RESTORATION COMEDY IN BUFFALO – THE RELAPSE FROM THE IRISH CLASSICAL STAGE COMPANY

Leah Russo, center, as Berinthia, with the cast.
Photo: Gene Witkowski

You don’t get much Restoration Comedy these days.

When was the last time the Stratford Shakespeare Festival or The Canadian Stage Company produced a play by Congreve or a Wycherley? Use the fingers on both hands and look to your toes.

Soulpepper Theatre Company did stage Congreve’s The Way of the World in 2008 but they dropped any notion of maintaining the play’s cultural and linguistic milieu and went for an Ontario-accented comedy. It got us through the text but not without pain.

If you can’t get Restoration Comedy at home the only alternative is to go looking for it abroad. In this case I did not have to go much further than Buffalo, New York where the Irish Classical Stage Company has staged The Relapse by Sir John Vanbrugh.

The ICTC has been around since 1990 and puts on six productions a year. The plays seem well-chosen and broad-ranging. The list of productions over the years shows works by Moliere, O’Neill, Coward, Shaw, Wilde, Pinter, Sheridan and many others. Indeed an eclectic mix of plays.

The productions are put on at the Andrew Theatre in downtown Buffalo. It is an attractive theatre-in-the-round that holds 200 people.

The Relapse is a classic Restoration Comedy and was first produced in 1697. It is set against the rigid class structure of English society and the pursuit of money, marriage, sex and social status.

Sir Novelty Fashion purchased a peerage and now wants to marry the rich but déclassé Miss Hoyden. She is the daughter of the aptly named country bumpkin Sir Tunbelly Clumsey. The penniless brother, Young Fashion, will attempt to marry Miss Hoyden by pretending to be Sir Novelty.

Loveless, the happily married former rake goes to London with his lovely wife Amanda but becomes seriously attracted to her even lovelier cousin, the young widow Beritnthia. Add a matchmaker called Coupler, a chaplain and a few other worthies and you have a play of wit, high and low manners and ornate language that can be a delight to see.

Director Derek Campbell has decided to eschew the 17th century setting of the play with its fancy costumes, wigs, swords and manners and sets the play in the mid-1960’s. Vanbrugh wrote much of the play in verse and in the precise and brittle style of Restoration Comedy. By bringing the play into the 20th century, the Restoration set, costumes and paraphernalia are exchanged for modern dress, a few couches and coffee tables. Old wine can perhaps be put in a new bottle without changing the quality of its taste or the nuance of its aroma. Can you do the same with an old play?

We are in 20th century England listening to Restoration English, pronounced with an American accent producing tortured English accents and watching characters in modern dress behaving like 17th century rakes, fops, country bumpkins etc. How are we to appreciate the difference in class without the assistance of costume, manners and accent?

Not very easily. The obstacles that Campbell has set for himself and the actors are insurmountable. The crisp language of Restoration Comedy suffers the fatal double incongruity of being spoken in woeful accents in a milieu that has no relation to the original. In the Toronto production, there was no attempt at English accents and the result was equally awful. The attempts at an English accent in Buffalo ranged from the execrable to the completely inept. Not all of them tried. Robert Rutland as the country bumpkin Sir Tunbelly Clumsey lived up to his name but he sounded like an American bumpkin and not an English one. He looks like a natural comic but not in that role in this production.

The only other comet in the accent department goes to Mary Beth Lacki as Miss Hoyden, who manages to produce an accent suggestive of northern England. The actors do not so much deserve criticism as the comment that they are mostly in the wrong play. Vincent O’Neill, the Artistic Director of ICTC can do comedy and much else no doubt but as Sir Novelty he appeared to be striving for laughs without getting them. Chris Corporandy as Young Fashion, Gary Darling as Coupler and the others would have produced much better results in a play with a language that that they can pronounce.
The next production of the ICTC will be The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh and it will run from February 26 to March 28, 2010.


The Relapse by Sir John Vanbrugh opened on January 15 and will run until February 14, 2010 at the Andrews Theatre, 625 Main Street, Buffalo, N.Y. www.irishclassicaltheatre.com

ALMOST PITCH-PERFECT HAY FEVER FROM ALUMNAE THEATRE

Judith Bliss (Dinah Watts) poses with her children Simon (Ken MacAlpine) and Sorel (Tamara Lubek) Photo by Joshua Meles

Noel Coward’s Hay Fever is an unlikely comedy. The Bliss family and their servant are spending a weekend at their country house in Berkshire. They are visited by four guests and nothing much happens. No one is murdered, there is no mystery to unravel or any plot to develop. Yet, Hay Fever, if done well, can be a very funny play. Ineptly done it is a monumental bore.

Alumnae Theatre Company gives the play a superb production, eliciting howls of laughter and providing a highly entertaining night at the theatre.

Coward provided lots the opportunities for a good director and cast to work with, however difficult it may seem. Judith Bliss (played to perfection by Dinah Watts) is a retired actress who is planning a comeback. Retired is a misnomer because she never stopped acting or taking theatrical poses on or off the stage. At one point Judith’s daughter Sorel (Tamara Lubek) tells her to “be natural” for a change. For the Bliss family being theatrical, self-absorbed and eccentric is being completely natural.

David (Hereward Pooley), the father who is a novelist and son Simon (Ken MacAlpine) complete the wacky Bliss family which gets some assistance in its bizarre conduct from their potty maid Clara (Anne Harper).

Each family member, unbeknownst to the others, invites a guest for the weekend. The guests become more like victims who need to plan and execute an escape after a night with the off-the-wall Blisses.

All the guests “fall in love” or are told they are in love or have a flirtation with one of the Blisses. Sandy (Leete Stetson) is cornered by Sorel and is caught kissing her in the library. Judith tells Richard (Jonathan Thomas) that she is in love with him and her husband must be informed immediately. The crafty Myra (Tina Sterling) tries to butter up David and they are caught kissing by Judith. The brainless Jackie (Kaitlyn Riordan) is supposed to be in love with Simon. That is a lot of activity for a play that has no plot and incidentally a lot of laughs.

The guests have become victims and the final act is a hilarious scene of them trying to escape from the Bliss house unseen. The self-absorbed Blisses get into an argument about the streets of Paris and the guests manage to escape behind their backs.

The play needs some astute and delicate handling. The lines are only funny if delivered properly. Each laugh depends on timing, delivery and the reaction of the recipients. Kudos to McDonald for orchestrating all and providing a fine production.

Dinah Watts leads the cast with a superb performance. She is allowed to overact, strike poses, gesture and modulate her voice. She does it impeccably. Pooley is hilarious as the somewhat disheveled novelist who finds himself accosted by an attractive woman. He and Sterling produce fine comedy.

The Bliss children are nothing if not theatrical and Lubek is especially good. Anne Harper’s maid was just what you would expect from a servant working for nutsos.
The English accents, so difficult to achieve at times, ranged from the acceptable to the excellent and the result was a very good night at the theatre.

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Hay Fever by Noel Coward opened on January 15 and will run until January 30, 2010 at the Alumnae Theatre, 70 Berkeley Street, Toronto, Ontario. http://www.alumnaetheatre.com/. Telephone (416) 364-4170

SOULPEPPER THEATRE COMPANY IN 2009

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

By James Karas
jameskaras@rogers.com

The season for most theatre companies starts sometime in September and ends in May. Then the summer festivals take over until the fall. The same arrangement applies to schools and the end of vacations, of course, and some day the calendar year may begin on September 1.

Theatre companies in Toronto follow the September-May schedule except for Soulpepper Theatre Company which follows the calendar year for its season. As such the end of the year is the appropriate time to review what they did during 2009 and comment about their 2010 season.

There is little doubt that if you want to see good plays in Toronto, Soulpepper is your best bet in terms of repertory, number of plays and quality of production.

Soulpepper produced a hefty eleven plays during 2009. All were written in the twentieth century. Three were Canadian, three American, two English, two Hungarian and one French.

The season opened in February with Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, a brilliant and intricate play that features verbal pyrotechnics and requires acting with precision and finesse. Unfortunately, Soulpepper’s production fell short of what one would expect of them or would want to see in a Stoppard play.

The wide-ranging references to art, poetry and fiction and the lines from The Importance of Being Earnest that are interwoven in the dialogue of Travesties fell flat. The great speeches and witty lines failed almost completely to connect with the audience leaving one with a bad evening at the theatre.

The second production was American David Mamet’s classic outpouring of vitriol and obscenities, Glengarry Glen Ross. If nothing worked in Travesties, the opposite was true of Glengarry. It was a pitch-perfect production that happened to have connections to the current subprime mortgage mess created by American banks’ insatiable greed.

David Storch directed Eric Peterson, Peter Donaldson, Albert Schultz and William Webster through the orgy of immorality represented in the play. A riveting night at the theatre was the result.

With Joe Orton’s Loot we moved to a different type of morality completely. Joe Orton’s world is matter-of-factly amoral and vicious. The play opens with a woman in a coffin at centre stage. Her husband displays little emotion and is mostly concerned with the flowers while her son uses the coffin to stash away stolen cash.

The dialogue is like a sadistic Oscar Wilde and I am not sure if director Jim Warren captured all the blackness of the play but it was an enjoyable production none the less. Oliver Dennis, Nicole Underhay and Matthew Edison had the leading roles.

Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing is set in the more familiar and congenial (for the audience) atmosphere of a working class apartment in New York in the 1930’s. It tells the story of a family (could be Greek, Polish or anything but in this case it is Jewish) that tries to make ends meet, maintain family traditions and morals in a new world and just survive. A moving production of the play’s several subplots with Nancy Palk’s powerful performance dominating the evening.

For its next production Soulpepper maintained a similar milieu. This time it was an immigrant family in Toronto in the 1970’s in David French’s Of the Fields, Lately, As in Awake and Sing this is a family drama in which a strong woman tries to effect reconciliation between her husband and her son. It is an emotionally charged play superbly directed by Ted Dykstra with marvelous performances by Diane D’Aquila, Kenneth Walsh, Eric Peterson and Jeff Lillico.

Billy Bishop Goes To War was the next production of the quintessentially Canadian play by John Gray and Eric Peterson. Bishop was the most highly-decorated Canadian war hero of World War I and the play about him has become the most frequently produced Canadian play. Ted Dykstra directed Peterson in the one-man show with Peterson paying some 20 characters. A planeload of kudos to Peterson and the production.

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? presents a family drama of a different kind, to put it mildly. Two couples meet for drinks after a party at a New England college. They could treat us to witty repartee à la Neil Simon or they could launch vicious verbal warfare and cruel games. They do the latter as they examine and reveal not only their lives but by extension American history. Diana Leblanc directed Diego Matamoros and Nancy Palk in stellar performances.

A married couple engaged in verbal warfare is at the center of Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman but the atmosphere is one of hilarity rather than brutality. The warring couple are actors and the jealous husband (Albert Schultz) has to pretend he is his wife’s (Kristen Thomson) secret lover in order to win her back. There are several layers to the deception and perceptions of the play all adding up to a thoroughly enjoyable night at the theatre. Molnar was a Hungarian playwright and you don’t see too many plays from that part of the continent. Take it as an added bonus from Soulpepper.

The promise of moving away from twentieth century drama and offering a Greek tragedy, unfortunately did not materialize. The brochure containing the 2009 productions stated that we will get Sophocles’ Antigone. It was to be “in a new adaptation by Evan Webber with Chris Abraham” which is enough to send chills up your spine but, eh, it’s better than nothing.

We did not get even that. We had to settle for Jean Anouilh’s version of the myth as he saw it during the Nazi occupation of France.

Liisa Repo-Martell and R.H. Thomson did fine work in the leading roles of Antigone and Creon. But director Chris Abraham never brought the production to life and the whole thing was a big disappointment. Soulpepper can and should do more classics and move away from the twentieth century.

The penultimate production of the year was Parfumerie by Miklós László, another Hungarian playwright whom you do not run into every day. We are in the spirit of Christmas and a romantic comedy where love triumphs is de rigueur. Parfumerie tells the story of two people who do not get along at work but who are carrying on a passionate epistolary affair. We all know how that is going to end! Oliver Dennis and Patricia Fagan are the lovers and Joseph Ziegler is the humane owner of the shop where they work. Morris Panych directs the heart-warming comedy.

Production Number 11 for the year was Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies. This was poetry recital combined with singing with piano accompaniment. There are a number of unusual elements to the event. It is based on a poem by Lee, who was Toronto’s first Poet Laureate. It is about Toronto and it consists entirely of verse. No doubt there are other plays based on poetry but I am not aware of one that combines all of the above.

The show was put together by Mike Ross (who also performs it) and Lorenzo Savoini. Albert Schultz directed. This is unusual fare and all we can do is encourage them to give us more.

In 2010, Soulpepper will produce twelve plays in what appears to be a more restricted repertoire. Canadian content is increased to four plays, the Americans and the English get three each and the Russians and the Irish one apiece. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country are the two non-twentieth century offerings.

Four of the productions are revivals: Billy Bishop Goes to War, Glengarry Glen Ross, A Raisin in the Sun and A Christmas Carol were all seen in the last couple of years. They are worthy productions but there are countless plays out there that could have been produced instead of regurgitating recent successes.

John Murrell’s Waiting for the Parade, David French’s Jitters, Sharon Pollock’s Doc are the other Canadian plays and although one can quibble about their choices one cannot mount a serious argument against them.

Oh What A Lovely War by Joan Littlewood, Theatre Workshop and Charles Chilton holds a lot of promise and may be an interestingly compared to Waiting for the Parade, another war-time play. Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country was produced a couple of years ago at the Shaw Festival and we could have waited for a while longer for another staging. That was the Brian Friel version and we will have to see what Susan Coyne has in mind in her adaptation of the play.

Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, a dark comedy, is to be eagerly anticipated as it comes hot on the heels of Loot. I have never seen Sharon Pollock’s Doc nor Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and I can hardly say anything about those choices. Arthur Miler’s Death of a Salesman is a classic that can be seen repeatedly with profit.

I could do without the revivals but that’s because I am not Soulpepper’s Chief Financial Officer or fundraiser.

One can always wish for more or different plays but one can also be grateful for a company that started on a shoe string and provides the richest and most varied theatre in Toronto.
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The 2010 season starts on January 22 with previous of Billy Bishop Goes To War. It opens on January 26, 2010 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill Street, Toronto, Ontario. For more information telephone (416) 866-8666 or go to http://www.soulpepper.ca/

(Photo: Kristen Thomson and Albert Schultz in The Guardsman)

MADAMA BUTTERFLY – OPERA FOR EVERYONE FROM THE COC

The Canadian Opera Company is in its 60th year of existence and in its fourth season at The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. The new venue may not have put Toronto on top of the operatic world but it can probably stand its ground against most opera houses. The new opera house is almost completely sold out for most performances and it is a world away from the old, unlamented O’Keefe/Hummingbird/Sony Centre.

The seven operas offered for the 2009-10 season are nicely spread out over the year instead of the old method of feast or famine. Full houses have resulted in additional performances and the present looks bright.

The COC offers Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale for the fall season which runs from September 26 to November 5, 2009. The next two operas, Carmen and Otello will be shown from late January to the end of February, 2010.

Madama Butterfly is a familiar favourite whereas The Nightingale is a new creation by Robert Lepage. It premieres on October 17 and with Lepage as the force behind it, the tickets for the eight performances are all but completely sold out.

Butterfly is an approachable work and can be enjoyed by the neophyte as well as the opera aficionado. In fact there was a little girl sitting on a seat booster across the aisle from me. The COC’s revival of its 2003 production makes it an even greater pleasure to see and hear the opera. Director Brian Macdonald has opted for a simple and very attractive production. He eschews any attempts at making it ‘different’ and the result is a terrific night at the opera.

The COC has two casts for the main characters. The night I saw it the role of Cio-Cio San (Butterfly) was sung by Romanian soprano Adina Nitescu in her COC debut. What one notices again is that Butterfly is an opera for a soprano with a bunch of visitors thrown in. Pinkerton, Sharpless, Suzki and Goro come and go – Cio-Cio San is on stage most of the time and she has a job to do. Nitescu has the vocal and acting equipment with which to do it. From “Un bel di” to her dramatic farewell to her son and suicide she delivered a moving and beautifully sung performance. She is physically suitable for the role. She does not exactly look like a 15-year old Japanese girl but if she did she would probably not be able to sing or act.

Newfoundlander tenor David Pomeroy was the swaggering Lieut. Pinkerton who is a heartless naval officer in the first act and a remorse-ridden man in the final act when he finds out that he fathered a child with the child geisha. Puccini does not overwork the tenor in this opera but Pomeroy gave a fine account of himself from the Act I aria and duet to the final trio. No doubt we will see more of him.

Baritone James Westman was a very sympathetic and well-done Consul Sharpless. He sang well and interacted very effectively with Butterfly. The pain and sympathy he felt for her was palpable and that is high praise for a singer who may be more interested in the notes than in the acting.

Puccini’s plush music was brought out by the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra conducted by Carlo Montanaro.

THEATER OF ANCIENT MESSENE TO REOPEN

Nikos Dionysios Planning Production in 2010

Plans are afoot to reopen the Theater of Ancient Messene.

Nikos Dionysios, director, actor and choreographer, has organized the Dionysios Theater Company with a view to producing ancient drama at the site as early as next summer. In fact he wants to stage Euripides’s The Bacchae and hopes to take the production on tour.

Dionysios, with his deep roots in Messinia, wants nothing less than a cultural revival of the south-western corner of Peloponnesus. He envisions not just theatrical productions but exchanges with other companies, workshops and conferences on the theater.

Your knowledge of the prefecture Messinia may go no further than eating Kalamata olives and you may not have heard of Ancient Messene and its theater at all. You are not alone. Systematic excavations of the site did not begin until 1986 and there is still much work to be done.

Ancient Messenia did not have particularly cordial relations with its neighbors, the Spartans, and its citizens ended up as helots of the latter. In 369 BC, they achieved independence and the Theban General Epaminondas built the city of Messene as the new capital.

Ancient Messene is the best-preserved city of southern Greece. It is located in the Municipality of Ithomi about 20 kilometers from Kalamata, and was probably the most-ignored site in Greece. Ancient Messene has a stadium, an assembly hall (Vouleftirio) and a theater. The stadium is useable as a theater and can hold up to 7000 people according to Dionysios. The assembly hall can accommodate about 700. The theater should be ready for use in two years and will hold about 4000 spectators.

“I want to capture the poetry of Ancient Greek tragedy” said Dionysios in a recent interview at a café overlooking Ancient Messene. “Greek tragedy is poetry, music and movement” he added “and we need to reach back to those elements even in translation”

“Take the Chorus, for example” he continued. “They spoke in unison, they chanted and they danced. You rarely if ever see Greek Tragedy performed that way these days.”

Dionysios trained and worked under the legendary director Karolos Koun. He has performed in theatres ranging from the Odeon of Herodes Atticus and Epidaurus in Greece to venues in Europe, Hong Kong and North America. Ephemera, his first work as writer and director was distinguished as the Best Production of the Year.

He has also created Masks, a production based on ancient poetry, and Bolero, a play based on the life of Isadora Duncan, among others.

In 2003 he directed Aristophanes’ The Birds at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada. That was the first time that the Festival had staged Aristophanes in its fifty years of existence.

In 2007, he directed and choreographed Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes with the Corfu Regional Repertory Company. In 2008 he directed, choreographed and acted the role of Dionysus in The Bacchae with the same company. The production was seen and well received in Albania and in southern Italy.

Kostas Georgakopoulos, the mayor of the Municipality of Ithomi, sees a great opportunity for the cultural and commercial development of the area. “It will be easier to go from Athens to Ancient Messene than from Athens to Epidaurus when the new highway is completed” he pointed out as he looked at the ancient site and on the spectacular vista of hills beyond.

“We want to enhance and promote the cultural life of the area” added the mayor. “We want to put Ithomi on the cultural map of Europe.”

Christos Athanasopoulos, the President of the Council of Ancient Messene nodded in agreement.

Excavation of the theater at Ancient Messene revealed the startling fact that it had a moveable and removable stage. The stage was mounted on large wheels and it could be moved forward towards the audience. The stage was as much as five meters (15 feet) off the ground. The reason for the construction of a moveable stage is not certain according to Petros Themelis, the archeologist who has spent more than 20 years excavating the site.

It was thought that the moveable stage was a Roman invention that the Greeks had copied after the conquest of Greece by the Romans. This appears not to be so and in fact the theater at Ancient Messene proves the reverse: the Romans copied the idea of a moveable stage from the Greeks. The stage was also completely removable. It was put away in storage at the end of the performance.

“I don’t expect to have a moveable stage” commented Dionysius “but I do want to see prominent theatrical companies from Europe to stage high-quality productions in Ancient Messene. It would be marvelous for people to see how other directors and actors treat Greek tragedy” he said.

Asked about how he plans to finance his vision, Dionysios commented that productions in ancient Athens used to be paid for by wealthy Athenians called “chorigoi”. “In fact there was a very rich and powerful family here called Saethidas during Roman times. They spent a lot of money to preserve the theater. I am checking out if there are any of them still around to repeat what their ancestors did two thousand years ago” he said. “If not we will have to rely on modern day Saethidases and local support.”

“Look what Herodes Atticus did. He built a theatre to commemorate his wife and two thousand years later his name is still a household word for theatre lovers in Greece. Not a bad monument!” he continued.

“Culture is good for business and business is good for culture” he added. Just imagine what even a few thousand visitors to an area can do for its economy. You can look at any number of examples from Canada to Europe where cultural events give a tremendous boom to a community” he concluded.

Mount Ithomi had a sanctuary in honour of Zeus Ithomatas. In the 16th century the Monastery of Voulkano was built over Zeus’s sanctuary. There was also in all likelihood a sanctuary dedicated to Dionysus, the god of the theater.

“We have pagan and Christian representatives close at hand” commented Dionysios with a smile. “With local help and maybe a modern Saethidas or Herodes Atticus, the theater of Ancient Messene may be up and running again after a couple thousand years of darkness.”

STRATFORD SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

HITS AND MISSES OR THE 57th SEASON IN REVIEW


In its 57th season the Stratford Shakespeare Festival is well into middle age and we have every right to expect a varied programme of old and new plays done to very high standards. We don’t have to like everything that they do but there must be production standards and values, and a selection of works that can compare favourably with any theatrical company in the world.

After some rough patches following the retirement of Richard Monette who was Artistic Director from 1994 to 2007, management of the Festival is now in the hands of Antoni Cimolino as General Manager and Des McAnuff as Artistic Director. Cimolino was second in command under Monette and McAnuff comes with considerable theatrical experience most notably in the production of musicals. The photograph in the programmes shows Cimolino cracking a smile with his arm resting on McAnuff’s shoulder. McAnuff sports a broad smile with his arms firmly crossed. Is there a message in the body language?

The Festival offered a total of fourteen productions this year in four theatres. I saw thirteen productions (Ever Yours, Oscar, a one-man show by Brian Bedford about Oscar Wilde being the exception) and now that the season is entering its final weeks it may be a good time to give it a brief look-over.

FESTIVAL THEATRE

There were four productions at the flagship Festival Theatre: two plays by Shakespeare, (Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), West Side Story and Cyrano de Bergerac. If the Festival were to be judged solely by the quality of these productions it would not fare very well.

Macbeth had the acting and star power of Colm Feore in the lead role and the boss himself, Des McAnuff directing the season opener. It was clearly intended to be a showpiece production. Unfortunately despite some good moments the production fell flat on its face.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the comic Shakespeare directed by David Grindley fared little better in what appeared as an all-out attempt to kill Shakespeare. Grindley gave a punk production with some laughter evoked by the artisans but precious little else. The mixture of punk rock, gratuitous violence and 1950’s overtones resulted into a pretty bad night at the theatre.

With Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac we moved to 19th century French drama with the super-nosed poet and swashbuckler played by Colm Feore and directed by his wife Donna Feore.

The result is a passionless production of a play that is full of passion and passionate longing. Donna Lisman is colourless and unconvincing as Roxane in the great balcony scene. The final scene where Roxane realizes that Cyrano is her true lover evoked laugher instead of pathos. That’s as bad as you want to get.

With West Side Story the Festival hits a bull’s eye. We are treated to a muscular, energetic and simply spectacular production directed by Gary Griffin. Paul Nolan as Tony and Chilina Kennedy as Maria perform the main roles exceptionally well with Jennifer Rias doing an outstanding job as Anita. Brandon Espinoza is the athletic and agile Riff, leader of the Jets and Andrew Cao is Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks.

West Side Story is as much a ballet as a musical. There are visceral instrumental pieces that require a highly capable corps of dancers to perform them. The production has an excellent group of dancers and singers to do the job.

AVON THEATRE

There are three productions at the Avon Theatre and the odds of seeing a superb one here are two out of three. The Importance of Being Earnest is the best comedy of the season and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a rollickingly well done musical. The bad news is that Julius Caesar is really bad.

Forum has witty dialogue, melodious songs and a fast-moving and utterly entertaining plot. Director Des McAnuff invents much comic business and he has a tendency to go over the top. He could have gotten more with less but nothing can take way from this thoroughly enjoyable production.

Stratford is lucky in having Brian Bedford to direct and play Lady Bracknell in the almost perfect comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest. Bedford’s directing is impeccable and the performances by the main players almost flawless if one ignores the issue of imperfect English accents. Productions of Earnest are fairly frequent; outstanding ones like this one are a rarity
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Now for the bad news. Julius Caesar directed by James MacDonald and designed by David Boechler can best be described by borrowing a few of the author’s words from Hamlet as “weary, stale flat and unprofitable.” No one can accuse the cast of taking any pleasure in Shakespeare’s words or of bothering much to share that pleasure.

TOM PATTERSON THEATRE

The choice of plays for the Tom Patterson Theatre is more adventurous and the productions far more successful. The adventurous part is the offering of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and Jean Racine’s Phèdre, both for the first time. What took them so long? Chekhov’s Three Sisters may not be adventurous but it is a good choice.

If Earnest is confined to the elegant drawing rooms of Victorian England, Bartholomew Fair encompasses life in London in the 17th century in all its variety, humour and exuberance as seen at a raucous fair.

The plot includes a pickpocket, a horse dealer, a whore, a pimp, a wrestler, a pig-woman, an urchin, a stilt-walker and others. The play presents an atmosphere and a world of its own and this is what Jonson created and director Antoni Cimolino captures so successfully.

Last year Stratford presented Euripides’ Trojan Women. It was a good start that should have been continued. It was not and we are given the next best thing with Phèdre. I found Seana McKenna’s performance outstanding and the production excellent although I took issue with the choice of translation which struck me as prosaic.

Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters directed by Martha Henry was the other high drama at the Patterson. The finely nuanced production showed what a first-rate director can do with an excellent cast.

STUDIO THEATRE

The results at the Studio Theatre were not as edifying as the productions at the Tom Patterson. Morris Panych’s new play, The Trespassers, directed by the author highlighted his virtues and his failings. He can write fine dialogue and develop characters but he has difficulty with structuring a credible plot. The play would have benefitted from the hand of a strict dramaturge.

Rice Boy by Sunil Kuruvilla struck me as a shapeless and boring play even though on paper it looks like a great choice for Stratford. It is a play with Canadian content and encompasses India and Canada. Geographical and national aptness were not enough to save the day.

Zastrozzi by George F. Walker is the third Canadian play offered by the Festival. It is one of Walker’s early plays and was first produced at the Toronto Free Theatre in 1977.

It is a strange, indeed bizarre play. Its full title is Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline and it is supposed to take place in “Europe, probably Italy” sometime in the 1890s. There is nothing in the production to indicate the date or place of the play and it could be located anywhere.

Zastrozzi (Rick Roberts), the main character, is a German master criminal. His friend Bernardo tells us that the play is not about passion or obsession or ideas or emotions. It is much worse than that: it is about revenge. Zastrozzi informs us that he is a man who has no weaknesses and is simply extraordinary.

Zastrozzi’s archenemy is the Italian artist and dreamer Verezzi (Andrew Shaver) and he wants to get rid of him in order to avenge what he, Verezzi, has done to his mother and to wipe off his smile.

We will see nudity, sex, swordfights, killings, and a lot of insane behaviour. The play is called a comedy of revenge and I cannot even give a decent plot summary. The characters are certainly cartoonish, perhaps even escapees from a sci-fi novel. They can almost be found in some episodes of Star Trek but without a visit from Captains Kirk or Picard. They are sometimes funny but by no means funny in any conventional sense. Are they ridiculous? In a way, yes but also macabre and no doubt out of this world.

The “feel” that director Jennifer Tarver gives us encompasses all of the above characteristics and I must admit that it left me simply cold. Walker has created an insane and unique world and characters that I could not relate to and I could not figure out what the initial appeal of the play was or the reason for reviving it. Surely there are better Canadian plays by Walker and others that are more worthy of production or revival than this one.

With a looming deficit, the impulse may be to produce safe plays. It would be wrong. The Festival should show gumption in producing less known works from the classical repertoire. If they do them well, the world will notice and people will fill the theatre. The Festival should create and nurture an audience as much as entertain the existing theatre goers.

And so, until next year.

(Photo is of Stratford's "Three Sisters")

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE AND ALBERTINE IN FIVE TIMES AT SHAW FESTIVAL

The playwright who lends his name to the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake gets only two of his plays produced there this year. That’s not quite 20% of the eleven productions. The two Bernard Shaw plays are The Devil’s Disciple at the Festival Theatre and In Good King Charles Golden Days at the Royal George Theatre.

Shaw described The Devil’s Disciple as a melodrama in three acts. There are melodramatic elements in the play but one should never take Shaw at his word and expect a conventional potboiler.

The play takes place in 1777 in New Hampshire during the American Revolution. Dick Dudgeon (Evan Buliung), an unorthodox character and the devil’s disciple, finds himself in the house of The Reverend Anthony Anderson (Peter Krantz) when British soldiers come to arrest the latter. Dudgeon pretends to be Anderson and he kisses the latter’s pretty wife Judith (Fiona Byrne) as he is led away to be hanged by the British. Dudgeon is tried by General Burgoyne (Jim Mezon) and Major Swindon (Peter Millard) and he escapes hanging.

The first two acts are incredibly ineffectual. The play and the production seem to creak and it is hard to say where the fault lies. Is the play that bad or is director Tadeusz Bradecki not able to bring out its strengths? Bradecki opens the play with the supposedly startling image of a man being hanged, something that Shaw did not think of. Even that does not work.

The final act is the trial of Dudgeon by Major Swindon and General Burgoyne. Jim Mezon does a very good job as Burgoyne as does Millard as Swindon. Shaw has fun taking swipes at British aristocracy, arrogance and incompetence and the audience joins in. There is Shavian wit and wisdom and the pace picks up.

Bradecki takes some liberties with the text going so far as to add a few lines about Butlersburg becoming Niagara-on-the-Lake, something not mentioned by Shaw. This does produce a laugh but surely it is an unnecessary interpolation but some people may consider it a clever way of reaching out to the audience and making the play relate to them. After all, 300,000 loyalists did come to Canada after the American Revolution and they were the ones who started Niagara-on-the-Lake.

The relatively minor role of a British Sergeant is given to Richard Stewart who seems to belong to another play. A British Sergeant should sound somewhat, even slightly like a British Sergeant. Jonathan Widdifield, on the other hand, is good as Christy, Dick’s doltish brother.

A production that can be summed up as one third good and two-thirds so-so is not what one expects from the Shaw Festival.

The Canadian content of the Festival is Michel Tremblay’s Albertine in Five Times at the Court House Theatre.

When the lights go on we see five women. The oldest will sit centre-stage and the other four will sit around her. The five actors represent one woman, Albertine, at the age of 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70. Her sister Madeline will also appear and will talk with her sister. The five actors will talk with each other but we know of course that they represent one person and whatever each actor says represents the memories or experiences of Albertine.

It is a brilliant device. Representing a single working-class woman over five decades of her life simultaneously is an inspired idea. I don’t think the execution is as successful as the inspiration but it is a play that makes you stop and take notice.

Albertine at 70 (Patricia Hamilton) has just returned home from the hospital and she muses that she will be better off there. She appears calm, at peace with herself in old age.

We learn that Albertine, the waitress and mother from the working class district of Duhamel had two children, Therese and Marcel. Therese misbehaved and at age 11 was allowed a paedophile to molest her. Albertine at 30 beat Therese to a pulp and apparently did not shed a tear about it. Regret and guilt if not tears come later and she has to live with the memory of her action. At different stages of her life she tries to forget, resign herself to her fate or take drugs. It amounts to a tragic life over five decades that are spread out before us.

Madeleine (Nicola Correia-Damude) provides a counterbalance to Albertine. Not all men are monsters, she says, and she is able to find love or is at least able to cope better than her sister.

Unfortunately the play is not always clear or easy to follow. Albertine at 70 can look back on her life, remember her past and have a dialogue with herself at different stages of her life. Albertine at 30 can have little to say to Albertine at 60, though she can correct lapses of memory, I suppose. Madeline died before Albertine reached 70 and yet she is on the stage talking with her. This is not a play that one can digest on one viewing.

Albertine at 30 is played by Marla McLean, at 40 by Jenny L. Wright, at 50 by Mary Haney and at 60 by Wendy Thatcher, doing good work in rather static roles. The play is directed by Micheline Chevrier.

In the end you end up being fascinated by the idea of the play and your attention is riveted but the fascination falls short of making this an enjoyable production. The play and the production fail to cross the thin line of “that was interesting” to that was a great evening at the theatre.