Tennessee Shakespeare Company is taking a Vaudevillian approach to The “Taming of the Shrew,” at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.
It’s a fun concept, especially considering Shrew’s debt to Commedia dell’arte, the Italian street theater that employed stock characters and treated well-known plots as empty vessels to be filled with stunts and gags.
According to press materials, “The TSC production will place the story in 1927 Memphis in the newly-constructed home of Hugo Dixon on Park Avenue… The year and geography also give us an opportunity to respond to the Jim Crow-law positions of submission for people of color in America, both socially and in the entertainment industry.”
Sounds like director Dan McCleary and Co. have taken one of Shakespeare’s more controversial works and ramped things up.
For details, here you go.
