Stratford - 2012 season’s opening week

Much Ado for Nothing

I can’t stop marvelling at Shakespeare’s versatility! From the romantic – like this well-known comedy, very well put together and played here, in this turn-of-last century South American context – to the tragic (Hamlet, Macbeth, etc...) to the magical (The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, etc...)! Then there is the Hay-Carlson phenomenon, the real-life married couple: she playing the feminist-before-the-time “Beatrice” against Carlson’s precious and shy “Benedick”. Both originated from the Shaw Festival; he came earlier – I remember him first as “Hamlet” a few years back, the only play I saw more than once that season, because of him...

42nd Street

A surprise to me – and a good one! I normally don’t particularly go for “musicals” (strange, would you say, for someone in the music business...!) but that one, wow! Storyline, interpretation, singing, dancing, ...and the costumes! Too much of a departure for a “Shakespeare” company? Perhaps...but I enjoyed, and if it is, it is a nice diversion... Cynthia Dale, a favorite of the Festival (and of me anyway, since TV show “Street Legal”), returns (very skinny) as the leading lady “Dorothy Brock” who gets pushed (literally) out of the limelight in the play by “Peggy Sawyer” (relatively junior Jennifer Rider-Shaw). Interesting to know that“42nd Street” was a film first, from the ‘30s, before it hit Broadway in the ‘80s...

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

Peanuts strips on stage! Well polished and humorous– the dog is very funny – but not my cup of tea...

Cymbeline

So Shakespearian...and so good! This is Shakespeare as I think of it; it has everything that I associate to his plays: complicated and very involved storyline (entangled threads), identity substitution, blood, battles, swords, magic potions, smoke, ghosts, even mythical gods (Jupiter appearing atop of an eagle!) And it all dissolves, and gets resolved, in a grand finale! The bard wrote Cymbeline towards the end of his writing career (of his life?) – The director of the play, Antoni Cimolino – the current General Director and the coming seasons’ Artistic Director succeeding Des McAnuff – was telling us that Cymbeline is thought by some to be Shakespeare’s last play, a reflection on his life...Cymbeline is also a bit of a “home coming” for Graham Abbey, the local boy returning to his roots as “Posthumus”, having been away from Stratford, for TV and other things in Toronto and elsewhere, since 2006.

The Pirates of Penzance

It’s a Gilbert & Sullivan – très peu pour moi, merci! It is a swell production though – the set and the costumes are magnificent. Congratulations to the set and costume designers – as only the Festival can put out.

The Matchmaker

Final opening of the week! Celebrating the 75th anniversary of this play by Thorton Wilder (of “Our Town” fame – subject of my high school English class!). I understand that the play was a major flop when it came out on Broadway in 1938, and that in the early ‘50s Tyrone Guthrie, then Artistic Director of the Festival, gave Wilder “a second chance” to” re-write” and adapt the original play into what is now “The Matchmaker”. It became a major hit, on the West End first, then on Broadway. Entertaining but, in my book, not convincingly!

So 3 out of 6 - not bad!

This is the 6th season opening at Stratford for us  – Cynthia started at the Festival at the end of the 2006 season; we caught the latest plays that year – the introduction year – among which I recall “Coriolanus” and “Don Juan”, en français, both with Colm Feore (extraordinary performances as well in the later play that was presented twice, one in English and then in the original text, by the fabled Jean-Louis Roux as Don Juan’ s reproaching father, and Benoît Brière who “stole the show” as Sganarelle)

I spent some time this week listing all the plays we have seen since our return to Canada – in Stratford for most of them, but also in NYC and Toronto – and I don’t remember seeing anything of the Stratford 2007 season (I have reviewed the play bill of that year – King Lear, Oklahoma, The Merchant of Venice, An Ideal Husband, To Kill a Mockingbird, My One and Only, The Comedy of Errors, Othello, Of Mice and Men, Shakespeare’s Will, etc... – and nothing comes back to mind), probably because I missed it altogether!

This year though, we attended a symposium – “Interpreting Shakespeare Across Settings and Media... featuring influential theatre artists and intellectuals in discussion about how Shakespeare’s work lends itself to a broad range of media, interpretations and settings” – organized and chaired by the Festival’s Archives Director, Francesca Marini, with Colm Feore – at his energetic usual! Katherine Rowe – a professor very specialized in the field. And especially Norman Lloyd – in his time an actor, a director and a producer who has worked with “greats” such as Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock! The man is 97 years old, still has the required booming voice and a mind clear as a whistle! He appears still to be “a man about town” – just back from attending this year’s Cannes film festival! I was asking him how to “explain” and his answer was “tennis”! He plays 2 or 3 times a week (while in France last week, he went to witness the beginning of the French Tennis Open at Roland Garros!). Great recounting and anecdotes: how lighting defined Orson Welles’ rendering of the seminal “Julius Caesar” in 1937 in NYC; the inspiration for his role – the poet – in this play; Peter O’Toole as “Shylock” – for him the performance that marked him the most; etc... (Talking of anecdotes, Feore used one to great effect– that happened while filming “Titus Andronicus”, with tough film director Julie Taymor, and “do nothing” as advised by Anthony Hopkins – to explain the relationship – and difference – between acting for the camera and acting on stage!)

Must see the 2007 documentary entitled “Who Is Norman Lloyd?” – Lloyd tells me it is available on Amazon... He is also the author of a book, Stages: Of Life in Theatre, Film, and Television, published in 2004.

Stratford, Ontario, June 3, 2012

P.S. Restaurants: pizzas as usual at Pazzo; breakfasts at Foster's Inn and Balsac's Coffee Roastery. Discovered Mercer Hall (will be back) and great dinner at Bijou Restaurant (had not been there for a few years - excellent duck!)