Director Darko Tresnjak and choreographer Peggy Hickey have a professional relationship they describe as “very much like a marriage” — but certainly nothing as volatile as the showbiz couple in the Cole Porter musical “Kiss Me Kate.”
Tresnjak and Hickey are collaborating on the revival of this musical-within-a-musical that centers on a battling pair of ex-mates who star in a musical version of “The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare’s problematic — and some feel misogynistic — play about the war of the sexes.
“We’re like an old married couple,” says Tresnjak about his 14-year association with Hickey. “There’s stuff we fight about, but at the end of the day we have a martini.”
Hickey has been Tresnjak’s go-to choreographer for any project that calls for movement, large or small, including plays (“Antony and Cleopatra,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), opera (“The Ghosts of Versailles” at Los Angeles Opera) and Broadway (the Tony Award-winning “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” — “which change all of our lives,” says Hickey).
“It’s a new chapter for us to do a big dance musical,” says Hickey of the revival of the 1948 Broadway musical “Kiss Me Kate”, which she describes as a “no-holds-barred, clear-the-deck, hey-we’re-dancing musical.”
Hartford Stage’s co-production is now in previews and opens Wednesday, May 20. The show, the theater’s first musical since it premiered the Tony Award-winning “Gentleman’s Guide” in 2012, will run through June 14.
Goodspeed Connection
They first met in 2001, when Michael Price, then executive director of Goodspeed Musicals, and line producer Donna Lynn Cooper Hilton brought Tresnjak and Hickey together. She was making her mark choreographing musicals like “Brigadoon,” “King of Hearts” and “On the 20th Century” at the East Haddam theater and Price had just brought in Tresnjak, an up-and-coming director at the time, to direct “A Little Night Music.”
It was a perfect pairing for both and their relationship has deepened over the years, working again at Goodspeed with a sublime production of “Amour” at its Chester theater and in a lyrical revival of “Carnival” in 2010. Tresnjak was named the following year as Hartford Stage’s new artistic director.
“There’s lots of stuff we agree on without needing to say a word,’ says Tresnjak. “We complete each other’s sentences. We both deal with bodies in space and time, and ideally you don’t want to know where my work ends and hers begins, and that’s how it should be.” But [in ‘Kiss Me Kate’] her work will get more attention than for mine and that’s great.”
Hickey says the musical numbers in the Hartford Stage co-production with San Diego’s The Old Globe are in the style of Hermes Pan — who crafted the dances for the 1953 “Kiss Me Kate” film, which starred Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel and featured a killer dancing cast including Ann Miller, Bob Fosse, Carol Haney, Bobby Van and Tommy Rall.
She is also influenced by veteran Broadway choreographer Jack Cole, whose signature was for a more muscular, athletic style, especially for the men, mixed with some jazz and exotic influences, too.
“This is a highly athletic show,” she says. “We have flipping and tumbling and throwing girls about. It’s exciting. It’s our hope to hit this thing just right..not to be too slavish to what came before but not reinvent the wheel for something that works so beautifully well.”
In developing her moves for the show, Hickey also worked with dancer pals at her home in Los Angeles last year, sending video clips to Tresnjak of ideas she had for the show “to be sure I was on the right track.”
Hickey also worked on one of the show’s big and iconic numbers — “Too Darned Hot” — at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival musical-theater lab for choreographers in the Massachusetts Berkshires last summer. It’s the only “think tank” for choreographers, she says, compared to the many creative retreats available to playwrights and directors.
For this production Hickey has an ensemble of seven with an addition of three principal dancers but, she says, everyone in the 19-member cast keeps things moving in the show
“Because the company is so small, all the dancers had to have incredible dance technique and sing their faces off,” she says. “There was no wiggle room for even a medium voice. We needed crazy triple threats (dancing, singing, acting) and they’re all so good.”
She particularly praises Megan Sikorai who plays Lois/Bianca, Tyler Hanes who plays Bill/Lucentio (who dances effortlessly, like Gene Kelly”) and James T. Lane who plays Paul (“who is just a dancing firecracker”).
‘Sweet Spot’
For Tresnjak, who has a particular fondness for mid-century style — most represented at Hartford Stage in his production of “Bell Book and Candle” — as well as a passion for Shakespeare (he’s already directed four of the Bard’s plays here with a sixth set for next spring), this Renaissance-meets-Broadway musical was an obvious choice.
“This hit right in his sweet spot,” says Hickey.
Tresnjak says he wanted to do the show as far back as the early ’90s after he fell in love with the album “Red, Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter,” which was the composer’s material performed by contemporary artists in a very modern — and sexy — way.
“I’ve always loved Cole Porter,” he says, “because his music makes me so happy. He also writes about desire and sexuality in such an open and healthy way.”
Deciding to do “Kiss Me Kate” also solved a dilemma for Tresnjak, but he says he had no interest in directing “The Taming of the Shrew” in part because of its less-than-feminist ending. “The things that I can’t stand in ‘The Taming of the Shrew” I don’t have to deal with ‘Kiss Me Kate.’
Hickey says its Porter’s “wacky world,” more than Shakespeare’s, and that this version “levels the playing field. Nobody wants a Stepford Wife – so there’s a 2015 spin, obviously.”
Tresnjak says putting on a musical this time at Hartford Stage compared to “Gentleman’s Guide” is less stressful because he is dealing with an standard from the Golden Age of the Broadway musical. “So we’re not getting rewrites handed to you overnight,” he says.
Plus, he says, there’s the sublime assurance that he’s dealing with one classic musical number after another. Among the show’s songs are: “Another Op’nin,’ Another Show,” “Too Darn Hot,” “Wunderbar,” “So in Love,” “Why Can’t You Behave,” “We Open in Venice,” “Tom, Dick or Harry” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”
“KISS ME KATE” is now in previews at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. The show opens Wednesday, May 20, and runs through June 14. Tickets are $25 to $85. For more information, visit hartfordstage.org or call 860-527-5151.
