SOURCE: Brantley, Ben. “Shakespeare's Hostilities of Courtship, Italian Style.” New York Times (15 July 1999): E1, E5.

In the following review of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Roger Rees in 1999 for the Williamstown Theater Festival, Brantley deems Rees's style excessive in its additions and interpolations, but uncovers several positive elements in the production, including Bebe Neuwirth's convincing Katherina.

American cinema audiences of the 1950's and 60's were thrilled to the marrow when Italian movies demonstrated that you didn't have to make nice to make love. Sniping, scrapping and thumb-bitting as foreplay? How exotic, how earthy, how passionate it all seemed when Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastrolani, or Anna Magnanl and anyone, were butting heads.

Marriage Italian Style, the name of the most legendary Loren-Mastroianni collaboration, might as well be the subtitle of the fast, furious and overstuffed interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew that runs at the...