CMT Audience Chooses ‘Kiss Me, Kate’

California Music Theatre asked its audience, via questionnaires, which musical they’d most like to see this year. The people’s choice?

“Kiss Me, Kate.”

“So we’re trying to give our patrons what they want,” said CMT artistic director Gary Davis, whose staging of the 1949 Cole Porter/Sam and Bella Spewack musical opens Saturday at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Terry Lester and Leslie Easterbrook star as the battling lovers in the play-within a-play, based on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.”

“There hasn’t really been a major revival for 20 years in the L.A. area,” Davis noted. “The show is really a great example of the genre, when the emphasis was on two pages of dialogue and a song--then two more pages of dialogue and a song. Once we committed to it, I reviewed the score, and I was amazed at how good the songs (including “Too Darn Hot,” “So in Love” and “Wunderbar”) were.”

One thing that hasn’t held up quite as well, Davis admitted, is the misogynist tone of the original.

“Kate’s last song is lifted right out of Kate’s speech (in “Taming of the Shrew”): ‘I am ashamed that women are so simple . . . bound to serve, love and obey, our bodies are soft and weak and smooth . . . Place your hands below your husband’s foot.’ Leslie and I are talking about how we’re going to deal with the text. I think we’ve got to realize it’s all a little tongue-in-cheek. So we’ll lighten it up--and make it sexy as well.”

ALL ABOARD: There’s room for plays, playlets, screenplays, monologues, dialogues, excerpts, one-acts and works-in-progress at First Stage’s annual Playwrights Express, a collection of back-to-back 15-minute works, unfurling Saturday and next Sunday from 2 to 10 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church in Hollywood.

“It is truly an anything-goes marathon,” said executive director Guy Giarrizzo, who’s overseeing his first Express. “Last year I hear some of the plays were quite wonderful, others . . . well, it can get pretty wild. We’re going with that whole carnival atmosphere, serving hot dogs and popcorn.”

The line-up includes “The Lucy-Desi Show,” “Mealy Mouth,” “The Play’s the Thing” and “Rock of Ages: The Fear of the Moment.”

Admission is $6 per day, $10 for both days. For further information, call (213) 850-6271.

MUM’S THE WORD: Andres Bossard, Floriana Frassetto and Bernie Schurch--better known as the silent theater group Mummenschanz--celebrate their 20th anniversary this year with “The Best of Mummenschanz 1969-1989.” The company plays Monday at Pepperdine University’s Smothers Theatre and Saturday and next Sunday at the Wiltern Theatre.

CRITICAL CROSS FIRE: “Three Ways Home,” Casey Kurtti’s New York-set story of the burgeoning friendship between two women from diverse backgrounds is playing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Chris Silva directs Deirdre O’Connell, Vonetta McGee and Glenn Plummer.

The Times’ Sylvie Drake saw “no soft little exercise in white middle-class liberal compassion. This is one tough-talking slab of writing whose jangled emotional keyboard is perfectly tuned. It makes an unsparing, frequently comic kind of music that lifts a potentially lachrymose, bleeding-heart situation out of the humdrum.”

The Herald Examiner’s Richard Stayton disagreed: “Steeped in sentimental romanticism and cinematic cliches, it’s already a packaged movie complete with familiar heroines . . . provocative at the depth of a movie of the week (but) exceedingly well performed. It does what it sets out to do: entertain.”

Echoed the Daily News’ Tom Jacobs: “(It) has been optioned as a feature film, but Kurtti’s writing is on a bad TV-movie level. It’s glib, jokey, superficial, sentimental and bland. Part of the problem lies with Silva’s production; one can imagine a staging in which the raw edges aren’t so smoothed out.”

Said the L.A. Weekly’s Bill Raden: “Judging from its unqualified you-can-make-a-difference premise and its first-person anecdotal tone, the real sources tapped by Kurtti and Silva are more likely mid-’70s TV movies of the week and AT&T; ‘reach out and touch someone’ commercials.”

In the Orange County Register, Thomas O’Connor wrote: “Kurtti sets out to humanize serious concerns about the real people and pain behind welfare statistics, about how readily implicit racist assumptions . . . cloud judgment. She has succeeded, but in a way that tries so hard and so conventionally to pluck heartstrings, it homogenizes the play.”

And from Drama-Logue’s Robert J. Sessions: “(The story is told) by having the characters deliver long interior monologues. While these soliloquies, which seem to be 80% of the play, are very effective and downright gut-wrenching, the characters rarely seem to interact with each other. This is a shame, because when this cast does interact, they are electric.”