Kiss Me, Kate, Coliseum, London, review: A magnificent revival from Opera North

Some musical spin-offs are arguably better than their source material. There’s an argument, for example, that Lerner and Loewe improve on Shaw’s Pygmalion with My Fair Lady. I would give the palm in this category, though, to Kiss Me, Kate, riffing on The Taming of the Shrew.

Cole Porter’s 1949 show has one of the most scintillating Broadway scores ever written and, thanks to the wit and wiliness of the book by Bella and Samuel Spewack, it has a premise that Pirandello wouldn’t have have scoffed at. A temperamental, formerly married pair are forced to play opposite one another in a new musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. The battle of the sexes rages offstage as well as on.

This musical-within-a-musical approach pays dividends, as is evident from this magnificent Opera North revival now playing a limited run at the London Coliseum. It enables Porter to show off the virtuosity and dazzling cheek with which he can pull off the trick of being in several worlds at once. There’s the cod-operetta of “Wunderbar”; Cole performing his beguine-rhythm magic on quasi-Elizabethan lyrics in “Were Thine That Special Face”; and the company’s steamy letting-loose of pent-up libido in “Too Darn Hot”.

It’s a joy to hear Opera North’s superlative orchestra, under the baton of James Holmes, play David Charles Abell and Seann Alderking’s ravishing orchestrations, reconstructed from Robert Russell Bennett’s originals. The lusciousness and comic sass of the score are almost beyond belief, as is its sheer largesse: 16 on-the-nose hits (from “Another Op’nin, Another Show” to “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”) and only one dud. That’s a formidable strike rate.

The jubilant marriage of Porter and the Bard in Kiss Me, Kate is matched by that between the operatic and musical stages in Jo Davies’s classy, deft production. Opera singers, Quirijn de Lang and Stephanie Corley, play Fred and Lilli. He could do with projecting more of the blithely selfish bombast that incenses Corley’s marvellously combustible, intelligent and sensitive ex-wife. But they make a very believable couple, signalling the passion buried under the bickering. Whether conveying the masochistic ardour of a song like “So In Love” or nailing the nifty knockabout of “I Hate Men” and “Where Is the Life that Late I Led?”, they are vocal perfection.

Old-fashioned song-and-dance qualities are supplied with a vibrant sense of mischief by Zoë Rainey as Lois Lane/Bianca and Alan Burkitt as Bill Calhoun/Lucentio. They are both masters at deploying the false endings, surprise resumptions and ceaselessly inventive business that are needed to mask the fact that Porter’s songs are often hilarious but static variations on a single conceit.

Just when you think it’s all over, Rainey keeps coming back, now in a phone booth, now astride the stuffed mule raunchily swinging its tail, as she lurches again and again between the butter-wouldn’t-melt ingenue and the brazen gold-digger in her glorious account of “Always True To You In My Fashion”. The very talented Calhoun is in his element with Will Tuckett’s knockout choreography (revived by David James Hulston) which makes masculine self-display a sexy hoot of a tap-and-ballet hybrid.

The designs by Colin Richmond smoothly contrast Renaissance opulence in the inset-musical with the backstage. Does Porter’s adaptation sluice out the sexism in the Shakespeare original? Well, it certainly tones down the misogyny.

Lilli has just discovered that the bouquet of flowers that she thought Freddie had sent to her were in fact meant for Lois when Kate first encounters Petruchio. Her fury is in part realistically motivated, not the ravings of some stereotypical termagant. On the other hand, the setting of Kate’s submission speech to a rapturous rendition of “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” felt like a bad mistake.

But overall this is a period piece with a subversive spirit, splendidly reanimated here.

Until 30 June (londoncoliseum.org)