'Brush Up Your Shakespeare'

By Darcie Flansburg
The Real Critics Editor/Publisher

The Riverside Community Players’ production of “Kiss Me Kate” was full of fabulous singers, but not many Shakespearean actors. The show is unique in that the actors are portraying characters in a play within a play and are also expected to sing, dance and perform Shakespeare.
The show follows a touring theatre group as they perform a musical version of “Taming of The Shrew.” The audience not only sees pieces of the musical, but also what’s going on backstage between old and new lovers.
To be fair, I prefer Shakespearean productions to musical theatre and am more inclined to focus on the Shakespearean moments when watching such a production as “Kiss Me Kate.” I also expected to see some strong Shakespeare scenes from Director Patrick Brien who directed the well received production of “Macbeth” for the Inland Empire Shakespeare Festival last summer. But the Shakespeare moments in “Kiss Me Kate” were rather lackluster.
Looking through the program, all of the lead actors have a laundry list of music and musical theatre credits, but many of them have only dabbled in Shakespeare, making Brien’s work that much more important. People are enlivened by the jazzy music of this show and appeared to love the beautiful voices of the ensemble, but a certain amount of momentum dropped when the Shakespearean scenes took place. The Kate and Petruchio scene, for example, wasn’t at all the dynamic scene one would expect it to be. Those of us that have seen the 1976 William Ball version of “Taming of the Shrew” know the true potential of that scene, but Brien’s version was slow and static.
The problems with this scene, and the other Shakespeare scenes in the show, are not, however, the sole fault of Brien. When I attended the show I was sitting next to an elderly couple. The man was obviously hard of hearing because his wife would often tell him what was happening in the play, including offering her own critiques. “I don’t think that he knows his lines,” I heard her say during a Petruchio scene, played by Peter Romero. Like many of the performers in the show, Romero has a beautiful singing voice and, based on his bio, he has had a good deal of experience in musical theatre, but he seemed to struggle with the Shakespeare scenes.
On the up side, Charissa Hogeland, who played Bianca/Lois Lane, has a very bright future ahead of her after she graduates from UCLA. Hogeland was pure perfection as Bianca and also played the company flirt very well.
Maxwell Snodgrass and Aaron Wolgemuth were an excellent comedic duo as the First and Second Men who are looking to get some money they are owed and end up in the play within the play singing one of the more memorable numbers, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”
The production was genuinely enjoyable when it came to the musical numbers. Choreographer Hollee Hennebelle did a good job of keeping the musical staging lively. It was when the actors weren’t singing and dancing that the play really dragged.