E-Mail This Article to a Friend On with the Shrew! (continued)

Acting is what drives this Shrew, and the particulars that the company’s dancers supply are what drive this production. Larissa Ponomarenko’s Kate is a wounded, angry creature who high-fives Hortensio (karate kick to the chops) and low-fives Lucentio (stomping on toes) with equal alacrity and has real venom in her cat-claw jumps, not to mention the way she brandishes her long-stemmed bridal-"bouquet" lily. She wants more from a husband than the infatuation Bianca provokes, and settles for, and so she holds out till well into the second act, both her face and her body a cascade of shifting emotions. Perhaps it was just the shredded bridal skirt suggesting Balanchine’s Tzigane, but on opening night, Ponomarenko reminded me of Suzanne Farrell in her vulnerability and her dramatic timing. Carlos Molina as her Petruchio was high-flying and swashbuckling, loose and easy in the way he flung himself around and inebriatedly fell out of his jumps, equally masterful but not as intense or nuanced, with a touch of Howard Keel’s Fred Graham in the 1953 MGM film version of Kiss Me Kate. Friday night, Reyneris Reyes was more of a regular-guy Petruchio, the character benefitting from his decision not to shrug when Kate is substituted for Bianca. Pollyana Ribeiro was the independent cat to Ponomarenko’s abused but hopeful dog, disdainful not just of these suitors but of men in general, and even funnier than Ponomarenko in her flat-footed walk. Where Ponomarenko is nuanced, Ribeiro is mercurial; she’d be smiling at Reyes one moment and belting him the next. Saturday afternoon, Adriana Suárez went on for Ponomarenko (injured ankle) and came out terrorizing Padua as if she were Damien in The Omen, but her Kate, like Ribeiro’s, is a little girl as well as a woman, and Molina’s boyishness soon touched her heart. Both Molina with Ponomarenko and Reyes with Ribeiro had problems with the treacherous lifts of the closing pas de deux. Saturday evening, Yury Yanowsky and Lorna Feijóo made them look easy, and Yanowsky’s Petruchio, hard-nosed with hints of self-parody (the look of disbelief on his face every time Feijóo stomped on him), recalled Patrick Armand’s 1995 performances. He might have been a better partner for Ponomarenko. And perhaps Molina’s swagger would have brought out more dimensions from Feijóo. She expresses herself most fully through her dancing; her Kate always seemed to be waiting for Cranko to get serious.

Romi Beppu’s Bianca was delectably articulated, especially in her port de bras; she gave the character a lot of detail, shimmying her shoulders at Molina and Reyes and throwing in a couple of bad-girl swats at Ribeiro. Jared Nelson as her Lucentio was all-American callow, sterling in his Carnival solo and attentive to Beppu in their pas de deux not just with his face but with his body. Saturday afternoon, Karine Seneca was Bianca as homecoming queen, beautiful, entitled, pouty when crossed, not as lissome as Beppu or as detailed but logical and more consistent with Shakespeare’s conception. As her Lucentio, Sabi Varga was more self-aware in his acting (the quick glance at the audience between his two big Apollo-alluding lute strums, the raised eyebrows at the comic entrechats of Gianni Di Marco’s Gremio) and more European elegant in his bearing, but his Carnival solo was more self-conscious than Nelson’s and didn’t have the same speed. Saturday night, Pavel Gurevich and Sacha Wakelin didn’t quite connect. Their second pas de deux had its own partnering problems, and though he started out with big, assured jumps, he seemed to lose steam, or concentration, in his solo. Her good-hearted Bianca was a little prissy and self-righteous and had the least detail.

Mindaugas Bauzys is a show all by himself. Tall and noble of bearing, his Hortensio looks like the star, and he gets Bianca’s attention, but it’s soon obvious that he’s more interested in playing with his, uh, instrument than in dancing with her, and Bauzys puts the cock back into cock rock. Clapping to command his wife at the closing obedience trials, he bruises those delicate artist’s hands seemingly beyond repair, but by the curtain call, he’s using them to spur the audience into even louder applause, blissfully unaware that it’s not all for him. Friday, Jared Redick seemed more inhibited and less interesting, but he caught fire toward the end, first extending the wrong arm to his red-haired-whore bride and then, during the curtain call, throwing us a "What am I, chopped liver" Woody Allen look as his wife took her bow. (Bauzys, on the other hand, stepped in front of his wife at the end, having apparently forgotten that he had one.) Worth another look. Of the Gremios, only Gianni Di Marco gave us Shakespeare’s aged pantaloon, Charlie Chaplin with an arthritic gait. Saturday afternoon, after watching Bauzys’s Mick Jagger theatrics, Di Marco took Gremio’s trademark handkerchief and started passing it around and between his thighs, having finally figured out what drives the girls wild.

Most exuberant and sympathetic of the whores was Melanie Atkins as the red-haired one on Friday; you could practically see her wriggling beneath her domino as she extended her arm for Redick’s Hortensio to kiss, Doris Day–radiant at the prospect of becoming an honest woman. As for the corps, one moment can stand for its contribution: Kate walking through the arcade of bridesmaids and snapping at the last one (Misa Kuranaga in the four performances I saw), who then looks around at the other five silently wailing, "Did you see that? What did I do?" That’s the kind of subtext that makes The Taming of the Shrew a great play. It’s the kind of detail that makes this a wonderful production.