Kiss Me Kate, Opera North, review: 'irresistible'

Kiss me, Kate will never be a favourite of mine. I find it too relentlessly chrome-edged and upbeat, to the point of raucousness. I feel the want of the warmer sentimental note that West Side Story and Carousel offer, or the quieter charm of Guys and Dolls.

The show has structural faults too. Like so many Broadway classics, its first act is excessively long and the plot grinds to a halt in the second. The narrative premise – a theatrical couple warring both onstage, as The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherine and Petruchio, and off – is overextended, and the characters under-motivated.

Cole Porter's 10 best songs

But who is inclined to complain when Cole Porter has lavished some of his most seductive songs on the score, and Opera North serves the show up with such panache?

Jo Davies’ nicely pitched production is smartly paced and gimmick-free, graced with easy-going good humour and designs by Colin Richmond that fluently contrast onstage Renaissance splendours with backstage grubbiness. If one or two of the performances are a touch under-projected, at least there’s no mechanical rictus grinning: everything is in excellent taste and executed with genuine enthusiasm.

Perhaps opera singers Quirijn de Lang and Jeni Bern don’t radiate sufficient charismatic glamour or sex appeal as the lead couple. But they present Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi as credible and sympathetic characters, singing their romantic numbers “Wunderbar” and “So in Love” through elegant legato and projecting the more knockabout stuff such as “I Hate Men” and “Where is the Life That Late I Led?” with sharp-tongued wit.

As Bianca and Lucentio, Tiffany Graves and Ashley Day make delightful ingénues, and although John Savournin and Joseph Shovelton seem rather dour as a pair of hopelessly dim debt-collecting hitmen, they give a stylish account of the virtuosic lyrics of “Brush up your Shakespeare”.

Charged up with Will Tuckett’s sizzling choreography and performed by an ensemble firing on all cylinders, the big showpiece parades of “Another Opening, Another Show” and “Too Darn Hot” duly explode with irresistible energy. David Charles Abell is the band’s expert conductor; a programme note usefully explains how his scholarly new edition of the score restores original intentions.

This is a more than honourable addition to Opera North’s impressive record of mounting musicals – one that English National Opera could usefully heed, as it embarks next spring on the riskier enterprise of reviving Sunset Boulevard starring Glenn Close.

Until 31 October (0844 848 2720), then touring to Newcastle, Salford and Nottingham