[In the following review, Gardner comments on the retro, 1970s styling and music of Victoria Liberatori's staging of The Taming of the Shrew with the Princeton Repertory Theatre in 2000. Gardner contends that this seemingly odd setting offered an excellent commentary on the play by evoking the sexual revolution and the women's rights movement.]

Months after a Broadway revival of Kiss Me, Kate cleaned up at the Tonys, the Princeton Rep Shakespeare Festival has put a new musical spin on The Taming of the Shrew. And it's a way groovy one.

For this new Shrew—which will be performed Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings through Aug. 27, outdoors at Petoranello Gardens—company artistic director Victoria Liberatori enlisted composer Galt MacDermot, best known for scoring the classic hippie musical Hair, to write incidental music.

Quirky as it might seem, Liberatori's choice was actually quite practical. For one thing, MacDermot is no stranger to the Bard: the Canadian-born tunesmith won a Tony for his musical adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1972, and he has since provided music for several of Joseph Papp's productions of Shakespeare plays.

Perhaps more to the point, the Princeton Rep's Shrew is set just after the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, in the swinging '70s. And MacDermot's prerecorded soundtrack—segments of electronically enhanced instrumentals fusing funk and lite jazz, which are played intermittently throughout the show and during intermission—is only part of the fun.

In Liberatori's canny take on Shrew, Petruchio zips into Padua on a motor scooter, clad in a banana-yellow suit that would make Mr. Blackwell break out in hives—one of many authentically tacky retro costumes designed by Marianne Powell-Parker. When Petruchio's willful lover, Katherine, argues with her dainty sister Bianca, a poster of one of Bianca's rock idols is thrown and a 12-inch record is broken in the process. When Bianca's suitor, Hortensio, disguises himself as a music teacher to woo her, he brandishes an electric guitar and sports a tight, sequined get-up that could have been lifted from the Jimi Hendrix exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

By setting Shakespeare's battle of the sexes in the recent past, at a time when the sexual revolution and quest for women's rights were at full throttle, the director and her able cast point out the extent to which male-female relationships remain an endless source of confusion, frustration and amusement.

Donald Kimmel is a nearly perfect Petruchio, exuding just the right mix of alpha-male pompousness and dapper charm. Missy Thomas' Katherine is at times a bit too shrewish—kicking and barking at her colleagues, she can seem less like a headstrong feminist than a child in need of Ritalin—but her chemistry with the male lead is undeniable. The fireworks between Thomas and Kimmel are enhanced by Bianca Falco's athletic choreography, which brims with feisty, funny innuendo.

Erik Sherr's slick Hortensio and Julie Lund's hyper-flirtatious Bianca also work well together, and Richard Bourg is convincingly lecherous as Bianca's older suitor, Gremio. But some of the most entertaining performances in this Shrew come from actors playing less central characters. As Biondella, a domestic servant to yet another of Bianca's admirers, Karen Traynor is irresistibly spry and impish; as Petruchio's traveling servant Grumio, Joe Narciso is a sharp schlep in the great tradition of Woody Allen and Albert Brooks—a guy who knows and appreciates what fools these mortals be.

Can you dig it?