By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: *****

WHEN?: Saturday 8 June 2024, opens 18 June and runs through 14 September 2024 RUNTIME: 160 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

‘Mother of God!’ For those wondering what Sergeant Ted Hastings did next in the Line Of Duty, wonder no longer …

• Read on for reasons including how this is set to be 1 of the most sizzling shows of this summer in London

Actor Adrian Dunbar may be best known for his role in BBC crime drama Line Of Duty as part of AC-12, a police anti-corruption internal affairs unit, but he’s also a string of theatre credits to his name including in London’s West End, Dublin and for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He even co-wrote the screenplay for film Hear My Song, about Irish tenor Josef Locke which was nominated for a BAFTA in 1993, and starred in Oscar winning films My Left Foot and The Crying Game.

Here he stars as show producer, director and star Fred Graham in this 1948-set musical about a theatre company putting on a musical of Shakespeare’s controversial The Taming Of the Shrew about a difficult woman trying to find a husband.

We last saw a Chichester Festival Theatre production of this classic Cole Porter musical starring the monsta-winning Hannah Waddingham at the Old Vic in 2013 but this new production directed by Bartlett Sher (My Fair Lady, Coliseum) very much reminded us of the classic production of Porter’s Anything Goes recently at the Barbican.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey’ may be Dunbar’s best-loved quote from Line Of Duty but Dunbar’s not giving the performance of Biblical proportions that Sutton Foster did in Anything Goes but he can hold a tune, has charisma by the bucketload and a twinkle in his eye that reminds of the late Ernie Wise in his beloved sketch shows with Eric Morecambe.

It’s actually the young leads of this classic musical we’re most excited to see. Charlie Stemp won our Best Theatre Actor monsta last year (Crazy For You, Gillian Lynne Theatre) and we saw Georgina Onuorah in Cinderella at the same venue.

Stemp’s gambler Bill Calhoun has gangsters after him who he owes money and he directs them at Dunbar’s Graham who deploys them in the show after his ex-wife Katharine, given a strong turn by Broadway star Stephanie J Block, threatens to quit the production when she receives a love letter from Graham intended for Calhoun’s beau and fellow actress Lois played by Onuorah.

Kiss Me Kate was Porter’s response to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, the first show he wrote in which the music and lyrics were firmly connected to the script and it won the first Best Musical Tony in 1949.

The show’s best known number is probably Act Two opener Too Darn Hot and it’s so brilliantly renderered here, with Stemp astonishingly somersaulting onstage directly before our front row seat, that it fully justifies its overblown title.

The song that brought the house down however was the comic Brush Up Your Shakespeare in which gangsters played by the hilarious Hammed Animashaun (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bridge Theatre) and Nigel Lindsay (An Enemy Of The People, Duke Of York’s Theatre) perform as part of the show-within-show.

Onuorah also gets her own chance to shine with the outstanding and flirty Always True To You In My Fashion.

Kiss Me Kate won a standing ovation at this preview performance, this production is exquisitely well cast, just too darn hot and set to be 1 of the most sizzling shows of this summer in London.

• Main picture via Facebook courtesy Barbican Tickets
• Have you seen Kiss Me Kate before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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