Kiss me Kate

The production that I will be writing about is called ‘Kiss me Kate’. This play was seen on the 23rd of May 2002 at the Victoria Palace Theatre. The section that I will be talking about is the “Wunderbar. ” This play was set in Baltimore in 1948. It was a musical comedy, which was also a play within a play. The plot also included Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’. The stage was a proscenium arch stage. The two characters that I will be talking about is Lilly Vanessi who was played by Marin Mazzie and Fred Graham who was played by Brent Barrett.

In the play, Mazzie and Barrett were married but divorced. In this scene, the set was split into two dressing rooms. In Mazzie’s dressing room, there were shades of pink, green, frills, a chalice lounge, and dainty lamps. This showed us that there was a feminine environment to the set and that there were signs of wealth. This contrasted to Barrett’s dressing room, which contained shades of green and a beige square table and masculine accessories. You could tell that there was less money on Barrett’s side because of the smaller space and the sparsely equipped room.

He had a curtain as a door and there was a door between the two dressing rooms and there was also two doors upstage of the set. There was a spot light which followed the characters when they were singing and dancing this gave the scene a cabaret feel and the lights gave the set a natural feeling in the beginning. A combination of the red and blue gels gave the set an emotional feeling. I liked the way that they used a lot of space and they never stood up in just one place but moved around. The door between the two dressing rooms symbolised that the two characters had a rift between them.

On the set Mazzie was wearing a pink silk and black lace dressing gown this made Mazzie seem wealthy and the way she walked showed that she had status and made her seem like the leading lady of the show. Barrett was wearing a purple housecoat this also showed that he had a bit of status and he walked with his chest out as if to show the audience that he was important. The colours of the costumes converged together to form a nice colour scheme on stage especially when they are singing together it looked romantic.

In this scene the actors are showing us behind the scene of the actual play ‘Taming of the Shrew”. The characters have clipped tones for example when Mazzie is talking to the General she has a calm and sweet tone of voice but when she is talking to Barrett she has a strong witted and dominant voice towards him and she uses sarcastic tones to him. This shows that they are in conflict.

Mazzie shows herself to be a very dominant character and she shows this by the way she projects her voice above everybody else and she shows that she is a leading lady by the way she walks e. . She walks with her head high and has an dominant posture. You could see that Barrett was a director by the way that he tried to order Mazzie but she was very independent and she never listened to him because she thought that she knew best. In the ‘Wunderbar’ scene you can see that Mazzie and Barrett have a love/hate relationship in the way that they argued with eachother one minute and then they reminisced and remembered how much they loved eachother back in the days the next.

They showed this by the way that they looked into each others eyes and you could see how they concentrated hard into each others eyes. This showed a lot of affection. When Mazzie and Barrett were singing to eachother you could see the way, that Mazzie changed her voice from dominant to calm and affectionate so that it sounded more meaningful. Throughout that scene, you could see that the audience was gripped with tension and when Mazzie and Barrett finally kissed the audience applauded in response and there were romantic feelings in the theatre.