Word: shrews
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Kate's familiar plot shuttles actor-producer Howard Keel between 'Broadway and sixteenth-century Italy. Keel plays Fred Graham, battling to produce The Taming of the Shrew with his fiery ex-wife in the title role. Wisely following note for note the lead of Alfred Drake who played the part on Broadway, Keel is robust in voice and bearing...
Putting a red wig on Katherine Grayson helps to hide her usual insipid manner. If she is not spirited enough to be a convincing shrew, however, she does seem ill-tempered while kicking about the stage in "I Hate Men." As Kate's younger sister, bombastic Ann Miller is wisely given the song, "Too Darn Hot." And in the show-within-a-show, Miss Miller taps through "Tom, Dick, and Harry," one of those songs typical of Porter--unimportant in his score, good enough to be a show-stopper anywhere else. Regrettably, Miss Miller must share. "Always True...
...Trip to Bountiful (by Horton Foote) concerns that second most ticklish menage a trois-the husband, the wife, and the husband's mother. The wife, in this case, is a giddy, shallow Texas shrew who browbeats her mother-in-law while exploiting her; the husband is too frightened to interfere; and the mother-in-law is a gentle, unhappy widow who likes Houston hardly better than her home life, and yearns for the small town of Bountiful where she lived long ago. In time she runs away to it, and is briefly happy among its ghosts before being forced...
Kiss Me Kate (MGM) might be subtitled "The Taming of the Show." Based on the Broadway musical based on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, which was based on an Ariosto comedy based on an old folk tale, the picture is pretty far off any kind of base...
...itself. Wrote Critic Henry S. Humphreys in the Times-Star: "There has been a jinx on operas based on Shakespeare's plays. With the possible exception of Otello, not one of them has held the stage. I confidently predict that Vittorio Giannini's The Taming of the Shrew . . . will break the Shakespeare jinx...