THE weather was a pleasant surprise – and so was the play.The prospect of “The Taming of the Shrew” being enacted under the stars – or in the rain – at the Delacorte in Central Park by the Public Theater suggested some dire possibilities.Petruchio played by a woman and Kate by a man? The whole thing set in a Weimar club with lots of whips?But no. Director Mel Shapiro is, in fact, offering an elaborately traditional and un-post-modern “Shrew” in a production that boasts quite old-fashioned virtues and vices.Among the virtues is a beautiful, all-purpose playing area, designed by Karl Eigsti and defined by garden plants, a low Spanish wall, and an open temple. It blends attractively with the buzzing, fragrant summer night around.And the central couple – Allison Janney as Kate and Jay O. Sanders as Petruchio – is splendidly vital.The vices include the whole supporting story about the courtship of younger sister Bianca by three suitors in four disguises. It’s all tediously unfunny, although Erika Alexander’s Bianca and Scott Denny’s Lucentio manage to be charming.The costumes, by Marina Draghici, present a busy, garish melange of styles, from traditional fool’s motley to NYPD blue. There’s a recurring chorus of monks who carry on campily like medieval Village People, make jokes in Latin about Viagra, do the rumba and proclaim that “there is nothing like a dame.”All this is familiar Central Park shtick, on the theory that ya gotta give ’em topical yuks to make the Bard go down.Shapiro directed the successful Central Park musical version of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” in 1971, and he tries to nudge this “Shrew” as close to the spirit of “Kiss Me, Kate” as possible.But the play’s core – the power struggle between the tempestuous woman and the iron-willed man – is played clearly and cleanly (well, pretty much), and it works.Janney, so good as the wife in the recent revival of “A View from the Bridge,” reaches a career high with her Kate, playing her as an electrically disturbed woman whose rage expresses the excess, the perversion, of something lively. We feel that her final harmony and calm is not self-suppression but self-healing. This is a Kate waiting not be dominated but to be connected.The Petruchio of Sanders is a secretly gentle guy whose phallic bluster is often for show, as when he arrives at his wedding dolled up as a pro wrestler.Petruchio’s tough-love therapy involves denying his bride food, sleep and clothing, all the while pretending solicitude. At last, exhausted but laughing, she agrees to his definitions of things. Their battles have all along been more verbal than violent; it’s their wild languages that have to be brought into unison.The final scene shows Kate being bossy again and lecturing to two women about male “rule, supremacy and sway.” Here Janney and Sanders play it straight, and guess what? It’s better the Bard’s way.Rather than lording it over her, he finally kneels to her and whispers, “Kiss me, Kate.” Love is not about power; Kate’s early rages and Petruchio’s early swaggerings were about power. Love is about trust.