Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
The ballet adaptation of Shakespeare's “Taming of the Shrew” opens this weekend. The production is a layered, less violent version of Katherine and Petruchio’s story. It helps that the central married couple is danced by a real-life married couple.
It’s a match made in hell. You have Katherine: insistent, bold, relishing in her unconquerable independence. Then you have Petruchio: selfish, ambitious, determined to “tame” his new unwilling shrew of a wife.
One of William Shakespeare’s most acid-tongued comedies, as newlyweds match wits, is told through dance, not dialogue, at the Hult Center. The Eugene Ballet’s “Taming of the Shrew” opens this weekend, with performances Friday, Oct. 30, and Sunday, Nov. 1.
The production marks both the return of the Toni Pimble-choreographed adaptation, which premiered in 2022, and the debut of custom-made steampunk machines featured on stage and made by Eugene artist Joe Mross’ studio Archive Designs.
For Pimble, former artistic director and longtime choreographer at the ballet, the restaging is an opportunity to refine the piece.
“When you come to rework or to remount a production, you have that opportunity to look at it and figure out: ‘Oh God, why did I do that?’ That doesn’t look so good,” she said. “We need to fix that.”
The main focus of the fine-tuning has been adding layers to Katherine and Petruchio’s relationship.
The challenge of building an authentic marriage through dance is left to a fitting pair: Principal dancers Danielle Tolmie and Mark Tucker, a real-life married couple with three children.
Tolmie’s Katherine is wickedly arch, peppering her movements with claw-like hand flourishes and reveling in pushing people away. Tucker’s Petruchio is a crop-top bad boy, shimmying hip-first through the stage. But beyond the surface prickliness, Tolmie and Tucker hope to bring another lens to the story: two people pushed into an arranged marriage, trying to figure each other out.
“A lot of the personas are what people have kind of put onto them,” Tolmie said. “The way that other people treat them has kind of made me a shrew and him this like jovial …”
“Arrogant man,” Tucker added.
“Deep down under those layers, we’re actually just wanting to be loved,” Tolmie said.
Taming a ‘shrew’ — and her tamer
Eugene Ballet’s version of the story was inspired by an article in The Atlantic that Pimble happened to read in 2019.
That article, like many before it, questioned whether a man named “William Shakespeare” actually wrote the works credited to the Bard.
It carried the headline: “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” Journalist Elizabeth Winkler wrote about the possibility that British-Italian writer Emilia Bassano, also known as Emilia Lanier, was the real writer.
The hypothesis got Pimble thinking.
And in her version, the play’s traditional framing device has been swapped for a Bassano-inspired woman “Shakespeare” writing the story before it is told through dance. (The character is played by associate artistic director and resident choreographer Suzanne Haag.)
The story has made for challenging adaptational fare since Shakespeare’s time. Its premise is noxious by modern standards. A bold, intelligent woman is beaten and starved into submission to her new husband, whom she did not choose. Her sharp edges are sanded down into something acceptable and wifelike.
(Not that that’s stopped anyone. There’s the Cole Porter-penned musical “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton 1967 film version, the 1990s teen romantic comedy rendition “10 Things I Hate About You,” and the 2003 Gabrielle Union and LL Cool J take, “Deliver Us from Eva.”)
No matter the version, Katherine is prickly and difficult to control but is ultimately worn down by Petruchio’s charms. The play has long been criticized for its misogynistic lens on a willful woman. But others have pointed to it as a societal critique of system that marries women off like cattle sold at market.
In the Eugene Ballet version, the literal lines of the play have been translated into dance as the performers keep the reference dialogue in mind. The main change, from the original play and the 2022 premiere, has been to tone down Petruchio’s violence toward Katherine. There is a spank at one point, but no real anger to their interplay.
“We don’t want it to come off as violent, because decidedly that’s not what their dynamic is,” Tucker said. “It’s like they’re two individuals in love that are testing one another for that compatibility in each other.”
There has also been a softening of Katherine, and a tinge of sorrow as she faces her situation.
Tucker said he’s seen Tolmie, who gave birth to their third child four months ago, allow her own vulnerabilities to shine through in Katherine: “Katherine is historically this absolute terror. She’s just a bullheaded, intelligent woman who doesn’t take any sh**, for a more colloquial way of saying it. You’re letting a little bit of the new you come into her.”
“We talk about this,” he added. “This is like our car ride home.”
If you go
- What: Eugene Ballet’s full-length, two-act “Taming of the Shrew” runs across 42 scenes with three pas de deux. Orchestra Next is playing live music penned by the 19th century French composer, Louise Farrenc, whose works were long overlooked due to gender bias in the classical music world in her time.
- When: Two performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 1
- Where: Hult Center in Eugene
- Tickets: Start at $32
