Tennessee Valley Players take on Cole Porter classic

Two of the lead performers in the Tennessee Valley Players' production of 'Kiss Me, Kate' are Deanna Stanley, left, and John Maples.

Two of the lead performers in the Tennessee Valley Players' production of 'Kiss Me, Kate' are Deanna Stanley, left, and John Maples.

Mix William Shakespeare, a few gangsters, and some toe-tapping show tunes on stage and you'll get a Cole Porter classic that, says the director, will delight audiences.

"We're doing the 1999 revision as it appeared on Broadway. ... It's one of his most popular," said director Edmund Bolt, regarding the Tennessee Valley Players' performance of "Kiss Me, Kate." "It's got wonderful music and is a lot of fun."

The play-within-a-play is a clever take on "The Taming of the Shrew," where a group of actors put on a musical version of Shakespeare's early comedy. As the story unfolds, the four main cast members' on-stage performance is complicated by what is happening in his or her off-stage life. When it's discovered one of the cast has a gambling problem and accrued a $10,000 debt, two gangsters show up to collect.

Bolt said the oddball situations supply many laugh-out-loud moments.

"The two gangsters wind up singing 'Brush Up Your Shakespeare,'" said Bolt. "It's a humorous song."

Thankfully, only professionals will be performing with TVP. The cast has a solid track record with this kind of material, says Bolt.

"We have a history of doing musicals in the community," said Bolt, who's one of the original founders of TVP. "We've been in business 30 years, almost exclusively doing musicals. ...We have a pretty dependable audience."

Doing a production as large-scale and complicated as Porter's classic play, though, required a cast of 34 to pull it off - a number Bolt said almost became unwieldy.

"It was very difficult to produce a show with that many people," he said. "It's hard to cast that size of show in the summer. ... People have vacations. You have to work around all that."

Besides a faithful adaptation of Porter's musical, audiences will also get to see an authentic wardrobe. The cast will be dressed in the same costumes used in the 1999 Broadway revival of the show.

"We are renting some originals from the 1999 Broadway productions," said Bolt. "They could have been in the Broadway show, London show, or touring show."

Stephen Woodward is a freelance contributor to the News Sentinel.

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