Stage Review - Shrew (Union Arts Center)

Theatre Review – Shrew
Presented By: Union Arts Center - Seattle, WA
Show Run: October 18 – November 2, 2025
Date Reviewed: Thursday, October 23, 2025
Run Time: Two hours and 30 minutes (including one intermission)
Reviewed By: Tucker Cholvin

Let’s get it out of the way: The Taming of the Shrew is just a hard play. A Shakespeare courtship comedy, the plot is dominated by misogyny, gaslighting, cruelty, which to modern audiences seems archaic and deeply uncomfortable. Any company that puts it on accepts a whole other challenge above and beyond the normal feat of putting on a play.

But artists love a challenge. Taming of the Shrew has been remixed again and again: by Cole Porter as Kiss Me, Kate (1948), as a romantic comedy in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), and as an all-female production in New York City’s 2016 season of Shakespeare in the Park.

Now comes Shrew, a reimagination by the (sort of) new Union Arts Center, created by the merger of ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakespeare Company. It’s an ambitious choice for the combined company’s first Shakespeare play, and their big swing largely connects. In this production, most of the cast is female or non-binary; only the play’s male lead, Petruchio, is played by a man.

Where Shrew shines brightest, it does so through comedy. I laughed a lot at this show, and it is a production full of scene stealers. Jasmine Joshua had every member of the audience cackling with their Guy Fieri-esque playing of Petruchio’s wise-guy servant Grumio. Throughout the first half of the play, the entire cast leans into Shakespeare’s tomfoolery and ridiculousness. And it’s a smart strategy, to ease the audience into a challenging play by making them laugh, over and over again.

Special commendation in this regard goes to Melanie Godsey, who shines in her combined role as Hortensio and Gremio – despite living many people’s literal nightmare. Added to the cast days before opening night after another actor left the production, the audience was cautioned that she would be on-book for parts of the performance as she continued to master her lines. The warning was unnecessary; she took on the role so fully (including a Texas twang) that it was often hard to realize she had the script in the first place.

This Shrew takes risks. Some of which connect, others less so. One fun element of the play is the reimagined ‘induction,’ an original feature of the script that introduces the main story as a play within a play. Frequently dropped in most productions, here it is imagined as an opening conflict between the actors playing Katherina (Jocelyn Maher) and Petruchio (Arjun Pande). The reimagination adds to narrative arc of the story while honoring and expanding Shakespeare’s original text.

In contrast, director Bobbin Ramsey’s decision to use puppets to play several of the roles is less fulfilling. It allows her cast to show off their acting chops as they toggle between the puppet and their character’s personas, and it adds something to the general ambiguity of gender and identity in the play. But at the same time, it frequently interrupts the flow and rhythm of scenes, or fails to add enough substance to justify their use.

What viewers should know: as the play continues, Ramsey brings more of the misogyny in the text out from behind the veil of winking comedy, and places it at center stage. All I can say is that it grows increasingly uncomfortable to watch, until the very end turns the play on its head – at which point, the lights come up, and an audience member is free to draw their own conclusions. All in all, as a first excursion into Shakespeare, it’s a success for the new company, and a deeply enjoyable one.

At its heart, this Shrew succeeds not by softening Shakespeare’s thorns but by leaning into them, wrestling with the discomfort rather than running from it. The result is a production that is messy, funny, provocative, and undeniably alive—everything theatre should be when it dares to reexamine the classics through a modern lens. Union Arts Center’s inaugural Shakespeare outing proves that risk and reinvention can coexist with reverence, and that there’s real power in holding a mirror up to a play that still unsettles us centuries later.

 The Union Arts Center production of Shrew runs on stage through November 2. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit

Photo credit: Giao Nguyen