If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

How sad is this?

Good start, but then it gets ruined

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This was the first time I'd seen Marc Singer. I fell in lust that day and have stayed there ever since. His was, without doubt, the best performance of Petruchio I've ever seen. His language was beautiful music, his delivery perfect and understandable and his body was to die for! I'm sure the other actors did a good job too, but the other performances paled beside his outstanding portrayal and I just don't remember anyone else! Who needs elaborate sets and costumes when the actors can make you see it all with just their performances? I was so impressed I have watched him in anything else he's done (even the not so great stuff). He is wonderful in "If You Could See What I Hear" and "Something For Joey". Any ideas where I can obtain a copy of this Great Performances airing of my very own? (Never mind, I've just bought a DVD copy on Amazon.)

Years ago when I first saw this production I was mesmerized. More than a quarter of a century later I can still say that it is the best rendition of "The Taming of the Shrew" that I have ever seen. Thoroughly enjoyable, it appears to follow the original Shakespeare in exactly how I imagine it was meant to be performed for Elizabethan audiences. The actors "played" to the crowd. The bawdy wit was obvious as I am sure it was designed to be. The characters interacted with one another as they would have appeared before an Elizabethan crowd but the dialogue was masterfully spoken in a manner completely understandable to a modern audience. Marc Singer was wonderful. Truly the best performance of his career.

This ACT version of "Taming of the Shrew" is very different from most of the overproduced movies made from Shakespeare plays--in this stage production, there are no huge set pieces or elaborate props. It's reduced to actors having fun with rich, descriptive language.The trouble with a number of movies made from Shakespeare plays--say, Kenneth Branagh's schizoid, interminable "Hamlet" or Baz Luhrman's MTV-ized version of "Romeo and Juliet"--is that, being movies, they try to make the material more visual. They show, rather than tell, what is going on. As a result, Shakespeare's powerful descriptive passages are reduced, cut, or worse, blazed through as quickly as possible and shoved aside to make room for more eye candy.There's no such difficulty here. This "Shrew" is almost performed on a bare stage, in commedia dell'arte style, with minimal accoutrements and some sound effects for laughs. Everything depends on Shakespeare's rich, inventive language, and the production is the better for it.

This was a terrific, fun performance of Taming of the Shrew that ran on Great Performances on PBS. It's still owned by WNET in New York, but they won't release it on video so that I can buy it. This was a high energy production in which dance played an important role along with the words. It's an awful shame that WNET won't release it.