She’s a movie star slumming in her ex-husband’s second-rate production of the
Cole Porter has suddenly grown a heart as big as Rodgers & Hammerstein. It’s just a guess, but musicals like “Oklahoma!” and “The King and I” receive more revivals than ones by Porter because they’re musical romances. Porter, on the other hand, wrote musical comedies, not that he didn’t know how to write a terrific love song. Take “So in Love” from “Kiss Me, Kate,” which opened Monday at Roundabout’s Studio 54. It comes early in the show, and as sung by Kelli O’Hara in this revival, it makes the next two and a half hours glow with the wistful longing and sweet desperation of a diva in love.
Despite her Tony Award and long career on Broadway, the word “diva” has never quite fit O’Hara. Indeed, she’s an odd choice to be playing a movie star who’s returning to the theater to play opposite her former husband in a musical version of “The Taming of the Shrew.” The only word less appropriate than “diva” for O’Hara would be “shrew.”
Her masterful rendition of “So in Love” is so heartfelt that we may overlook her rather genteel take on the Bard, but maybe not. O’Hara plays the movie star Lilli Vanessi for real, turning her into a cool Veronica Lake complete with long, sometimes peekaboo, blond hair. There’s nothing send-up or buffoonish about this performance; in fact, she sometimes conveys the impression that her Lilli is slumming a bit in this less than first-rate production of a musical “Shrew” that’s opening in Baltimore.
