So I’ve definitely mentioned before my love for the movie 10 Things I Hate About You. When I was younger (and being perfectly honest, anytime I get a chance as an adult) I was a theater kid. I’ve loved going to see shows and I’ve been in a few shows.My grandparents used to take my sister and me to a local theater for puppet shows and fairy tale plays and stuff. But what really solidified my love for the theater is when my fourth grade class read William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in graphic novel form and then went to see the Tacoma Actors’ Guild perform the play. Their Puck regularly came out into the audience during the fourth wall breaks (today, I know this is a regular theater thing, but it blew my 9-year-old mind). So yeah, some of the words went right over my head, but I was hooked.I own a 19th century edition of Hamlet with some production’s notes and castings penciled in, and I have Folger Library editions of plays like Midsummer (that I am making my own notes to direct someday) and Twelfth Night (in which I played Duke Orsino). But somehow, I managed to miss reading the very play one of my favorite movies was based on.So I took some of my birthday cash and picked up a Folger Library mass market of The Taming of the Shrew. Listen, the Folger Library is a treasure, their Shakespeare editions have great notes on obscure vocabulary and great essays and notes on the history of the plays and they are transparent on how they source their texts, which is great for a book nerd like me.Anyway, what I came to learn is that 10 Things takes some big liberties in its adaptation of the source. No real surprise, and the way the text of 10 Things goes is certainly a reading you can do of Shrew. For one, Patrick Verona is way less of a prick than Petruchio.Petruchio would neverSure, Patrick has the same “we’ll pay you to date the girl no one likes with the hot sister” plot going. But Petruchio never really has the “Some asshole paid me to take out this really great girl” moment. And he definitely never buys Kate a Strat. He just has “I’ll take your money, then also negotiate a rad dowry.” So yeah, Patrick beats Petruchio. Hands down.And also, regardless of the literal buckets of irony and spite that can easily be read into the Act V “submission makes for a good marriage” speech, I just don’t see Kat Stratford, with her great Gits poster or love of Sylvia Plath giving a speech with a surface reading that the best place for a woman is wherever a man puts her. Kate and Kat are so similar all through, right up to that one speech. Only a scene or two before we have Kate still spitting barbs right back at Petruchio as he gaslights the hell out of her on the road from his home back to Padua. I suppose Kate doing the equivalent of Kat’s “I want you, I need you, oh baby oh baby” as Petruchio tells her a man is a woman and the sky is green and expects her agreement is why I have such an easy time reading an absolute dripping sarcasm into the big long marriage speech.Does this look like a woman who thinks she’s submitting to anyone?The title isn’t entirely correct, I don’t entirely hate Shrew. It’s got a really funny plot most of the way through and I can see theater friends absolutely killing it. I can see them rolling eyes through the submission speech so the audience gets that it’s a farce. But all that surface level stuff is still there and I can also easily see the way you stage this one to play up that a wild Kate is a threat, and she needs the tortures suggested by Petruchio to make her a gentler, more docile house Kate.10 Things adds some redemption to Petruchio by letting Patrick fall for Kat as Kat and make amends before he can win the girl. Shrew leaves Kate as a trophy to be bought and traded and displayed. I just wish more of the surface text let Kate be more in charge of Kate like a Lady MacB gets to be. I mean, before the truth of all the murder drives her off a cliff.So yeah, I originally was just going to write just a basic review on this one and then I turned out to have more to say on how adapting it just made everything better. So yeah, 10 Things I Hate About You is the superior Shrew.Something to Take AwaySo, as Lucentio is trying to woo Bianca and Tranio is pretending to be Lucentio so the real Lucentio can pretend to be a teacher in order to get close to Bianca, there’s a scene where Baptista (father to Kate and Bianca) tells Tranio as Lucentio that he believes that Lucentio would inherit his father’s estate but wants assurances that Bianca would be cared for and inherit the estates if Lucentio dies first.The problem is that Vincentio, Lucentio’s father, would see right through Tranio playing at being Lucentio, and anyway Vincentio is so far away. So they get the idea to hire some random guy to pretend to be Vincentio and give the assurance.So, I found a job for one of your players. They have to pretend to be some fancy noble so some other fraudster can pull off their job.As in the play, when the real Slim Shady shows up, hilarity will ensue.
