Okay, the whole article.

[fancycwabs]

Shrewd Move to try Taming The Bard
By Mark Jordan
Special to DeSoto Scene

Petruchio is wearing a golf shirt and khakis and Katharina tight black workout clothes, but though the dress is modern the language is pure 16th century.

"Good morrow, Kate; for that's your name, I hear," says the anxious suitor.

"Well have you heard, but somewhat hard of hearing," answers the unwilling target of his wooing. "They call me Katherine that do talk of me."

Randy and Amy Cooper are rehearsing scene 1, act 2 of William Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew," on stage at Hernando Performing Arts Center. The production, which opened last week, wraps up with three performances this weekend.

"It's a work in progress," says director Joe Ranager of Horn Lake as the troupe prepared for its opening night last week. "It's a little rough in spots, but this is the first time they've been in costume on stage, some of them without a script in their hand."

Welcome to the world of community theatre, where stage veterans and novices balance school and work with an unquenchable desire to perform.

Kudzu Playhouse's production of "Shrew" is in some ways the most ambitious show the 21-year-old Hernando-based community theater troupe has ever put on.

The Playhouse has its roots in Hernando's sesquicentennial celebration of 1986. City planners wanted a stage performance to help complete the slate of festivities, so a group of local theater enthusiasts came together to stage a production of Eudora Welty's "The Robber Bridegroom." The group stayed together after the celebration, forming Northwest Mississippi Theater Guild, which eventually became Kudzu Playhouse.

Over its two-decade history, Kudzu Playhouse has been a torchbearer for theater in DeSoto County, acting as a beacon for live theater fans who would otherwise have to drive to Memphis for their fix. With help of a Mississippi Arts Commission grant in 1990, the troupe began staging plays at area high schools, spurring Hernando High and Horn Lake High to start their own, now-acclaimed, theater programs in 2000.

Kudzu has tackled many types of productions, including such award-winning efforts as "The Fantasticks" and "Greater Tuna." But in its history, the one thing it has never tried is Shakespeare. Until now.

"(For) most of the theaters around here, musicals have been the big draw," says Ranager, who also sits on the Kudzu board of directors. "The Kudzu board looked at wanting to do something nonmusical. We talked about the importance of doing something ofr hte schools. And so we said 'Do we want to tackle a Shakespeare?' And they said 'Sure, why not, but let's do a comedy.'"

The play they settled on is one of Shakespeare's earliest, a romantic comedy with elements and characters that will be familiar to people who have never seen a production of the Bard. "Shrew" tells the story of the domestication of the ill-tempered, recalcitrant Katharina, the eldest daughter of a wealthy merchant, by the unorthodox means of the lord Petruchio, the only match for her quick, acerbic wit. Though its sexual politics now seem hopelessly misogynistic, "Shrew" has provided the model for relationships in romantic comedies for centuries. Most prominently, Cole Porter turned the play into the classic musical, "Kiss Me, Kate," in 1999 the story was adapted for the screen in the teen comedy "10 Things I Hate About You" starring Heath Ledger, and again in 2003 with "Deliver Us From Eva" starring L.L. Cool J.

For his production, Ranager had bigger concerns than outdated Elizabethan mores. Community productions are always hostage to real-life demands of their actors, and "Shrew" was not different, with turnover among about half the cast.

Then there are the difficulties inherent in the play itself. Though he is working from an edited version that cuts the play's length to a manageable two hours, the rich, poetic language language of Shakespeare still is a far cry from "Greater Tuna." The director simplified matters early on by instruction his performers to abandon accents in favor of a more naturalistic style.

"I didn't want to worry about British accents because most of us in community theater, including myself, start doing a British accent and half through the show it goes away," Ranager says.

But even though Ranager found actors who could handle the dialogue, they often needed to be coached on the exact meaning of some of the colloquialisms used in the text.

"The vast majority of people in here have not done Shakespeare before," Ranager says of his cast, "There are several places where characters have long blocks of monologue, basically. Whereas with most modern plays you don't have that long a piece at one whack. Shakespeare does. So that's a little hard for people to grab hold of."

Just as important as deciding how to approach the dialogue was finding the right people to play the leads. Ranager found the perfect solution in the Coopers from Bartlett. Longtime community theater veterans Randy and Amy Cooper met on the set of a production of "Miracle on 34th Street," playing the love interests Fred and Doris. The two have acted in several plays together over the years, including "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Oliver," in which they played Bill Sikes and Nancy.

Though Randy confesses to having done "lots" of Shakespeare, including having played other roles in "Shrew," this is Amy's first stab at the playwright's works. Ranager, who worked with the pair on "Fiddler," syas their personal relationship makes their onstage one stronger.

"It's helped a great deal," he says. "It's just more comfortable for them to play off of each other. I mean they know each other. They live with each other. The chemistry is present."

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Summary: Mr. and Mrs. Melq rock.