Stratford, Ontario, CA, pop. just over 30,000, seems at first blush indistinguishable from numberless charming small towns in the American Middle West: wide streets, few buildings taller than three stories, plenty of flora and pocket parks, churches and cafes and specialty shops galore. And friendly folks everywhere.
But on most nights from April through October, as well as many afternoons, Stratford comes to life in a unique way. The people begin to move. Always at an easy clip, but ineluctably in small groups that become ever larger, locals and tourists shuffle their way to any of four performance spaces in three scattered locations. Talk about your “theater towns”: Stratford defines the term and has been doing so for 70 years, ever since the late journalist Tom Patterson (for whom one of the four buildings is named) persuaded distinguished director Sir Tyrone Guthrie to take up the reins of the regular celebration of Shakespeare that he felt his home town deserved, by virtue of name and inclination.
Until last week I had never visited the Festival, to my embarrassment. But a generous invitation from friends was something I couldn’t resist, and especially now when so many theatre institutions, particularly in the U.S., are so patently struggling to stay alive while recalibrating their mission to the art form and to their communities. This year alone the Stratford acting company, some 136 strong, was scheduled to perform 13 full-length plays in staggered rep for a total expected audience of well over 600,000. Clearly the Festival is in touch with its community, but how and why is it working? I hoped I would learn something and have a great time. Lo, both came to pass.
My week began with a mounting (and I do mean mounting) of Richard II, the most poetic of all Shakespearean histories, set in the waning days of the disco era and, coincidentally, the waxing days of the AIDS crisis. As the strains of Gloria Gaynor waft across the three-quarter-thrust stage, the evening explodes with the squealing, sensuous revels of King Richard, played by Stephen Jackman-Torkoff as an amalgam of Sylvester and Prince. Under the inevitable mirror ball, and accompanied by a corps de Spandau Ballet of white-winged angels, Richard’s campy retinue makes out, bumps booty, and generally cavorts in a way sure to incur the wrath of any and all forces of reaction.
In other words, ladies and gentlemen: Welcome to Studio 1354.
You will have guessed that faithfulness to Shakespeare’s text was a low priority for director Jillian Keiley and her chosen adapter, Canadian playwright Brad Fraser (Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love). Famous lines and speeches have been jettisoned, new dialogue is taken from the sonnets or written from scratch, and entire subplots are invented in the service of attaching to the history’s bones a stark analogy to the 1980s. That, of course, was the decade during which gay men were left to suffer and die while Reagan-era conservatism, represented here by an army of grim, gray-flanneled suits, stood by contemptuously silent.
For me it works, big time. It brilliantly illuminates the disjunction between the moralistic worldview of self-righteous Bolingbroke (Jordin Hall, commanding), who will eventually usurp the throne as Henry IV, and the hapless kingship of Richard, unsuited to rule but forced by fate to do so. Richard’s intimates Bushy and Green (Bagot’s been excised, doubtless to avoid the name’s rhyming association) are joined by Aumerle (Emilio Vieira), who becomes the king’s lover and, eventually, his executioner. Historical or not, it adds a chilling dimension to the second half, not least because of Jackman-Torkoff and Vieira’s expert playing. Also interpolated is a bisexual member of Bolingbroke’s inner circle, Willoughby (poignantly etched by Charlie Gallant), whose declining health causes a rift with his comrade Ross (Matthew Kabwe). The latter’s reluctance to physically contact his friend thrusts us back to that painful time of dread. Shakespeare himself played so fast and loose with his sources that Fraser’s stab (le mot juste, to some) doesn’t bother me a whit. And the young people in the audience adored it. I heard them discuss it in cafés all week. That’s not nothing.
A different kind of artistic license is taken in the greenery-lush Much Ado About Nothing of director Chris Abraham, who brings out every opportunity for physical comedy in the on-again, off-again courtship of Beatrice (Maev Beaty) and Benedick (Graham Abbey) while giving short shrift to their verbal jousting. Both have been permitted (encouraged?) to ad lib with the audience, to which I say “So what? They’re delightful. Did not the groundlings at the original Globe engage in similar participation?” Meanwhile, if like me you are accustomed to groaning over the tedious antics of Dogberry (Josue Laboucane) and his watch, here you roar at this crew’s eager bumpkin naїveté, played totally straightfaced and hence all the funnier.
Abraham has his designated Bard-rewriter in verse dramatist Erin Shields, who incorporates dialogue for Hero (Allison Edwards-Crewe) to chastise her intended Claudio (a fine Austin Eckert) – and presumably many of us men in the audience – for too-readily accepting the calumny of her betrayal. This too didn’t bother me, for I’ve always felt that Hero got short shrift after she’d been through so much, and Edwards-Crewe plays her indictment with such sincerity and fire that I couldn’t resist. (It didn’t hurt that both Shields and Fraser’s verse interpolations were tough to distinguish from authentic Shakespeare.)
The purists were up in arms, of course, but I’ll take a queerified Richard II or a slapstick, rewritten-for-current-morés Much Ado any day, if they’re done to new purpose and engender engagement or delight. (The original texts remain, lest we forget.) I had problems with the King Lear in that regard. Director Kimberley Rampersad serves (reputedly well) as Associate Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the Lake. Yet I wonder whether it was wise to assign this most titanic and difficult of tragedies as what is evidently a first try with Shakespeare, and on the main Festival Stage no less, whose modified thrust has defeated many a stager (as I learned, in hard lessons, through years of acting and directing on just such a platform in summer stock). Few of the major characters in this Lear establish any significant or lingering contact with each other, and several of the principal roles are inadequately cast, costumed, or played. To be fair, Rampersad notes in the program that her understandable concern over her dad’s health crisis distracted her during the Lear prep period. A remarkable and touching admission, but perhaps all the more reason to give the project over to a more experienced hand, who might (for instance) have declined to open the raging storm on the heath with a falling beam, down which Paul Gross’s Lear is asked to tiptoe like a tightrope walker.
Gross, incidentally, is one of the actors most associated with this festival, but not because of his tenure, which to date consists of this Lear and a 2000 Hamlet. But he starred in three seasons of the much-loved satirical dramedy Slings & Arrows as notorious theatrical madman Geoffrey Tennant, who comes back to the town of “New Burbage” to run its festival, and hijinks ensue. Stratford seems to have an ambivalent relationship with S&A – of all the merch for sale at the festival’s and town’s shops and stalls, I not once spied the series’ DVD box set – but Gross himself is a favorite, making it all the more disheartening that he chose to return in a role for which his vigor and bearing don’t really suit him; not yet at least. At moments his military-martinet king, riding-crop in fist, has the capacity to pull us up short. But I suspect he needed stronger directorial collaboration to string those beads into a coherent through-line of action into madness.
Anyhow, the Stratford Festival some time ago took the adjective “Shakespearean” out of its official monicker. This year the Bard is represented only by Richard, Lear, Much Ado, and a reportedly experimental black-box Love’s Labour’s Lost that doesn’t open until summer’s end. However, new Canadian works and adaptations, children’s theater pieces, and world classics are annually programmed, this year including Grand Magic, written in 1948 by the prolific Eduardo de Filippo. A cast of 27 (yeah, I blinked at that number, too) people this curiosity, which starts out farcically with a down-on-his-luck illusionist rebuilding his career, and transforms into the moody, existential quest of a cuckolded husband wrestling with questions of fidelity and betrayal. I felt that Antoni Cimolino, the Festival’s esteemed Artistic Director, didn’t quite have a tight-enough handle on the shifts in tone and scope that the script requires. But it’s a thoughtful (if cerebral) work with much to recommend it, and how often will one have a chance to see it at all? It’s worth grabbing.
Still, Shakespeare and the likes of Grand Magic aren’t likely to generate endowment money, and that’s where the musicals shine in. A smartly-done (if over-miked) Monty Python’s Spamalot is selling out nightly, and deserves to. Its farceurs take the story utterly seriously which is as it should be, particularly Aaron Krohn as a square-jawed Sir Lancelot whose gender fluidity comes more as a surprise to him than anyone else. Speaking of surprises, the boffo pipes and comic brio of the Lady of the Lake are de rigeur to any Spamalot, but here’s what isn’t: Jennifer Rider-Shaw is very, very pregnant, and she’s clearly tickled by it, and you wish you could eavesdrop in the future when she tells her youngster about the high kicks and deep-knee bends Mommie was doing up to the day of birth.
As a final ploy to pay the rent, Stratford’s presenting Rent, the only one of the 13 offerings running for the entire season’s length. And boy, is it a kid-attractor and crowd-pleaser. Though I’ve always loved Jonathan Larson’s febrile, pulsating score, the self-absorbed kvetching of his artistes-in-training usually gives me a distinct pain. But director Thom Allison realizes – not unlike Chris Abraham with Dogberry – that if you play conflicted characters with total reality, even tired clichés can be invested with new life. The actors embody their roles’ pain as well as joy, notably Lee Siegel as the most anguished Tom Collins within memory. Nestor Lozano Jr.’s street musician Angel is as fresh as if they’re the first ever to pound that pickle-tub drum. And from the original U.S. cast of Six where she played Anne Boleyn, Andrea Macasaet is simply astonishing as the drug-addicted, hopelessly romantic Mimi. Her illness is real, but so is her unquenchable zest for life, and if Rent isn’t about that it isn’t about anything.
Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, which wound up my visit, set me to weeping as Rent always does, but this time not just for the show, nor for the unexpected tribute to the AIDS Quilt at the very end. I was genuinely overcome by the scope and commitment of what I observed here all week, a community of artists and a community of citizens bringing out the best in each other. (It’s worth noting that Stratford has matter-of-factly embraced color-blind casting on the assumption that, on the stage at least, race and ethnicity are much ado about nothing.)
Further kudos are due to the technical achievements of the Festival’s designers and craftspeople, who made every show look like a million bucks (U.S., not just Canadian!) and gave me images I expect to retain for a long time. I think of the evocation of a public bath in Richard II by set designer Michael Gianfrancesco, with strips of muslin covering a shallow trap from which actors popped and canoodled, accompanied by Don Ellis’s lusciously liquid sound design. Or the rocks, furniture and foliage from Much Ado designer Julie Fox, behind which Benedick, and later Beatrice, hid while eavesdropping on their friends’ matchmaking. Or the major scene change in Grand Magic, when Lorenzo Savoini’s lighting transformed the full auditorium into the deep, deep ocean as the room furniture, gently lifted and shifted by the cast, became flotsam and jetsam bobbing in a tumultuous sea. This truly was grand magic, and that’s still possible even in our post-COVID era of rebuilding.
The 2023 Stratford Festival season began on April 8, 2023 and runs until October 28. For tickets and information: www.stratfordfestival.ca
