By KEVIN NANCE
Staff Writer
The Tennessean
It's been a selling point for touring Broadway productions in the post-Phantom era that the shows you see in your own hometown are every bit as good as the original Broadway versions.
This issue of parity for the hinterlands mainly refers to elaborate sets and costumes, from flying chandeliers to dancing candlesticks. The road version of Kiss Me, Kate, the recent Broadway revival of the supremely witty 1948 Cole Porter musical now playing the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, has no such frippery and needs none.
Then there are the little matters of casting and that elusive quality you might call zip. In both these areas, the touring Kate is the pleasant, hard-working but rather plain younger sister of the Broadway Kate. She's worth kissing, but you don't feel moved to head for second base.
Although Rex Smith and Rachel York give their best to their roles as a divorced couple starring in an out-of-town tryout of a musical version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, they simply lack the size and heat of their predecessors, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie. Where the Broadway stars ignited a comic bonfire, Smith and York manage a comfortable little blaze; you're glad for it, but it doesn't reduce you to the helpless laughter of New York.
And much of the supporting cast, including the corps of dancers who get their moment to burn down the room in choreographer Kathleen Marshall's big second-act production number, Too Darn Hot, is too darn lukewarm. There's a joy, an abandon, a snap-crackle-pop missing here.
The good news is that even in a sub-par performance, Kiss Me, Kate is still self-evidently one of the sparkliest jewels of the American musical theater.
Porter's score has more great tunes than almost any three other musicals combined, including the wistful So in Love and its spiteful counterpart, I Hate Men; Always True to You (in My Fashion), given a tart rendition here by Jenny Hill; and, my favorite, Brush Up Your Shakespeare, with its magnificently cheeky rhymes using the Bard's titles, such as pairing ''heinous'' with ''Coriolanus.'' And Sam and Bella Spewack's book, freshened here by the uncredited John Guare, is a model of construction.
The cast does have its standouts, including the lithe and leggy Hill; Richard Poe and Michael Arkin, droll as the mobsters who don tights and discover their yen for culture; and best of all, Middle Tennessee native Chuck Wagner in a riotous cameo as a Douglas MacArthur-like general of mythic pomposity.
With his massive chest puffed up and his craglike chin perpetually hoisted high, Wagner's general is ready for Mount Rushmore. Or he would be, if he didn't have to share billing with those nobodies.
Getting there
Kiss Me, Kate, an Actors' Equity-affiliated touring Broadway production, continues through Sunday at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Jackson Hall. Show times are 8 p.m. today-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets ($21.50-$65) are available at Ticketmaster outlets or by calling 255-2787.
Tennessean arts writer Kevin Nance can be reached at 259-8238 or by e-mail at knance@tennessean.com.