Word: petruchio
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...contrast, Cranko's Taming of the Shrew is a near perfection of sadness, sweetness and light. Particularly as danced by Haydée and Cragun (as Kate and Petruchio). Shakespeare's antic frolic, set to a score composed of snatches of Scarlatti music, subtly explores a remarkable range of domestic feeling from dominance to submission and finally to partnership. For Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the fourth full-length storybook ballet that Stuttgart is offering U.S. audiences, Cranko discards the whole Tchaikovsky opera score in favor of a graceful montage that helps make the ballet a romantic matinee...
Strong and effortless, Cragun tactfully puts a matinee idol's figure at the service of his roles, making Romeo, Petruchio and even Onegin believable and remarkably affecting. The marvel, though, is Marcia Haydée. Experts correctly point out that she is not a great dancer technically. Most would turn puce at the thought of mentioning her in the same breath with Margot Fonteyn. But few dancers within memory have projected the rangi of whims and wishes or invoked the delicate interplay of emotions that flow from the least gesture of Haydée's body, the slightest...
...refurbished the oft-told tale by styling it with the brio of the 16th century commedia dell'arte. Moreover, his casting seems to be a case of art's imitating life: Elizabeth Taylor as the sharp-tongued tigress, Kate, and Richard Burton as her hard-nosed trainer, Petruchio...
...better performances, Taylor makes Kate seem the ideal bawd of Avon-a creature of beauty with a voice shrieking howls and imprecations. Whenever Liz strains at the Elizabethan, the camera shifts to Burton, who catches the cadences of iambic pentameter with inborn ease. As the lickerish and liquorish Petruchio, Burton pursues his Kate with a weary, beery smile that promises temptation and trouble. An inspired chase across rooftops and into piles of fleece establishes him as a kind of King Leer, the supreme embodiment of a raffish comic hero...
...Cleopatra and the shocks from that courtship broke every seismograph in the empire. Now Elizabeth Taylor, 34, and Richard Burton, 40, are about to relive the tale in Elizabethan style. In Rome they will begin shooting The Taming of the Shrew, which will give Richard an opportunity to utter Petruchio's immortal line: "Why, there's a wench...