Taming The Musical.

When people despair about Broadway not being what it used to be, they usually wonder where the successors to Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille, and Michael Bennett are. Be comforted. Musical theater choreography didn't end with Bob Fosse. New talent is on the way. Some has brilliantly arrived. For example, Kathleen Marshall. Like every other top-class choreographer, Marshall is earning her hurrahs through hard-working experience. Take her approach to last month's revival of Cole Porter's 1948 hit, Kiss Me, Kate, her fourth show associated with Broadway--but her first really big one--with numerous musical numbers and a cast that includes Brian Stokes Mitchell, Marin Mazzi, Michael Berresse [see page 86], and Amy Spanger. Of the last two dancer-singer-actors, Marshall says, "They are completely meshed with each other. They're young and hip and sexy."

As artistic director of the celebrated Encores! series at City Center for the past three seasons, Marshall is well-schooled in revivals. She had choreographed Call Me Madam and Dubarry Was a Lady for Encores! before becoming director and The Boys From Syracuse, Li'l Abner, and Babes in Arms (which she also directed) afterward. She says she possesses a deep respect for praised--and sometimes despised--musicals, "not only for their original authors, but also for the show's original orchestrator and dance arranger."

Says Marshall, "From what I've learned with Encores/ there's a great desire from audiences to see these revivals done well but [for directors] not to mess with them too much. With my current show, Kate, I have much more freedom, but I'm also very aware--we make sure this is something that could have been done in 1948. People think with revivals for today's audiences, `Well, we've got to totally reinvent it.' Obviously it has to be filtered through our contemporary sensibility, but Kate's such a wonderful show. Yes, we do have to dust it off and give it a lift--after all, this is fifty years later; our clocks tick faster. So we can zip it up. But let's not throw away what was gold to begin with."

Working closely with director Michael Blakemore and veteran music director Paul Gemignani, Marshall explains that they started with "what's on the page and only got away from it when needed." Kate's a tale, created by Sam and Bella Spewack (book) and Cole Porter (music), about divorced actors reunited onstage for the tryout of a musical based on The Taming of the Shrew--a musical brimming with the problems that can attend any new show, not the least of which in this case is the battle of the sexes onstage and off- between the ego-driven leads.

In a subplot, Berresse plays Bill Calhoun, an actor who likes to gamble, and Spanger is Lois Lane, his actress girlfriend. "As I said to the cast," says Marshall, "it's about us--who we are and what we do. The trick is to take all the details and heighten them enough and theatricalize them."

Although Kate was made into a movie by MGM in 1953 with most of the Porter score intact (plus a hit song, "From This Moment On," not originally used), this is the first time it has played Broadway since winning a Tony (the first musical to do so) in 1949. "From This Moment On" has also been included in the revival, "but it's not a big dance number as it was in the movie," says Marshall.

One of the few things the production team wanted to eliminate was, as Marshall puts it, "the cringe factor--things that might offend now but weren't considered unduly incorrect then. Relationshps between men and women were different in 1948, and there's always something in those earlier shows that can make an audience uncomfortable today. Cringe factor aside, though, the real issue here is the relationship between this ex-husband and ex-wife working together again--it happens in the theater all the time. Sometimes when you're casting a show you think, `Oh, he used to be with her, is that going to be okay? Will they be able to work together?

"Brian's and Marin's characters are both so strong, I think you can totally understand what worked about that relationship and therefore you don't just concentrate on their arguments but also on what makes them click. The wit and humor in the words, the lyrics, you can't beat them! There are so many times when we're working with this great material, we merely have to set it correctly, then get out of the way and run with it. And as Mike Blakemore points out, the whole play takes place in one day, with all the intensities of opening night [of this show within a show] and the nervousness surrounding a first public performance heightening the already charged atmosphere."

Another point that Marshall emphasizes is the element of audience participation: "The show-within-a-show concept means that you can include and acknowledge the real audience. And the structure of classic musicals has been to invite participation that is often missing in contemporary modern sung-through musicals. The audience is just sitting there and doesn't get to applaud many times, so there's no real symbiotic relationship.

"But in a number like `Brash Up Your Shakespeare,' you're not just an observer, you're a participant. Lee Wilkof and Michael Mulheren play two gangsters who unexpectedly get caught onstage. In the original, they sang the song, had one encore, and then had a second. And we're sticking with that structure because it's a classic. The guys literally leave the stage, the music starts again, and back they come for two more choruses, leave the stage, and come back again. I think there's something charming about that kind of thing; it creates a very warm feeling."

What has changed quite dramatically, however, is the choreography. Having researched so many musicals for Encores!, Marshall is acutely atuned to Broadway's changing choreographic styles. Hanya Holm created the original dances for Kate, and, as Marshall points out, "she came from the modern and ballet world. Our take's jazzier. For instance, in the original `Tom, Dick, or Harry,' the song was followed by a solo for Harold Lang, like a big ballet variation in three-quarter time. We've put the dance break in the middle of the song, staying in swing tempo and giving the three suitors a variation--more like Fancy Free, with each guy showing off."

With talents like Berresse and Spanger, both of whom started their professional careers as gymnasts, Marshall can afford to get technically ambitious. Also, she points out that "the way Porter wrote the music for the show within a show is anachronistic. It allows nightclub performers Lois Lane and Bill Calhoun to have a swing number in the middle of a Shakespearean story! So we could really go all over the place. Working on the movement for `It's Too Dam Hot,' we make it kind of swingy. There was a new jazz style emerging at that time, the sort of Jack Cole thing, very wide movement with a lot of shoulder isolation, so I tried to incorporate that, too. I think people will realize that this is not a style of dance that's contemporary, and whether it's forties or fifties doesn't matter."

Marshall's appreciation of musicals stems from her youth, when her parents, two academics, took her and her brother, director-choreographer Rob Marshall, "to practically every show, concert, or opera that came to our hometown, Pittsburgh. We were fans way before we were bitten seriously by the theater bug. But I was old--thirteen--when I started taking ballet and tap. Rob did jazz and we exchanged lessons. I did little shows in high school. He'd direct and choreograph, and then we'd switch. One day Constance Towers came to town with The Sound of Music. With no experience, we went down and auditioned for the Trapp children. And we got it! After that, we danced in summer stock, got Equity cards, and went on TV with Chef Brockett (the local Mr. Rogers) and other personalities. After college, in '85 I toured with George M, came to New York, auditioned, went up through the ranks--ensemble, swing, dance captain, assistant choreographer--classic progress" (she also assisted her brother on Damn Yankees and She Loves Me).

Last September Marshall turned thirty-seven. Already she has other Broadway shows lined up, Seussical and Wise Guys, besides her demanding Encores! job at City Center. But when it comes to Kate, she says, "It's not just `another opening, another show,' it's Wunderbar."

VAULTING TO STARDOM

Michael Berresse was a gymnast for eight years. "it's very unusual for a man my size'" he says. "That's why I stopped competing--I got too large. I'm almost six inches taller than the average international competitor. When I started to dance, it was just a financial segue out of gymnastics. I was flexible and athletic, and I played the clarinet, piano, and saxaphone. I was playing in the pit orchestra when I was sixteen in high school. One day we were playing for a dance company and I remember thinking, `I know I can do that.' I went up onstage and talked to the director and asked to take class. Two months later I was dancing in the company. And then I really began to study--Graham, Ailey, other techniques, and tap. It came naturally to my body.

"I've always seen myself as a combination of Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor because I love being goofy and silly (among his credits is The Cocoanuts, which was originally written for the Marx Brothers). When I was in the ensemble of Chicago, I took the job because I was understudying the character of Billy Fynn and because I wanted to work with Ann Reinking. I love being able to create a sense of time and place as opposed to just choreography. I think that's why I so enjoy working with Kathleen. She's the most prepared choreographer I've ever encountered.

"And for me it's interesting to play an offstage character who couldn't care less about the theater but who, when he steps onstage, lights up."

H.O.

Senior editor Hilary Ostlere is theater columnist for Dance Magazine and covers the arts for several publications.