker) and Tranio (Kyle Fabel) do give off an enjoyable vitality. So do Neal Huff and Carrie Preston as the lovers of the subplot, Lucentio and Bianca, Katherina's sister, here presented as a spoiled Italian princess in a headband. But they could all benefit from some streamlining of shtick.

This is especially the case because Mr. Rees clearly has more on his mind than slapstick. His own Petruchio, while presented as a slightly seedy, mercenary greaser who wouldn't be out place at an Off Track Betting parlor, is also given to serious moral doubts. Mr. Rees, a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran who can play with the comedy's language as though it were a beach hall, provides some intriguingly shaded line readings. But he also often seems out of place in his own production.

He is by far at his best in his scenes alone with Ms. Neuwirth, who is the evening's real revelation. This perennially droll actress, justly celebrated for her work on Broadway (Chicago) and television (Cheers), has an arch, contemporary style that would not seem to lend itself either to Shakespearean language or the tempestuous Kate.

Yet without altering her eccentric signature delivery, she gives her much abused, much abusing character a credible psychological center. Ms. Neuwirth always exudes both the beleaguered air of the underdog and the highhandedness of the diva, and she mixes those traits quite touchingly here.

It is not an entirely convincing performance. But by the time she gets to Kate's notorious submission speech, Ms. Neuwirth has cannily laid the groundwork for its presentation by a woman who has learned that love demands compromise. There's an implicit wink along with real passion in the moment, as though she were catering to a fantasy that both she and her husband know is a joke at heart. Even before Ms. Neuwirth returns in police garb for a surprise postscript, this Kate has already had the last word.