Choreographer gets a kick updating 'Kiss Me, Kate'
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For Kathleen Marshall, theater has long been a family affair.
The 39-year-old choreographer of the hit revival of "Kiss Me, Kate," coming to the 5th Avenue Theatre this week, fell in love with the stage alongside her older brother (now a fellow director-choreographer), Rob Marshall. As kids, they often attended musicals in their native Pittsburgh.
"We were both big fans before we ever took a dance lesson," she confides. "We just loved going to see something, then coming home and imitating it in the living room."
After attending Smith College and dancing in summer stock, Marshall began her choreography career as Rob's assistant, helping him devise the dances for Broadway's "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and major revivals of "Damn Yankees" and "She Loves Me."
The siblings confer often. "I'd love to go up and see Rob in Canada, where's he directing the big film version of 'Chicago' with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger," reports the blond, delicately featured Kathleen.
But don't get the idea that she's in big brother's shadow. In addition to a Tony Award nomination for her vivacious dances in Broadway's "Kiss Me, Kate," Kathleen Marshall choreographed the recent show "Seussical" and other tuners on the Great White Way. And she's won a devoted following staging older musicals (most recently the '60s rock musical "Hair") for New York's wildly popular "Encores!" series. Marshall also served as artistic director of "Encores!" for several years.
But the splashy success and five Tony Awards of the "Kiss Me, Kate" revival helped boost her onto the A-list of influential Broadway movers and shakers. And these days, for a change, that list is dominated by women.
"It's great, isn't it?" Marshall says, with a ready smile. "Susan Stroman is the director-choreographer star of the moment, with her show 'The Producers.' But there's also Lynn Taylor-Corbett, who did 'Swing,' Julie Taymor, who did 'The Lion King,' Susan Schulman, who I worked with Off-Broadway on the show 'Violet.'
"There are still times around the table at a production meeting when you're the only woman. But when the Broadway shows with the highest grosses and best reviews are directed by women, the commercial producers sit up and take notice."
Marshall is something of an expert at spiffing up aging musicals for today's patrons and collaborated closely with director Michael Blakemore on the "Kiss Me, Kate" redo.
"With revivals, you have to keep one foot in the period the show was first done in, and one foot in the present," she observes. "We looked at the original orchestrations of the Cole Porter score to get a sense of what the show was like in 1948. We decided to make it earthier, heartier."
"Kiss Me, Kate" is what Marshall calls an "onstage-backstage" musical, a popular genre in Porter's day. The action is divided between the backstage battles of divorced thespians Fred (played here by Rex Smith) and Lili (Rachel York) and their onstage antics in the musical's ingenious show-within-a-show: a song-and-dance version of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew."
Marshall's dances happen in both realms, and in the same spots as Hanya Holm's original choreography for "Kiss Me, Kate." But the new footwork is jazzier, and in some cases more gymnastic, than in the original numbers.
A critics' favorite is Marshall's take on "Bianca," an athletic, airborne segment where Bill Calhoun (Jim Newman) "tries to impress and win back his girlfriend. I based the choreography on Gene Kelly, who was so athletic, and who I think of as pure sunshine. He usually danced with a big smile and his face turned upward, to the sun."
Another big dance segment is the "Too Darn Hot" number, in which off-duty hoofers shake a leg in a sweltering Broadway alley.
Though "Kiss Me, Kate" recently closed on Broadway after a healthy run of more than 800 performances, it is thriving in London and on tour in the United States.
Marshall came to Seattle last week to take part in a public forum for the show's touring engagement at the 5th Avenue and to teach a master class for other director-choreographers.
And she's busy with new artistic projects. One is staging an "Encores!" adaptation of the old musical "Carnival," slated for February. Another is a TV movie deal she's "too superstitious to say anything about yet."
With brother Rob segueing into film directing (he also helmed the top-rated made-for-TV edition of "Annie"), Marshall sees possibilities for herself behind the camera.
"It seems that with the success of the film 'Moulin Rouge,' people may be more open to movie musicals again," she muses. "You just have to find the right style to get the audience into it."
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