As so often in theater, where there have to be weeks of rehearsal, the year often begins later than for everyone else, at the wrong end of January.
Another Opening…
To be more precise, for Kiss Me Kate spankings, 2015 began January 29-31, when students at Cambridge University in England put on the musical:
But for more than an OTS smacking, we move on to February 12-14 and a high school in Maryland, where the production may be seen first in rehearsal,
and now in full costume:
Miss Vanessi herself kindly uploaded the finished product to YouTube:
… Another Show (and Another, and Another)
On now to the end of February, when Kiss Me Kate was to be seen at a high school in New Jersey, and subsequently on YouTube.
This was swiftly followed, on March 4-14, at a high school in Sacramento, California:
March 6-14 saw six performances at a high school in Pennsylvania. Here’s Fred preparing to spank Lilli,
but the lights came down before his hand did!
There are videos of two performances here and here.
Also in March, at a high school in Connecticut:
Meanwhile in England, Walsall Operatic Society staged the musical March 10-14, with Tom Fletcher as Fred and Philippa Mills as Lilli:
And also feeling the after-effects:
And we move swiftly on to New York, and a high school’s opening performance on March 18:
You can watch the video here.
But for the second performance on March 19, there was a change of Lillis, as may be seen here.
And the new one’s still there for the last show of the run, March 21, viewable here.
Almost concurrently and not far away, there was a production at a high school in Syracuse, also New York, on March 20-21:
And on March 21 and 22, at yet another high school in New York:
An interesting feature of this one is that Fred decides early that he’s going to spank Lilli if she keeps on attacking him. Watch when he sits down in the video, which may be seen here.
Finally for March, back to England for two school productions, one in Woking…
… and the other in Bath:
Why Can’t They Behave?
Over Easter, on April 2, 3 and 6, KMK was the spring musical at a high school in Oklahoma, and was again generously uploaded to YouTube afterwards – twice!
On April 10, KMK opened at the Los Angeles liberal arts college Vanguard University:
They Hate Men
Over now to Wales. Kiss Me Kate opened in Monmouth on April 15 for a run of four amateur performances, and we can see Miss Vanessi getting the paddling of her life both in the rehearsal room…
… and onstage:
(That’s Andrea Pole, chairperson of the Monmouth Music Theatre, getting spanked by Graham Bryant, the husband of the show’s director.)
For three weekends in Massachusetts, from May 1 to May 17, the Walpole Footlighters’ production featured Ken Golner as Fred and Rachel Parkman as Lilli:
From May 21 to 30, Kiss Me Kate was staged by students at the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts:
Their Bots are… Too Darn Hot!
The approach of summer saw a production by Hartford Stage. The director, Darko Tresnjak, addressed one delicate issue directly:
Taming of the Shrew is designed to give uproarious pleasure over the subjugation of a woman. In Kiss Me, Kate, she is an equal-opportunity offender. We made sure that she slugs him 10 times as much as he spanks her.
The production opened in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 26, ran until June 14 and then crossed the continent to run at the Old Globe in San Diego from July 1 to August 2. Fred was Mike McGowan and Lilli was Anastasia Barzee.
Equal opportunities or not, the New York Times reviewer was more interested in one side of the matter than the other, opening her review with a comment that ‘The most notorious spanking in theater history is being delivered with good-humored gusto’, and later remarked, ‘we can only hope that Ms. Barzee has been well supplied with some padding under her voluminous gown’. If you’d like to see for yourself whether she needed it, you can watch the trailer here.
Next we go to Bowie, Maryland, where 2nd Star Productions opened their Kiss Me Kate on May 29, inaugurating four weeks’ worth of spankings for Brenda D. Parker, courtesy of Brian Binney:
Over to Germany, where the musical opened at Herdringen on June 6, with Georg Plümpe as Fred, seen here spanking Nicole Becker as Lilli:
Out of the … Skirt!
And now down to Athens, where the musical opened on June 24. Here are some rehearsal shots of the production in which Haris Andrianos spanked Irini Karagianni:
This was a production in which Fred Graham’s Shrew show was in modern dress. And making it even more special, it gave us the first raised skirt of the year:
I’m not sure they can be properly described as passion killers, especially when we move out of the rehearsal room and onto the stage. I think they may well be that most aptly named of undergarments, Spanx:
Follow that? Well, maybe not with what the University of Hildesheim’s English Drama Group presented on June 30. It’s another modern dress Shrew, but this time Miss Vanessi has it easy, because she is wearing pants rather than a dress for the spanking scene, as you can see here.
One Lilli who didn’t have it at all easy was Brittney Eagan, who starred in the Oregon Musical Theatre Festival’s production which played for eight performances from July 23 to August 2. The reason for her difficulties was a bright idea the costume designer had: to put a slit in each side of her skirt to facilitate vigorous movement in the fight scene. The first side-effect was that you saw a lot of Britney’s bloomers. The second side-effect was that the slits also facilitated movement of the skirt itself when Troy Pennington put her across his knee!
The video may be seen here.
He Comes to Spank Her Lustily in Austria
Back to Europe now. The musical opened at Staatz in Austria on July 24, for a sellout production that ran until August 15. Here are Werner Auer as Fred and Katherina Dorian as Lilli:
In the third week of August, Kiss Me Kate ran nightly at the Broadway in the Park festival in Tustin, California. ‘I’ve never spanked anyone on stage before,’ Ken Reid White told the press. Well, he has now: he’s spanked Laura Hathaway!
Cantiamo di Sculacciata
In England, Opera North’s production opened in September, with choreography by a man who has given quite a few good spankings in his time: William Tuckett, well known as a distinguished Widow Simone in La Fille Mal Gardée. For the production’s core publicity image, Opera North used an attractive and witty non-spanking picture in which Quirijn de Lang’s Fred uses unconventional means to get the unwilling Lilli onstage:
Soprano Jeni Bern returned to one of her earliest roles, Lilli Vanessi, and celebrated by changing her Facebook profile picture. Not to her younger self in the part, but something altogether better known:
‘Looking forward to a spanking, Jeni?’ commented one of her friends. And she replied, ‘Well padded, dear!’ And so she was, in a magnificent but voluminous purple farthingale! But perhaps she scarcely needed even that, since one review suggests that the spanking itself was relatively perfunctory:
The famous spanking scene in Act I, after Petruchio has been kicked and bitten by Kate, is dealt with briefly, and several characters, mainly female, receive casual bottom-slaps at various points. Here, in the context of Kiss Me Kate, set in the world and attitudes of the forties and fifties, it is all legitimate, adding to the sense of period as well as the humour.
On the other hand, when the tour reached Birmingham in 2016, a reviewer commented, ‘how the audience enjoyed a rather cheeky view of Kate’s bared anatomy in the spanking scene!’ So it was a raised-skirt spanking, though I really don’t think anyone should take the word ‘bared’ too literally – no doubt her bloomers were indeed ‘well padded, dear’!
Back over to Germany now, where Morgan Moody is spanking the Texan soprano Emily Newton at the Dortmund Opera: ‘there’s only one soft side of her that Petruchio wants to get to know,’ wrote one reviewer.
The production opened September 27, and the trailer may be seen here.
Were Thine That Special… Ass?
Kiss Me Kate opened at Mainstage Theatre, Anderson, Indiana, on October 1. Rick Purvis gave his Fred, and his Fred gave Jill O’Malia’s Lilli a good spanking, seen here in a publicity photograph for the production:
And here in the actual performance:
It’s back to raised skirts at Humboldt State University, where Kiss Me Kate had six performances from October 16. But on campus there wasn’t quite the same wonderful Greek daring…
We’re even less well served in the production that opened at West Virginia University on October 22, whose official photographer took exactly 878 pictures of the performance and managed to feature the spanking in exactly… none of them! Though he did provide evidence of the unusual way the production handled the fact that Miss Vanessi was unable to sit on the horse:
But never mind: let’s head south, where things are…
Wunderbar!
Down in Rio de Janeiro, the Teatro Bradesco produced the musical in October, premiering on the penultimate Saturday of the month, with Alessandra Verney as Lilli and, as Fred, Brazilian soap star Jose Mayer, whose track record, in both soap and spanking, is discussed at length here.
The production was something a little special, and the spanking featured heavily in a promo shoot. The first picture that saw publication is really rather fabulous:
Others from the session varied from equally superb to so-so, but as we proceed it’s worth noticing just how much spanking imagery was put out in the service of the show:
And back behind the scenes, here are some shots of the shoot in progress:
And here’s another first for the year: the spanking scene appeared on the show’s main poster image, something you don’t often see these days.
And it’s not over yet. Because when the show got on stage, Rio audiences were treated to – another raised skirt!
There’s a video here.
And so Alexandra Verney wound up getting a well-deserved… Best Actress award. But she wasn’t the only one who got spanked. Here’s Jose Mayer posing for the press with the costume designer, Carol Lobato:
And the production even inspired a bit of emulation in the foyer:
And with the brilliant Brazilians raising the bar, there’s only one piece of advice to give the rest of the world:
Brush Up Your Spanking!
And so to Bavaria. KMK was staged by the Landestheater Niederbayern, touring southern Germany from November 6, with Jochen Decker and Katharina Elisabeth Kram in the lead roles. They feature on another spanking poster, and it’s a very nice shot, too, with yet another attempt at a raised skirt:
Not raised far enough to be very effective, you might well think, but a pretty leg is still most welcome in a spanking shot! And – an important caveat – it’s no reflection of how the scene was played in the actual performance, in which the characters looked like this:
We’re getting close to the spanking in the tabletop sequence here:
And… BINGO!
The trailer may be seen here, including an extract from the spanking cut into the German version of ‘I Hate Men’. And after that, I bet she does!
The run of raised skirts won’t last, because our next port of call is just a few days earlier at a high school in Georgia, where Kiss Me Kate got three performances, November 5 and 7-8:
And the aftermath:
But there’s one more skirtless spanking to witness, at St Petersburg in Russia, where Kiss Me Kate opened on November 8. Here’s Andrei Danilov dealing with Svetlana Lugova with, first, the threat of the paddling of her life, and onstage, issued while she’s in an especially vulnerable position:
For the paddling itself, she becomes even more vulnerable:
We end the year heading to the north of England for the student production by Blackpool and the Fylde College. It opened November 25 and ran for three performances:
It’s a real pity that skirt stayed down, because Lilli was wearing rather a pretty pair of tight white mini-bloomers, as seen earlier in the scene during the tabletop wrestling with Fred:
Ah well, there are always going to be missed opportunities!
For 2016, go here.
Vanilla Spanking 