Stratford 2013 -- Measure for Measure and Mary Stuart

By coincidence or karma, the two plays we saw last night were both about power: the lust for it and the consequences of it.  Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Schiller's Mary Stuart (in a new translation by Peter Oswald) both look at what happens when people try to grasp for something that is invisible and intangible.

Measure for Measure, directed by Stratford veteran Martha Henry, was placed in post-war Vienna and tells the tale of the Duke Vincentio enforcing strict moral laws, including the death penalty for having sex out of wedlock.  Seriously.  Just such a case has arisen; Claudio and Juliet have visible proof that they have been engaging in pre-marital sex, and the unhappy couple face the gallows.  And in a test of his own power structure, the Duke decides to take off for the far reaches, turning power over to his deputy Angelo, only so that he -- the Duke -- can sneak back into town disguised as a friar and see how Angelo is doing with his new-found powers.

As expected, Angelo makes a hash of it.  Isabel, a nun and the sister of Claudio, pleads with Angelo to grant her brother clemency.  Sure, replies Angelo... if you'll sleep with me.

The story goes on from there in typical Shakespearean semi-comic fashion, concluding with all being worked out, [spoiler alert] the young lovers being saved, and Angelo getting his comeuppance.  There are the usual comic characters, including Elbow, a constable who does a nice bit of reminding us of the constable in Young Frankenstein.

Ms. Henry's direction is smooth and swift, and the cast, as always, is comfortable in bringing out the nuances of Shakespeare's language, even if it does -- as happens to me -- take a few moments for my Shakespeare translation device to kick in.

The point of the play is that political hypocrisy and sexual misconduct is as universal as ever in high office.  We all recognize the characters here; we've seen them paraded across cable TV and Buzzfeed, and there's a cottage industry of unmasking the anti-abortion congressman who paid for his mistress's two abortions or the anti-gay crusader hiring a well-muscled "intern" to travel with him to Aruba.  Shakespeare and Ms. Henry and the cast do a neat job with it.  My only quibble is that Shakespeare himself seems to exact some rather intentional cruelty on sympathetic characters; for instance, allowing Isabel to think that her brother has been executed until the very last minute, and the Duke colluding on this falsehood.  If we are to be relieved by the happy outcome, it's a bit of a torture to mete it out in such small measures.

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Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned and then executed by Queen Elizabeth I in 1587.  There's no record of them ever meeting face to face to work out their claims to the English throne, so Friedrich Schiller, the Romantic poet, gave us a fictional "what if" in his play Mary Stuart. In this new version by Peter Oswald and directed by Antoni Cimolino, the queens meet on a field of battle -- literally -- and the outcome, while never in doubt by history's telling, becomes a drama about power, gender politics, and religious fanaticism that sounds awfully familiar to the audience in the 21st century.

Lucy Peacock and Seana McKenna, both Stratford stalwarts, take on their roles as dueling queens with gusto, and although I was unfamiliar with the play before I saw it, I can imagine that both Schiller and Oswald had fun imagining what these two powerful personalities had to say to each other because it truly comes across in the dialogue and Mr. Cimolino's inventive blocking.

As a tale for our age, it's not hard to grasp the connection between the hard-core religious zealots of that time -- Catholic vs. Protestant -- and our own.  People who are willing to kill and die for their faith is nothing new and nothing the theatre hasn't dealt with before, but we Westerners -- the "enlightened ones" -- like to think that it's only those Others who do such crazy things such as invite martyrdom and suicide or incite rioting against the infidels and blasphemers.  Even when you take into consideration the Crusades and the Inquisition, those are thought of as both medieval and, well, uncivilized.  But the brutality of the faith ran strong in 16th century Britain, and you can't turn on the TV or the internet today and see its descendants carrying forth against the abortionists and the radical homosexuals.

Mary and Elizabeth were rivals not just for the throne but for the faith.  We know how that turned out, but we're really haven't changed much since then.

Stratford 2013 -- Fiddler on the Roof

The world is made up of little communities, each with their customs, traditions, and stories.  It doesn't matter where you come from; we all have a sense of tribalism, whether it's through religion, ethnicity, or even sexual orientation.  Humans cluster in like-minded groups.  It's our nature.

This simple fact is what makes Fiddler on the Roof so compelling and such a universal story.  A shtetl in Russia in 1905 isn't much different than a neighborhood in Los Angeles or a pueblo in New Mexico: they are bound together by common bonds, and even when the bonds are frayed or broken, there is still a sense of community, of belonging, of purpose.

I had a hard time getting through the performance of Fiddler on the Roof at Stratford.  It wasn't because the production was terrible; quite the opposite.  It was magnificent in every detail, from the casting of all the roles to the set, which often consisted of little houses that represented the town of Anatevka like a table model.  The music was flawless, the choreography and staging on a par with anything you'd expect on Broadway, and the story itself; clear and passionate, humorous and heart-rending.  And I spent a great deal of time flashing back to 1972, when, at the tender age of 19, I performed a very, very small role in a production of the musical at the University of Miami.

Our cast had a large Jewish contingent.  Many of the cast members had family who had either survived or been lost in the Holocaust.  For them, the story of Jews scratching out a living in what is now the Ukraine under the thumb of Tsarist Russia, always under the cloud of the pogrom yet to come, made the story of family, tradition, and faith all the more important and immediate.  And when I, a naive young kid from the Midwest who only knew from Judaism what you learn from friends at a private high school where the only question was how well did you clean up at the bar mitzvah, began to immerse myself in the story of Tevye the milkman and the town of Anatevka, my world expanded to understand that not only was there life outside of my cocoon of WASP culture, it wasn't so much different than the traditions I grew up with and accepted as my way of life.  Except no one was trying to wipe me and my way of life off the face of the earth.  For what was supposed to be a small part in a musical comedy, it was a lesson of life that still strikes me to the core more than forty years later.

Fiddler on the Roof is about Jews in Russia in 1905.  But it could be about the Puritans in 1605, the Quakers in 1650, the Native Americans on the Trail of Tears in 1831, the Irish in 1848, the Palestinians in 1948, or Cubans in 1959.  It's about all of us.  The theme of Tradition that runs through the play is what binds it together.  From the opening number to the last notes as the people of the town leave after being forced out, holding on to small things -- a pot, a shoe, a book, a faith -- keep the tribe and life together even as they are scattered to the winds to end up in Chicago, Jerusalem, or Miami. 

Stratford 2013 -- Waiting for Godot

When I was a Very Serious Theatre Student in high school and college, I, along with my fellow VSTS's, studied the works of Samuel Beckett as if they were the Sacred Scrolls that contained the Cosmic Truths of Real Theatre.  That melodramatic stuff by Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller was so self-important and strenuous when it tugged at the heartstrings, and comedy by the likes of Neil Simon was barely worthy of a glance.  Inge?  Middle American sophistry.  And when they labeled Beckett's work as "Theatre of the Absurd," there was some far deeper meaning to the words than just being "absurd."  Nothing absurd like the Marx Brothers or Abbot and Costello.  Even Charlie Chaplin, with all his introspection, didn't rise to the level of Beckett's definition of  "absurd."  There had to be depth beyond what the audience saw.  After all, Beckett was Irish and who knew more about depth than the Irish.  And he lived in Paris and wrote in French.  We just knew there had to be something more to his works.  Every word, every phrase, had to be dissected, parsed and analyzed, and many a night we spent trying -- as we did with Pinter -- to plumb the depths of his heaviosity, accompanied, of course, by chemical enhancements and Pop Tarts.

All these years later, it becomes clear that Samuel Beckett not only appreciated the absurdity of Charlie Chaplain, the Marx Brothers, and even Abbot and Costello, but he emulated them.  Waiting for Godot (and, by the way, it's pronounced "GOD-oh," not "Go-DOH."  As Brian Dennehy explained in a Q & A session after the performance, "Godot" is Dublin slum slang for God.  Beckett was from Dublin.)  The characters in the play are comic pairings of the same style as the comic geniuses as Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, and the dialogue in some scenes is evocative of Who's on First.  The overall effect is stunningly simple, and the blade of Beckett's wit and meaning slips effortlessly to the bone.

The context of the play is also important.  Beckett wrote it shortly after the end of World War II, a time when Europe was as desolate as the scene he describes for the play: "A country road.  A tree.  Evening."  Beckett himself barely survived being arrested by the Nazis in occupied Paris in 1942, and spent the war working with the French Resistance.  If he'd been caught, he would have most likely been executed.  That, along with the desperate devastation he saw around him, surely played a role in his work.  And Waiting for Godot shows it, but not in the way you might think.

In spite of the desolate setting, the poor and struggling characters, even the pain and sorrow that they bear and inflict on each other, and like the leaves that appear on the branches of the bare and seemingly lifeless tree, there is hope, albeit faint.  [Spoiler alert]  And while Godot does not arrive as promised, Vladimir and Estragon will be back to wait for him.  "Nothing to be done."

Hey, I'm Back!

What, it's only been a year, right?

The Stratford Festival Theatre

Welcome to Stratford, Ontario, home of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.  This year we are seeing Waiting for Godot, Blithe Spirit, Fiddler on the Roof, Measure for Measure, and Mary Stuart.

I have never seen a full production of Godot; this one has Brian Dennehy in it, so I can’t wait.  I’ve never seen Blithe Spirit, but I saw the musical version of it in 1964.  It was called High Spirits, and it was by Noel Coward as well.  Fiddler on the Roof?  Oy, been in it… forty plus years ago at the University of Miami Ring Theatre.  I played the Russian priest… what else?  And I have never seen Measure for Measure or Mary Stuart.

I'll be posting my reviews/thoughts about the shows here, so check in and see what I've got to say

Stratford 2012 - The Matchmaker

Maybe it's just me, but Stratford's production of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker didn't strike too many sparks.

For someone who grew up hearing the tunes from Hello, Dolly! done by everyone from Louis Armstrong to teenagers in high school theatre, it's easy to see why the play, originally called The Merchant of Yonkers (and a flop) in 1938 and then revised at the behest of Stratford's founding director Sir Tyrone Guthrie as The Matchmaker in 1955 and then to London and Broadway, made such a great musical: there's a lot of room for musical numbers in the plot. It's played as a farce with mistaken identities, slamming doors, people hiding under tables; all the usual elements that make plays like Noises Off work so well. But it's also a comedy of manners, poking fun at the conventions of society of the time (the 1890's), and while that kind of play can have great farcical moments -- the screen scene in The School For Scandal is a fine example -- it just seemed to run a little flat in this play. Maybe it's because Mr. Wilder allows for several moments of breaking down the fourth wall and having the characters speak directly to the audience, including Dolly's speech at the end of the play. That has a monumental impact in Our Town, but here it's a little disconcerting. It does not help that the characters are looking back at the people and the play with a hefty helping of cynicism.

Tom McCamus, who does characters with his voice the way some do them with their entire body, was Horace Vandergelder, the tightfisted half-a-millionaire. He controls his niece Ermengard (Cara Ricketts) with an iron hand, threatens her intended Ambrose Kemper (Skye Brandon), and terrorizes his employees, the adventure-seeking Cornelius Hackl (Michael Shara) and the shy and overreacting Barnaby Tucker (Josh Epstein). The set-up from the git-go is that he will be defied by everyone, including the title character, Dolly Gallagher Levi (Seana McKenna). Ms. McKenna brings a charm to the part that isn't overpowering, and she reveals some of the vulnerability in Dolly that makes her appealing, but the play really isn't about her; the real matchmaker is Horace.

As I noted earlier, it's easy to see how this could be a musical, and if you know Hello Dolly!, you'll hear the cues for the musical numbers that Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman picked up and turned into standards. And there is a musical theme running through this production: the lights in the show come up on Ambrose wistfully singing "The Sidewalks of New York," and that tune is the lietmotif all the way through to the curtain call. And while the song itself is a playful look at a town of long ago, one couldn't help notice that it was done in a slightly acidic tone, as if warning us that adventures can be perilous; even dangerous.

Stratford 2012 - 42nd Street

"The two most beautiful words in the English language: 'musical comedy.'" - Justin Marshall, the director of Pretty Lady.

That sums up the whole idea of 42nd Street, the musical comedy that pays tribute to all the other musical comedies by pulling out all the cliches of Broadway musicals, putting on their tap shoes, and hoofing their way across the stage of the Festival Theatre at Stratford. The story is so well-known -- a girl gets off the bus from Allentown and through luck and compound fractures becomes the toast of Broadway in the smash hit Pretty Lady -- that it's been done, re-done, and parodied (Dames At Sea). The cast has all the types: the young ingenue; the handsome boy tenor; the tough-as-nails/heart-of-gold chorine; the wisecracker; the hard-bitten director; the prima donna star; and even a few mob thugs. You hardly need a synopsis or a program. All you have to do is sit back and listen for the cues to the music, hum along to songs you know, and try to keep your feet from tapping along.

Stratford hasn't always done musicals. When I started coming on a regular basis in the early 1970's, the chances of seeing a show like 42nd Street were as rare as seeing palm trees along the Avon River. Yes, they have always produced modern plays by Canadian and American playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Robert Patrick's Kennedy's Children was done here in the early 1970's, and they've done stunning works with avant-garde and adventures like Treasure Island. They'd also done their share of Gilbert & Sullivan (The Pirates of Penzance is a regular) along with operettas like Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne. But they also realized that they needed to fill the seats with audiences that weren't into heavy or classical dramas; there was gold in the blue-hair crowd from Toronto, Buffalo, Detroit, and Toledo, and they wanted shows like Oklahoma!, Camelot, My Fair Lady, and for the aging boomers, Jesus Christ Superstar. They had the theatres, they had the talent, and they had the need. And it has worked: productions like Hello Dolly! pay the way for plays like Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, so while the grandparents enjoyed the Broadway show and mom and dad absorbed the culture of Henry V, the gay grandson enjoyed the not-too-subtle subtext of Mr. Marlowe. It's business... but it's also good theatre, and it brings in the audiences who might otherwise turn up their scholarly noses at something they might consider shallow and see what Stratford can do with it. It can be an eye-opener to a larger perspective on something as playful as the "Peanuts" musical, You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Or it could be just plain fun and dazzling as the production of 42nd Street. The music is by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin, with the book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, and based on the original production directed by Gower Champion. (There's a Broadway legend story that goes along with the original production: Gower Champion died the afternoon of opening night in August 1980.) Director Gary Griffin has a fine cast with Cynthia Dale as the prima donna star who dominates the show until her accident; Kyle Blair is the handsome young tenor, Sean Arbuckle is the tough director, and Jennifer Rider-Shaw is the starry-eyed kid from Allentown who pulls off the smash. The supporting cast is terrific, but it's really an ensemble show, and they can all sing and dance. And they do, right up to the second bow.

My only quibble is that this production was staged on the thrust stage of the Festival Theatre, which I doubt was intended for a full-tilt Broadway tap dance show. It doesn't leave you a lot of room for scenery -- although you don't need much -- and it must have been interesting to choreograph twenty or so dancers on the small space. But it does allow for imaginative and three-dimensional staging that you wouldn't get on the stage of the traditional proscenium house at the Avon, and there's something to be said for, in the words of my late dance teacher Paul Avery, "doing it up brown" on the same stage that saw William Shatner perform Julius Caesar and Irene Worth play Hedda Gabler. And there's not a wrong step or a sour note in the whole show. Sir Tyrone Guthrie would be proud, and I'll bet he would have been tapping along.

Stratford 2012 - A Word or Two

The stage is set with a desk and chair, a director's chair, a small podium, and a winding staircase of books that cantilevers over the stage like an impossible sculpture; in the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay, toppling to the skies. The lights come up on an elderly gentleman sitting at the foot of this literary tower, and the words come forth.

This is supposed to be a one-man show: Christopher Plummer, actor (everything from Hamlet to The Sound of Music to Star Trek VI) and director, but it is not really just one man there. He is in the company of Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare, A.A. Milne, Stephen Leacock, Ogden Nash, Emily Dickinson, Christopher Marlowe, Oscar Wilde, the Bible, Archibald MacLeish, and many others. He tells us of his love for words, for language, for sharing the mysteries of life and longing and love through the words; of growing up in Montreal and of his family that read aloud after dinner when he was a boy, and discovering the stage and theatre. In his memoir, In Spite of Myself, Mr. Plummer is very candid about his faults, his excesses, and his ambitions, and he brings them with him to this tale as well. He's unfailingly honest, wistful, rueful, joyful, and all through his own words and those of writers he loves.

Even though it was in the Avon Theatre, a converted movie house that seats over a thousand people, it is an intimate performance, and even though I was in the fourth row center, I knew he was reaching and touching the people in the back row of the balcony. Not because he's that powerful an actor -- although he is, and a single raised eyebrow from him carries for miles -- but because what he was sharing was so deeply felt. And it should; this is a performance that he created and produced on his own and has toured with before. This is a labor of love.

Stratford 2011 - Politically Incorrect

As a part of my annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I put on my theatre scholar's cap to review the plays we're seeing.

Honesty may be the best policy, but it doesn't always work in politics and in affairs of the heart. At least that seems to be the point in Molière's brilliant and stylishly-produced comedy The Misanthrope at Stratford.

The story centers around Alceste, a man who has vowed to speak frankly about his opinions, foregoing the niceties of 18th century Paris society where politeness and social amenities are the Rule. It gets him into trouble with his friends as well as the woman he loves, and even when his honesty is put to the test both in court and in winning his love, he has to pay a price.

The timelessness of the play doesn't hurt, either. Today we seem to be awash in people offering their unvarnished opinions of everything, from (ahem) bloggers to the cult of personalities that develop around the folks on cable TV who claim to speak their mind and damn the consequences. Everyone from Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh to Keith Olbermann to presidential candidates hold forth and frequently get in trouble for their candor. And, as Molière proves in this play, it often becomes less about the moment of truth than it does about the person speaking it. Rather than "listen to what I'm saying," it becomes "listen to ME!" And when honesty becomes secondary to personality, both lose.

The production at Stratford is beautiful in all respects. The Festival stage is a gilded wedding cake of a Paris home at the hands of designer John Lee Beatty, and the costumes, by Robin Fraser Paye, are equally stunning. The translation is by Richard Wilbur, done in rhyming couplets, and it captures both the voice and the taste of the era in its wit and charm, and it is deftly directed by David Grindley.

The performances are all stand-out, including Ben Carlson as Alceste and Sarah Topham as Célimène, his love interest and exact opposite when it comes to social decorum. The pace is quick, the staging choreographed beautifully, and the points of the story are rapier-like, not cudgeled. Stratford may be renown for its productions of Shakespeare, but they know how to do comedy of manners as well.

Stratford 2011 - Falstaff 2.0

As a part of my annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I put on my theatre scholar's cap to review the plays we're seeing.

Each year that we come to Stratford, we make an effort to see something we've never seen before. That's the case with Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor; it was a new one for me.

Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth commanded that Shakespeare write a play about Sir John Falstaff in love. According to scholarship, that's not exactly true, but it's a nice little legend, and it explains how a character from Henry IV can show up in England some 200 years after his death in Henry V. In this play, Falstaff has been rebooted from the hard-drinking rowdy confidante of Prince Hal to become a broke and dissipated sot without much of a touch of Harry in the night. The only connection between the two Falstaffs is the name. In this case, Falstaff is not so much in love as he is in lust and looking for money, and since both desires can lead a man to foolishness, the women he has set his sights on use him as their foil.

This play also serves as an outlier in Shakespeare's canon. It is the only play of his that takes place in Elizabethan England, in sync with Shakespeare's own life. The characters aren't named Antonio or Romeo, there's no magic spells or ancient curses to be fought or heeded, and the plot isn't based on a recycled story or rewrought history of English kings and dynasties (although it does contain elements of stories by translated by William Painter). It is, in many ways, a precursor to the comedies that would come along a hundred years later, after the time of Cromwell when public theatre was banned, and the stage was being restored and influenced by the Renaissance making its way to England from the continent. If you didn't know it was Shakespeare, you would think you were seeing something by such writers as William Wycherly or John Dryden.

The plot is not all that different than a lot of Shakespeare's previous comedies; there's mistaken identity, disguises, attempts at adultery, and strong women who pretend to be at the mercy of the menfolk but are really the ones in charge. Of course there are young lovers who are determined to marry against their parents' wishes, and of course it all ends happily, even if there are some loose ends left untied. (I guess even Shakespeare struggled with finding a good ending.)

The production on the Festival stage under the able direction of Frank Galanti is thoroughly enjoyable. Laura Condlin as Mistress Page and Lucy Peacock as Mistress Ford, are the nominal merry wives, and they have a great deal of fun. The plotting husbands are played to the hilt by Tom McCamus as Master Page and Tom Rooney as Master Ford. Geraint Wyn Davies hams it up well as Sir John Falstaff, who is treated more like the butt of jokes rather than the driver of the plot; he's painted almost like Malvolio in Twelfth Night and even has a couple of goofy companions to round out the company. The thankless roles of the young lovers, Fenton and Miss Ann Page, are played with winsome charm by Trent Pardy and Andrea Runge, but as in most of Shakespeare's comedies, they don't get to have as much fun as the rest of the intriguers.

This is not your Henry's Falstaff, but he's still a basketful of laughs.

Stratford 2011 - Harold Pinter's Comic Stylings

As a part of my annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I put on my theatre scholar's cap to review the plays we're seeing.

I remember sitting through numerous graduate school seminars in theatre where we plumbed the depths of every line in a Harold Pinter play, trying to come up with the inner meanings of his long pauses and seemingly disconnected simple phrases. The plots were deceptively simple, we thought, because there had to be something more. How else could Pinter achieve the total heaviosity that we were told was there?

Even after working on two different productions of The Birthday Party, one under the direction of Emily Mann at the University of Minnesota, I was sure that there was some greater depth to Pinter's work than what we saw on the surface; maybe I had not achieved the elusive level of understanding, and all I saw was just the inane conversation between people I didn't care about. But all the wise and insightful articles and critiques of his work hinted that there was much, much more. And so I sought it out.

Well, I finally figured it out yesterday at the hands of a truly great production of The Homecoming here at Stratford: Harold Pinter was a comic genius. Not in the fashion of the Marx Brothers or Mel Brooks, but in crafting characters and situations that really are truly comic. Instead of being menacing, Brian Dennehy gives Max, the patriarch of his dysfunctional collection of sons and brothers, a blustery tone in an almost Homer Simpson way that lets you appreciate his ineffectualness. His in-home sons Lenny and Joey are echoes of their father; Lenny, the seething and conniving pimp, and Joey, the muscular, inarticulate, slightly goofy boxer who lives for the moment. All of them are perfect for playing off each other.

As in all Pinter plays, there is a menacing intruder who disrupts the flow. In this case it's the arrival of Max's son Teddy, a professor of philosophy who lives in the U.S, and his wife Ruth, who immediately sizes up the family dynamic and plays each of the men like a fine Stradivarius. It's all done in a claustrophobic set of a dingy home in London that cries out for more room, even after long-ago attempts to make the space bigger.

This production doesn't play for the broad laughs; director Jennifer Tarver and her cast knew just the right touches to bring about the laughter -- both broad and nervous -- in this production. The casting is perfect, and Mr. Dennehy, who has a presence on stage that is both vulnerable and menacing in everything I've seen him in, is the quintessential English working class dad. Stephen Ouimette is always a delight to watch for his understated archness, and Cara Ricketts as Ruth is just plain fascinating. Kudos also to Ian Lake as Joey and Mike Shara as the seemingly dense Teddy, the professor who appears to not know what is happening right under his nose, but really does get it.

I suppose it's rather Pinteresque that I learned more about Pinter's work in two hours yesterday than I did in all those seminars way back in grad school. Who knew?

Stratford 2010 - The Shaw Festival

We added a side trip this year to Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario, and our first visit to the Shaw Festival. It's been going on for almost fifty years, and we've always talked about it, so we finally made our way from Stratford to NOTL -- about a three-hour drive -- and went to see Shaw's 1904 play John Bull's Other Island.

The town itself is very charming, with its Victorian-style homes and shops, more of a New England flavor than the Midwestern ambiance of Stratford's cornfields. It is also very popular; that is to say, the sidewalks were packed with tourists from all over, including, I'm sure, those making sidetrips from seeing Niagara Falls or weekenders from Toronto. We stayed at the Prince of Wales Hotel, smack dab in the middle of all of the tourism. It's a charming place, rambling over several buildings on the main street, and the rooms are lovely in that genially overstuffed Victorian way.

We had dinner at a very highly recommended Italian restaurant -- Ristorante Giardino -- and then went to the play at the Court Theatre, one of several venues for the festival, and the original space for the festival. The name is true to the place; the theatre is on the second floor of the city's old courthouse. It's a black-box space, three-quarters thrust, with room for about three hundred in the audience.

The play itself was new to me. I've seen or read most of Shaw's best-known works, but this comedy, written in 1904 at the urging of William Butler Yeats, was one I'd never read or seen. Frankly, I don't know why; it's funny, touching, and as is the case with most of Shaw's plays, loaded with political commentary and insight. His views of the relationship between England and Ireland are sharp and pointed; his characters -- both the English and the Irish -- are fully drawn, and in doing so, he manages to explode stereotypes and exploit them as well.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Two civil engineers from England come to Ireland to see about transforming a small village into a tourist resort, replete with a golf course and a hotel (a nod to NOTL?). Tom Broadbent (Benedict Campbell) is a typical English businessman of the time; exceedingly polite and an easy mark for the doubting and deliberate Irish hosts. He is accompanied by Larry Doyle (Graeme Somerville), his business partner, and an Irishman from the town they're going to develop. Naturally Mr. Doyle is torn between his roots, his ambitions, and his feelings -- pride mixed with shame -- about his family and his homeland. Along the way, in typical Shaw fashion, we get comic scenes and political lectures about the struggle for Ireland's identity, and Shaw, being an Irishman who himself moved to London, much like Larry Doyle, makes the outcome a true question. And it is amazing how prescient he would be about the resolution and the revolution in Ireland years before came to be. More than a hundred years later, it's still a question.

Stratford 2010 - Evita

Day 3

Evita has been called a rock opera or, in the terms used here at Stratford, an "electric musical." But if we're going to go by the strict definition of what an opera is, then there's no need for an adjective. It's an opera in that it is all sung with only a few lines of spoken dialogue, and it certainly requires the talents of trained voices. That it uses contemporary musical forms -- or at least contemporary to the time it was written in 1976 -- doesn't disqualify it as an opera any more than the use of jazz does Porgy and Bess or Spanish folk music does in Carmen. (By the way, one of the other similarities Evita has with Carmen is that both of the composers were foreigners writing about other lands and cultures; Bizet was a Frenchman writing about Spanish workers, and Andrew Lloyd Weber is an Englishman writing about an Argentinian power couple.) So it's an opera. And I usually hate operas.

I have sat through several of them and despised them for their convoluted plots, the imponderable language, and the exaggerated characters and vocalizations. But Evita puts it in a different perspective. The plot line is straightforward, there are five major roles, no subplots, the music is both well done and appropriate for both the time and the action. Chilina Kennedy was brilliant as Evita, as was Juan Chioran as Juan Peron. Josh Young, who sang Che, the narrator/commentator, was excellent as well, bringing just the right touch of cynicism to a character that stands in for the people of Argentina and the outside world watching the pageantry of forced enthusiasm for a dictator.

The theme of Evita is, as director Gary Griffin put it in his director's note, "...our need for icons. Why do we worship people like Eva Perón – or, more recently, Princess Diana and Michael Jackson? What is it about us (for we create our icons as much as they fashion themselves) that causes us to invest so deeply in people we know only as public figures?" It's probably a search for something in common with them; after all, the biggest sellers in the magazine racks are the People magazines or the National Enquirers when they show us pictures of celebrities without the make-up and the glitz; when we see Brad Pitt shopping at the grocery store. Evita and the story behind it is that on a scale that touched millions of lives in real ways in a real place in our living memory. And it provides a cautionary tale for our own political celebrities: how soon will someone come up with a version of "Don't Cry For Me, Wasilla"?

Stratford 2010 - Dangerous Liaisons and The Tempest

Day 2

Every once in a while, just to prove they're like any other theatre company, Stratford will produce a clunker. I've seen lousy productions here, such as the 1973 Othello with an actor playing the title role whose accent was so thick that he was virtually unintelligible, and in the early 1980's they did Miss Julie by August Stridberg that set my teeth on edge. This year it is Dangerous Liaisons by Christopher Hampton.

It is the stage version of the novel Les liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos that has been filmed several times, including a version in 1988 with John Malkovich and Glenn Close, and a hip 90's version called Cruel Intentions with Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Whatever. What I saw today was a thoroughly unlikable production of a thoroughly unlikable play about thoroughly unlikable people. Even the glorious Martha Henry and the occasional flashes of humor from Tom McCamus as Valmont couldn't save this cold and jarring production. The settings on the Festival stage were a mixture of Rococo furniture and what appeared to be clear Lucite chairs in the Rococo style but see-through. I'm not sure whether this was done for effect or to give the audience a clearer view of the action. (They've been able to use non-transparent furniture on the thrust stage for as long as I've been going there without any ill effect.) The music was also a combination of period-style pieces interjected with what could only be called Queen on crack with harpsichords.

The plot revolves around a couple of bored rich French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution making bets that involve sexual conquest and deception. It includes rape, sexual assault, subjugation, denigration, and driving people to madness for sport. At the end when they are held accountable, the regret is less about realizing they did wrong then it does about preserving their good name, and while the epilogue hints at the doom that lies in wait for all the aristocracy of France in 1785, it's overly dramatic and therefore silly.

I'm sure there is some reason the good people of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival chose this work, and I'm sure they thought they could do a production that makes the point about how cruel the rich can be. This wasn't it.

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On the other hand, tonight's production of The Tempest was what made me fall in love with theatre in general and what keeps me coming back to Stratford year after year. Starring Christopher Plummer as Prospero, it had all the ingredients that make the Stratford festival what it has always been for me: a stunning production with all the joy and staging that make you forget you're sitting in a theatre, acting that is so natural that it makes the poetry come alive. Even the rather cookie-cutter roles of Ferdinand and Miranda, the young lovers, were played to full effect by Gareth Potter and Trish Lindström. Ariel, the sprite, was magically done by Julyana Soelistyo to the degree that she was, in many ways, the soul of the play and on equal footing with the power and presence of Mr. Plummer. Caliban, the half-human slave of Prospero, becomes a sympathetic figure in the portrayal by Dion Johnstone, and the comic relief parts of Stephano (Geraint Wyn Davies) and Trinculo (Bruce Dow) were wonderfully done. The bad guys -- Prospero's brother and usurper and his fellow conspirators -- were done with the touch of evil that is required of such roles, but unlike previous productions where they are treated as pawns of Prospero, there was some depth and even some softness in their plight of being stranded by the storm that Prospero called forth to bring them to him for his vengeance.

Christopher Plummer had some mighty large shoes to fill. The last man to play the role of Prospero on the Festival Stage was William Hutt in his farewell performance in 2005. I saw that performance and thought it was masterful, but Mr. Plummer more than adequately honored both the role and the memory of Mr. Hutt. Bringing his own touch to the role and playing Prospero as a father to Miranda that had touches of a dad in it (the scene where he blesses the engagement of Ferdinand and Miranda has Dad-meets-Boyfriend all over it) proves -- again -- that Mr. Plummer is an actor that not just plays the role but takes the character to his heart in a way that few actors truly do. Rather than dominate the stage, he knows his part and his place as one of the ensemble.

Thanks to this production, The Tempest is becoming one of my favorite Shakespeare plays.

Stratford 2010 - Jacques Brel...

The name of the show -- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris -- is sadly incorrect. The Flemish songwriter died in 1978. But that doesn't mean his works are gone, and the song cycle that was put together by Mort Shulman and Eric Blau when the title was true is still alive and doing very well at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

The original format -- two men, two women, and a small orchestra -- hasn't been changed since the first time it was staged in 1968 and it is still effective. The direction of Stafford Arima and the powerful voices of Jewelle Blackman, Brent Carver, Michael Nadajewski, and Robin Hutton (subbing for Nathalie Nadon) handled the music and the lyrics very well. The musical direction by Laura Burton, using new orchestrations by Rick Fox, were impeccable. The stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre, which is a converted curling rink, served the staging well; Brel is a production best served in an intimate venue, and since Stratford is a long way from Greenwich Village, this was as good a place as any to do it.

There is no through-line or plot to the song cycle; each one stands on its own. But the overall theme of Brel's songs -- cynical, poignant, and often dripping with acidic commentary on life and love -- combine to give you a somewhat sardonic look at life through his eyes. But just when you think he's dug the scalpel in, he pulls you in another direction; giddy, distraught, mocking, and sometimes cruel. But just when you think you've seen his life through the haze of cigarette smoke in a boozy nightclub on the Left Bank, the final song, "If We Only Have Love," is an anthem to uplifting hope and promise. Gotcha.