Tough Act to Follow

For a light musical comedy, the first national touring production of the 1999 Broadway revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” will arrive at the Shubert Theatre on Friday with some pretty heavy baggage.

The Cole Porter musical, which debuted on Broadway in 1948, is set backstage during an out-of-town tryout for a musical based on Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”--with the perpetually quarreling ex-spouses Lilli Vanessi and Fred Graham also portraying Shakespeare’s perpetually quarreling Kate and Petruchio in the play-within-a-play. Audiences may also remember “Kiss Me, Kate” from the 1953 movie starring Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel and also featuring Ann Miller and Bob Fosse.

This new touring production presents the opposite scenario from the onstage tale: “Kiss Me, Kate,” after finding major success on Broadway, is now trying to make it on the road.

And the baggage in question is not the show’s elaborate sets and costumes--although Rex Smith, who stars with Rachel York in the touring production, says his costume for some scenes weighs 45 pounds, explaining why the actor chugs down a quart of Gatorade and at least a gallon of water per show.

It’s all those Tonys.

“Kiss Me, Kate” director Michael Blakemore, at age 71, made history at the Tony Awards by becoming the first director to be honored for directing a play and musical in the same year: the cerebral play “Copenhagen,” about the World War II meeting of two physicists, and the candy-colored “Kate.” “Kate” also took the award for best musical revival, lead actor in a musical (Brian Stokes Mitchell), costume design (Martin Pakledinaz) and orchestrations (Don Sebesky).

Now, with the U.S. tour underway and another “Kate” production soon to begin rehearsals in London, Blakemore’s revival has become a franchise--not as ubiquitous as McDonald’s, perhaps, but enough to force Blakemore into the position of considering how to maintain the bubbly spirit of the original revival (a bit of an oxymoron already) with new stars, in new cities, on new stages.

Can “Kiss Me, Kate” make it off Broadway?

The yearlong national “Kate” tour began June 19 in New Haven, Conn., followed by visits to Washington, D.C. (at the Kennedy Center), and Dallas before L.A.--to mostly positive reviews. Speaking by telephone from his home in London, Blakemore, 73, fretted over the fact that commitments to other projects--rehearsals in New York for a “Copenhagen” tour, which begins Nov. 20 in Los Angeles at the Wilshire Theatre; upcoming rehearsals for the London “Kate”; and the final chapters of his memoirs, in the works for 15 years--will prevent him from being in town for the opening of the show at the Shubert. But he remains confident that the quality of this revival can survive multiple incarnations.

“When I’m in the country where something is being performed, I like to keep a sort of regular check on it, but from this side of the Atlantic, it can’t be done,” Blakemore says of the show, which contains such well-known Porter songs as “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” “Too Darn Hot” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” On Broadway, with new leads Burke Moses and Carolee Carmello replacing the Tony-winning Mitchell and his former co-star Marin Mazzie (who will move on to portray Kate in the London production), the show has “pretty much kept up its standards, I think,” Blakemore says.

Blakemore acknowledges that following Mitchell’s Tony-winning turn as Fred Graham, Smith has big shoes to fill but believes the actor is up to the task. “Rex does it in his own way,” he says. “He is very reminiscent of Douglas Fairbanks, he has that dashing quality--he looks rather like a ‘30s movie star.

“Brian was sort of very modern, and it was interesting color-blind casting [Mitchell is African American], and he has enormous qualities like this wonderful baritone voice and so forth. He had huge, justified success in the part. But when you see Rex in the part, you don’t think to compare him. He’s his own man.”

Such a philosophical attitude toward change was necessary for the challenge of reviving this musical in the first place.

The Australian-born Blakemore, who began his career as an actor, recalls seeing the original Broadway production when it came to London’s Coliseum theater during his years as a drama student there in the early 1950s. Alfred Drake, who created the role of egotistical actor-producer Fred, had left the show by then, but the original Lilli/Kate, Patricia Morison, was onstage, as well as a number of other American actors. And Blakemore loved it. “It was absolutely joyous--it’s Porter’s best score,” he says.

When the opportunity arose to revive “Kate,” Blakemore continues, “I wasn’t altogether sure I wanted to do it, for this reason: For a director, when you see something wonderfully done, there doesn’t seem to be much point in trying to do it again. But I suddenly thought, well, hold on, this is still a great show. It will be different no matter what we do, because we live in different times, with different sorts of talent. And I’m very, very pleased that I did.”

Even before the Tonys, Blakemore acknowledges, there was a certain amount of baggage attached to “Kate.” Like the Shakespeare play that inspired it, the story involves the “taming” of the rebellious Lilli--including a scene in which the exasperated Fred finally turns her over his knee for a good spanking. Like “The Taming of the Shrew,” the show was a definition for the phrase “politically incorrect.”

Revival producers Roger Berlind and Roger Horchow engaged playwright John Guare to tweak the 1948 book by Sam and Bella Spewack--although Guare is not credited for his work--and original plans called for cutting the spanking scene, Blakemore says.

“John [Guare] is a good friend of mine and a brilliant playwright, but I must say, I thought we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he says. “It seemed to me it all depended on what the woman did to the man first. “ Blakemore prevailed--and the spanking remains in the show. “You bet!” he asserts. “But we extended the prior scene, when Lilly comes onstage and starts beating him up,” he adds. “She does a number of terrible things to him, until finally his only recourse is to say: ‘You do that once more, and I’ll strike back.’ By making her violence to him extreme, when finally he does the only thing he can do under those circumstances, the audience doesn’t mind a bit--in fact, they often give it a rush of applause.

“Listen, I’m not for spanking women, don’t misunderstand me--but it’s got the quality of one of those kinds of screwball ‘30s comedies that we still love. There is great good nature and great love between the characters.”

Together, Blakemore and Guare blunted the sexist fangs of the Lilli/Fred relationship by reinventing the character of Lilli’s other suitor, Harrison Howe, into a worse male chauvinist than Fred Graham could ever be. In the 1948 version, Howe “was a rather tame senator--this was dated and rather weak,” Blakemore says. “We made him into sort of a modern-day Petruchio, and ended up with this sort of Gen. MacArthur character.”

Blakemore and Guare also brushed up the Spewacks’ script with some new lines, but not with the goal of updating the proceedings with today’s sensibilities. “If you do that, you don’t have the same story,” he says. “You could make objections to anything these days. But if you make the imaginative leap to go back to the mind-set of those days, the classics of the time take you back to a time when people did think differently.

“It’s there to delight you without in any way insulting your intelligence. And that really is quite an admirable, and very modest, aim.”

For their part, actors Smith and York say they have embraced this modest aim--although, like the musical itself, each arrives at the touring production toting a bag or two.

Smith, 45, had no particular history with “Kiss Me, Kate,” but he does have an unfortunate relationship with the Shubert. In 1994, Smith was in rehearsals to star there opposite Faye Dunaway in “Sunset Boulevard” when producer Andrew Lloyd Webber dropped Dunaway from the show, saying that she could not meet the vocal requirements--which led to the actress’ $6-million lawsuit. The lawsuit was later settled out of court, but the show did not go on--and neither did Smith. “They pulled the plug three days before it opened,” he says. “Talk about being all dressed up with no place to go! Coming to the Shubert now is a personal-best kind of issue for me.”

Smith also hopes that somewhere in the theater, he will retrieve the other half of the tuna fish sandwich he was eating when the cast received the news that “Sunset” was canceled.

“I’m hoping to find it down there and make it into a paperweight,” he jokes.

Eventually, things worked out for Smith and “Sunset Boulevard”: The actor went on to do 650 performances opposite Diahann Carroll in Toronto in 1995-96. Also in Toronto, he met his wife, Courtney, then a probation officer, who is now his manager and mother of their son, Gatsby. And Smith, whose ebullience shines through even in a phone interview, seems constitutionally incapable of looking at anything from any angle but the bright side. He even got along just fine with the infamously temperamental Dunaway.

“Look, I’ve heard things about her being difficult and stuff like that, but I think a lot of that comes from being adamant about who you are; it’s hard for a lot of people to accept that from a woman,” Smith says.

“Let’s say it took her three hours to decide how to answer a telephone onstage--well, when she answered that phone, she answered it the way it was supposed to be answered. What they would take from Robert De Niro becomes a whole different thing when it’s Faye Dunaway. We had some good laughs. And I was kissing the woman who kissed Bill Holden in ‘Network’--I compare that to playing a Tony-winning part.”

Smith breezes right by the inevitable comparisons to Mitchell; he takes Mitchell’s Tony as a compliment, even though he didn’t happen to win the award himself. “It’s a Tony part--that’s not to detract from anything that Brian Stokes Mitchell did--but it is the kind of part that, if an actor does the role really well, it says Tony,” Smith says. Smith--a former teen idol whose 20-plus-year musical theater career has included star turns in “Grease,” “The Pirates of Penzance” and most recently “The Scarlet Pimpernel” opposite “Kate” co-star York--says he came to regard the soft-spoken Blakemore as a father figure during the rehearsal period. “I lost my father, whom I adored, about a year and a half ago,” Smith says. “He was a fighter pilot.

“I’ve always been keenly interested in the company of men who’ve lived life--to hear their stories, to learn from them. There were things I wanted to learn from Michael, as an actor. When everybody zoomed out for lunch for an hour, I would quite often find some way to be digging through my knapsack or something, to wait until everyone was gone, to have a quiet moment just to talk about life. On many levels, I found him an engaging man to be around.

“It was also fascinating to watch him direct. He was not strict, but he had a clear, concise view of what he wanted. I would watch him gently let an actor find, in their own work, what he wanted.”

Blakemore confirms Smith’s description of his directorial style. “I don’t scream and yell at people,” he says. “I didn’t like it when I was an actor, and I think it’s a sign of weakness.”

For York, 33, working with Blakemore on “Kate” represents her career coming full circle--comparable to Smith getting the unexpected chance to search for the other half of his tuna sandwich at the Shubert. The actress made her Broadway debut in the original company of “City of Angels,” with Blakemore directing.

But York’s personal “Kate” baggage has nothing to do with the director. It has to do with a certain dinner-theater production of “Kiss Me, Kate” in San Clemente, when York was just 17. She was a member of the chorus when the leading lady, a mature performer in her late 30s or early 40s, became ill and was unable to perform the role of Lilli/Kate. The world of dinner-theater provided no understudies, and York was the only one who could sing the part.

In two days, she learned the role and filled in for four shows. She threw up before each performance.

York is feeling much better this time, possibly due to a substantially longer rehearsal period. And having worked with both Smith and Blakemore before provides a certain security blanket. “He’s very mild-mannered, very gracious, and very clever,” she says of Blakemore. “And he sees everything .

“The funniest thing about him is, when you watch him direct, he becomes each one of the characters he’s directing. He mouths the words as the character is saying them. It’s hilarious to watch. You can see he has an eagle eye.”

Blakemore admits to this habit. “I do like to play the role in my head, as the actor is playing it,” he says. “I was an actor for 15 years before I became a director. I never try to get the actor to imitate me, but I have in my head a production, and how things should be played, how they should come out.”

When it comes to new productions of “Kate,” Blakemore believes one choice is crucial to maintaining consistent quality: casting American actors for the lead roles, which he has done even for the London production.

“When I first came to Broadway, it was in the middle of the Vietnam War, and I was very suspicious,” Blakemore recalls of his first stateside directing experience, Peter Nichols’ “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,” in the late-’60s. “New York seemed to me to be a rather demonic city. Also, British theater was at an extraordinarily high point at that time, and I suppose I arrived with a slightly prejudiced view.

“But on subsequent trips, I completely revised my opinion of the city, and now I adore it. And I love working with American actors, particularly in the musical theater.

“English musical actors are very, very good, they prove themselves over and over again. But in a play that is so quintessentially American as this one, you can’t beat that Broadway sound. When I first saw ‘Kate’ at the Coliseum in London, it had four Americans in the four leading parts, I thought that was right. And we’ve done exactly that.”

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“Kiss Me Kate,” Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Friday through Oct. 13. Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Additional performances: 8 p.m. Oct 8 and 2 p.m. Oct. 10. $40-$70. (800) 447-7400 or https://www.telecharge.com.