for Kiss Me, Kate) toured America in 1935-36. In 1967, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton starred in a well- received film, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. The 1999 high school comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, starring Julia Stiles, was a loose adaptation of the play. Productions in the 20th and 21st centuries often brought critical interpretations to the play’s gender and power dynamics. Notably, director Phyllida Lloyd has directed the play twice with all-female casts, both starring Janet McTeer (seen this season in Bernhardt/Hamlet) as Petruchio.


ON PLAYS-WITHIN-PLAYS Shakespeare’s use of the play-within-a-play device in Shrew allows the audience to watch Petruchio “tame” Katharina from a critical distance. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the hilarious play-within-a-play pokes fun at theatre by taking itself too seriously. In Hamlet, the play-within-a-play shows the power of drama to provoke a murderer’s guilty conscience, while Hamlet’s conversations with the players comment on how all human behavior is itself a kind of performance.


METATHEATRICAL MUSICALS The term metatheatre was coined by theatre scholar Lionel Abel in 1963 to describe a philosophical, self-conscious, and self-referential type of drama, often featuring characters who are aware that they are performing—for each other, and sometimes for the actual audience. Abel pointed to Hamlet as a metatheatrical hero who remains “conscious of the part he himself plays in constructing the drama that unfolds around him.”


Kiss Me, Kate is metatheatrical, portraying the daily workings of a theatre company while they perform their musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. Lilli and Fred are professional actors who, like Hamlet, self-consciously perform offstage as well as on, and their personal relationship mirrors the Shakespearean battle of wills between Katharina and Petruchio. Meanwhile, the themes of money and mistaken identities figure in both Shakespeare’s original and the gangster subplot of Kiss Me, Kate.


Kiss Me, Kate (1948) was the first show to feature an entire musical embedded within a musical. Rodgers and Hammerstein later used the same idea for Me and Juliet (1953), about a secret “showmance” between an actress and stage manager during a production of Romeo and Juliet. The Producers (2001) lampoons the creation of the


deliberately terrible show, Springtime for Hitler, while The Drowsy Chaperone (2006) imagines a fictional 1920s musical as seen through the eyes of a fan. Also In 2006, [title of show] found new levels of metatheatricality by portraying two musical writers in the act of writing a musical about the writing of a musical called—wait for it— [title of show] !•


This season, Theresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet offered a metatheatrical exploration of how an actor struggles to play Shakespeare’s most challenging role. (L-R) Jason Butler Harner, Janet McTeer, and Dylan Baker


KISS ME, KATE UPSTAGE GUIDE 7


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