The troupe’s resident Casanova, meanwhile, has non-romantic matters on his mind, namely the $10,000 gambling dept he owes the mob, which a pair of Damon Runyonesque gangsters (Dean Ricca and Shawn Cahill) have come to collect.

Other Taming Of The Shrew company members include inveterate gambler (and ladies’ man) Bill Calhoun (Joey Elrose) as Lucentio, and his Bianca, the beauteous Lois Lane (Alli McGinnis), currently dating Fred but attracted despite her better instincts to … you guessed it … lothario Bill. Fred and Lilli’s constant bickering amidst occasional musical reminiscences about the “Wunderbar” times of their early married life hint at the possibility that by Kiss Me Kate’s final curtain, the twosome may no longer be ex-lovers after all. (Lotsa laughs in Cremona.) Our next jump is Parma, that stingy, dingy menace, then Mantua, then Padua, then we open again…” You guessed it, “in Venice!”Īmong the “crazy group that never ceases to troop around the map of little Italy” are the actor and actress playing Petruchio and Katherina-the formerly married-to-each-other Fred Graham (Dink O’Neal) and Lilli Vanessi (Donna Cherry). Compared to the 510 years that Petruchio has been telling Katherina to “Kiss me, Kate” in William Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew, the mere 62 that he’s been doing the same thing in Cole Porter’s Tony Award-winning Kiss Me Kate seem like no time at all, especially in as fresh and fun a production as the one currently on stage at Glendale Centre Theatre.Īny musical theater buff worth his or her salt knows Porter’s play-within-a-musical backwards and forwards, but for the uninitiated out there, Kiss Me Kate’s plot (book by Sam and Bella Spewack) revolves around a troupe of traveling Shakespearean players who, as they sing in the show’s crackerjack opening number, “open in Venice.

The Lovers by L.A. McGinnis