We preview the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s 2012 season

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario) will be celebrating its 60th season by cutting its Shakespeare offerings down to three plays, plus a version of Macbeth using characters from The Simpsons. Overall, it’s a disappointing 2012 playbill. Still, in order of interest, these are the shows that interest us the most:

1. Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (at the Festival Theater)

Much Ado About Nothing figures to be the best Shakespeare of the season. Ben Carlson, one of the finest classical actors we’ve seen anywhere, will play Benedict, and his wife Deborah Hay will appear as Beatrice. Since he’s been at Stratford, Mr. Carlson’s been as good as they get as Hamlet, Brutus, Leontes, Touchstone, and Alceste (in last season’s The Misanthrope). The question is whether Ms. Hay can match him in Shakespeare. At the Shaw Festival she stood out as a comic actress, but she was also terrific three years in a more nuanced role in Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance (see this Emsworth post).

If you haven’t noticed, Shakespeare’s five most popular comedies are in a rotation of sorts at the Stratford Festival; it’s comforting to know that it won’t be long before you can see one of your favorites. We’ve had

The Taming of the Shrew (2003)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2004)
As You Like It (2005)
Twelfth Night (2006)
Much Ado About Nothing (2006)

The Taming of the Shrew (2008)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2009)
As You Like It (2010)
Twelfth Night (2011)

It was therefore predictable that Much Ado About Nothing, which is indeed a favorite of ours, would be on the marquee in 2012. It will be directed by former Shaw Festival Artistic Director Christopher Newton, who has said the play will be set in Brazil.

2. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (at the Tom Patterson Theater)

We’ve tried and failed several times to read Cymbeline, but it’s always seemed too hard to follow. So we’re hoping this show will bring to life a Shakespeare play that hasn’t worked for us in print. Stratford productions have done this for us before — we’re thinking especially of Troilus and Cressida (2003) and Two Gentleman of Verona (2010).

We don’t claim to understand Cymbeline‘s plot, which is the complicated story of a young woman who marries against her father’s will. Geraint Wyn Davies will play the title role, and Cara Ricketts will play his daughter Imogen. Despite its uncomfortable seats, the Tom Patterson Theatre is still our favorite place to see Shakespeare.

3. 42nd Street (at the Festival Theater)

We were startled to realize that 42nd Street was not from the golden age of Broadway musicals. We’d seen the ’30s movie and assumed wrongly that it was based on a musical play. In fact, 42nd Street wasn’t staged until 1980; it won the Tony as best musical play in 1981.

The story of 42nd Street is a show about a show, with cliches that were endlessly recycled in old movie musicals; a chorus girl, Peggy Sawyer, is canned for messing up, but is rehired to take the place of an injured star. Interestingly, the Stratford Festival has yet to announce who will play Peggy Sawyer. [1-23-12 update: it's been announced that Jennifer Rider-Shaw, a young singer who was part of the company in Jesus Christ Superstar last year, has been given the part.] But long-time Stratford favorite Cynthia Dale will be returning to play Dorothy Brock, the injured leading lady whom Peggy Sawyer replaces. Gary Griffin, who directed the phenomenal West Side Story at Stratford three years ago, will be in charge.

The show uses one of Emsworth’s all-time top-ten favorite pop songs, “I Only Have Eyes for You.” This tune was not in the 1933 movie, but was instead written by the same songwriting team of Harry Warren and Al Dubin for another show, Dames, a year later. Other songs in 42nd Street include “Lullabye of Broadway” (which wasn’t in the 1933 movie either) and “You’re Getting to Be A Habit With Me.” June 2012 update: “I Only Have Eyes for You” wasn’t used in the show after all! But the show as a whole was dazzling entertainment.

4. Electra (by Sophocles, at the Tom Patterson Theater)

Another shot at classical Greek tragedy! We have shamefully little experience either seeing or reading the ancient Greek poets. Three years ago at Stratford we did see a play by Euripedes, The Trojan Women, which like Electra was written about 400 years before the birth of Christ, but we didn’t know what to make of it and didn’t feel confident enough to blog about it. We still find it mind-boggling to think that these dramas have been preserved for 2500 years.

In a way, Electra is a sequel to The Trojan Women. In the latter play, the Greek king Agamemnon and his men have burned Troy and carried off their women. In Electra, the Greeks are back home after the Trojan wars, but Agamemnon and his new Trojan concubine Cassandra have been murdered by his wife Clytemnestra (as predicted by Cassandra in The Trojan Women). Agamemnon’s daughter Electra is unhappy about the murder of her father, and she and her twin brother Orestes set about to revenge their father by slaying their mother. Good times!

In the plays of Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Miller — that is, in modern theater — the characters have more or less realistic conversations with one another. There was none of that in The Trojan Women, which consisted mostly of protracted laments by angry women, plus speeches by the gods. There probably won’t be any snappy repartee in Electra either. But it’s a different genre; we’ve gathered that ancient Greek tragedy is as different from modern theater as modern theater is from opera.

5. The Matchmaker (by Thornton Wilder, at the Festival Theatre)

Bernard Shaw and Tennessee Williams wrote novels too, but nobody reads them. Thornton Wilder is on the short list of writers who have been as successful writing stories and novels as they have writing plays. In fact, we just read and enjoyed Wilder’s late novel The Eighth Day this fall.

Everyone knows and loves Wilder’s Our Town, but The Matchmaker, which we enjoyed about ten years ago at the Shaw Festival, is every bit as entertaining, and funnier. This is the play on which the musical Hello, Dolly! was based. The wonderful Seana McKenna will play the matchmaker, Dolly Levi.

6. Henry V (by William Shakespeare, at the Festival Theatre)

Emsworth ungraciously announced a year ago that he did not intend to buy any more tickets for Shakespeare plays directed by Stratford Artistic Director Des McAnuff. Faithful to that vow, we boycotted the McAnuff-directed Twelfth Night last summer, even though it’s one of our very favorite Shakespeare plays (see this list), and even though it was apparently popular with Stratford audiences. We were told by reliable friends that we did well to skip it. We don’t doubt that Mr. McAnuff sincerely loves Shakespeare, but he clearly doesn’t have faith that a Shakespeare play can stand on its own without gimmicks like the sixties-style rock songs that (report has it) repeatedly interrupted the story of Twelfth Night last summer.

But what could Mr. McAnuff possibly do to ruin Henry V? It’s a play about a historical English king, set unambiguously in a definite time and place in history. So surely he won’t re-imagine it as a fascist fable (as he did with As You Like It a couple of years ago) or set it in Africa (as he did with the Scottish play, Macbeth, a year before that). Fortunately, our vows are not as inviolable as Lear’s, which he “durst never” break (King Lear, Act I, Scene 1). We’ve never seen Henry V on stage, and we badly want to.

It’s disappointing that Ben Carlson wasn’t cast as Henry V. Mr. Carlson is of suitable age for the role now, but he won’t be the next time the Stratford Festival mounts Henry V, in another ten years or so. The part has been given instead to Aaron Krohn; Mr. Carlson will be relegated to the minor role of of the Welshman, Fluellen. Lucy Peacock will adorn the role of the Hostess; we’ll be glad to see Tom Rooney as Pistol.

7. A Word or Two (readings/recitations by Christopher Plummer, at the Avon Theater)

A year ago we expressed the hope that Christopher Plummer would return to Stratford in 2012 to play the Duke in Measure for Measure. Mr. Plummer is indeed coming back to Stratford, but to give a solo program of readings and recitations. It’ll run for only a month, from late July to late August.

No doubt these readings will be memorable. But we are seriously put off by the fact that tickets for this one-man show will be about 30 percent more expensive than tickets for, say, Henry V, which will have castles full of courtiers and battlefields full of armies.

8. The Pirates of Penzance (operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan, at the Avon Theatre)

Wonderful tunes, clever lyrics. The Pirates of Penzance is the farcical story of a young man whose nurse accidentally apprentices him to a band of pirates, to whom he is bound until his 21st birthday. But Frederic was born on February 29, so unfortunately he won’t hit 21 for a while. It’s all very entertaining, but we’ve come to think of Gilbert & Sullivan as community theater material and aren’t likely to add this show to our bundle of tickets.

9. You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (musical play based on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, at the Avon Theatre)

Surely they jest.

10. MacHomer at the Studio Theatre)

Homer Simpson and family do Macbeth. Here’s more evidence that the management at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival doesn’t have faith in its core product. This show will play only during May, while the schools are still in session and English teachers are still bringing their students to Stratford. After all, why should the kids have to suffer through Much Ado About Nothing? Give ‘em something they’ll understand! And something that’ll make ‘em laugh!

Other shows: Hirsch (by Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson, in the Studio Theatre); The Best Brothers (by Daniel MacIvor, in the Studio Theatre); Wanderlust (by Morris Panych, in the Tom Patterson Theatre)

The play called Hirsch is about John Hirsch, who was Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival for five years about 30 years ago. We’re not uninterested in the history of the Stratford Festival (see this post), but this seems a stretch.

The Best Brothers is a world premiere by a Canadian playwright, described as the story of a couple of brothers coming to grips with the death of their mother.

Wanderlust is a new musical play written by the Canadian playwright and director Morris Panych. It’s advertised as based on the poems of Canadian poet Robert W. Service. Like Jack London, Service wrote a good deal about the gold rush in Alaska and the Yukon in the early 20th century, and that’s what this story is about. Tom Rooney will take the role of the poet.

Play, Orchestra, Play at the Shaw Festival (a review)

The Peppers are a bit old in the tooth to pass for a pair of young sailors

After seeing three of them, we can say with assurance that it was an excellent idea for the Shaw Festival to give four of its season’s shows over to Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30. The show at the Royal George Theater, Play, Orchestra, Play is every bit as entertaining as the others. 

The three one-act plays that make up Play, Orchestra, Play are quite different from each other: one is comic, one is brutally serious, and one is essentially a romantic fantasy. This is pretty much the same mix as in Brief Encounters, which we loved (see this post), but there is a good deal more music in Play, Orchestra, Play than in Brief Encounters — five songs in all, plus musical interludes between the plays.

First in order is Red Peppers, a slice from an evening in the life of George and Lily Pepper, a vaudeville pair who are are hanging on by their fingernails as the end of that era nears. The Peppers are still working, in cheap regional music halls, but their cross-talk is stale and their act’s not very good.

The Peppers squabble in their dressing room

We meet them on stage, dressed as a pair of sailors singing “Has Anyone Seen Our Ship”; the end of the number is spoiled when Lily (Patty Jamieson) drops her prop as they dance off the stage. As they change in their dressing room (the period costumes include vintage British underwear!), George (Jay Turvey) blames Lily for flubbing her exit, and they start rehashing old grievances.

But they stop bickering, close ranks, and redirect their fire toward the common enemy: the conductor of the house orchestra, the house manager, and another performer, all of whom drop by during the interlude before they go on again. (At some point in his career, Coward himself must have had to rely on unreliable house musicians for tempos; in Red Peppers he settles a score or two. In this production, unfortunately, the orchestra’s just a little too loud, so that we couldn’t catch all the lyrics to “Has Anyone Seen Our Ship” and “Men About Town.” No doubt the Peppers were familiar with that problem, too.) The insults fly around the dressing room; the pugnacious Peppers are shockingly willing to alienate the very people on whom they depend for professional survival. It’s all very funny, and very real.

Coward

Coward was at the top of the entertainment world when he wrote this play in 1935. But he clearly loved people like the Peppers, who were at the bottom of the profession, for their fierce independence and their commitment to their craft. We met people a lot like the Peppers last winter when we read J. B. Priestley’s 1929 novel The Good Companions, which tells the story of a traveling troupe of perfomers who play small music halls throughout England.

The middle play, Fumed Oak, features the equally vulgar and far less lovable wife, daughter, and mother-in-law of Henry Gow. Fumed Oak is straight drama and has no musical numbers, but this was the play in Play, Orchestra, Play that we liked best.

Henry Gow (Stephen Sutcliffe) does his best to ignore his whining daughter and bitchy wife

The unfortunate Henry Gow (Stephen Sutcliffe) has been stuck for years in a job as a retail clerk; worse, he’s married to Doris Gow (Patty Jamieson again), who long ago tricked him into marriage with the old pregnancy ploy, thereby frustrating his dream of going to sea and seeing the world. “You’re a bad lot, Dorrie,” Henry tells his wife. “Mean and cold and respectable.” It took three years after their “little rough and tumble” for a baby to be born; their daughter Elsie (Robin Evan Willis), now a teenager, is a “horrid little kid,” as Henry says. His mother-in-law (Wendy Thatcher) lives with them in their tiny, noisy apartment and whines and bitches at everyone.

Henry Gow (Stephen Sutcliffe) declares himself free

During the first part of Fumed Oak, Henry sits silently at his breakfast listening to the females snipe at one another. (Unlike the bickering in Red Peppers, there’s nothing funny about it.) During the second part, Henry carries off an enormously satisfying coup, gives the women what for, and escapes his hellish home. Is this play misognynist? We thought about it and decided it wasn’t.

We wondered what the title of this play meant. Henry Gow says that when Conrad and Kipling wrote about the sea, they “knew there was a bit more to it than refinement and fumed oak and lace curtains and getting old and miserable with nothing to show for it.” When we got home, we looked it up and found that “fumed oak” is oak that has been darkened by exposure to ammonia — not a bad metaphor for Coward’s character.

The show concludes with Shadow Play. Unlike the first two plays, which deal with working class folk, Shadow Play delves into the lives of the rich and fashionable. (Coward was remarkably familiar with people of all stations in life.)

Julie Martell and Stephen Sutcliffe as Vicki and Simon in Shadow Play

In Red Peppers, vaudeville partners George and Lily Pepper had only each other to lean on. In Shadow Play, Vicky Gayforth (the exceptionally fetching Julie Martell) and her husband Simon (Stephen Sutcliffe again) are socialites who have forgotten why they needed each other in the first place. Simon is carrying on a notorious affair with Sibyl Heston (Robin Evan Willis again); Vicky is letting an infatuated young man pursue her, but hasn’t yet decided how far to let him go.

After Vicky and Simon have come back from a romantic play, Simon proposes that they divorce. But the desperately miserable Vicky has already taken extra sleeping pills, and the rest of the play is a drug-induced dream sequence, much of it in song, as Vicky relives their early romance. Julie Martell and Stephen Sutcliffe are fine duet partners (as they are in the Shaw Festival’s Sunday in the Park with George this summer, as well). The songs in Shadow Play are “Play, Orchestra, Play,” “Then,” and the melodic and memorable “You Were There.”

The backdrops for each of these one-act plays consist of scenes projected onto a screen (see the picture at the top of this post). These work very well and are especially effective during the fantasy sequences in Shadow Play.

Director Christopher Newton programmed a good many of Noël Coward’s full-length plays while he was the Shaw Festival’s Artistic Director. We hope the Shaw doesn’t take too long a break from Coward after this year. Surely, in a couple of years, it will be time for the Shaw to put on Cavalcade again — what an unforgettable show that was! And we’d really love to see The Vortex.

Emsworth reviews of other Shaw Festival productions in 2009:

John Osborne’s The Entertainer (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)

We preview the Shaw Festival’s 2009 season

Even under Jackie Maxwell, Shaw Festival seasons have been fairly predictable — which, of course, suits Emsworth, who is deeply suspicious of change, just fine.

For instance, since The Devil’s Disciple hadn’t been seen at Niagara-on-the-Lake since 1996, it was overdue for one of the two slots for Shaw plays, and a good bet to pop up in 2009.

For Emsworth’s preview of the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season, which will feature two classic American comedies, The Women and Harvey, see this post.

And since the Shaw Festival did an O’Neill play three years ago, which we guessed and hoped was the beginning of an O’Neill cycle, an O’Neill play on the 2009 playbill would have been a good guess (in fact, we’ll get A Moon for the Misbegotten).

Noel Coward

We also would have laid money on another Noel Coward play in 2009, because Coward is always in rotation at the Shaw Festival. Maybe The Vortex!? That’s what we hoped. Or another pass at Cavalcade?

Well, the schedule’s out now, but there won’t be a major Coward play. Instead, there will be ten minor Coward works at the Shaw Festival this year, each a one-act play. Nine of these are collectively titled Tonight at 8:30; the ten pieces will be presented as part of four different shows. This year, Bernard Shaw won’t be the most-seen playwright at the Shaw Festival.

We’ll see most of the 2009 playbill, as usual.  Here’s why we’re interested in most of them — and less interested in a few of them.

Eugene O'Neill

1. A Moon for the Misbegotten (Eugene O’Neill) We’ve never seen this play, but we loved what the Shaw repertory company did with O’Neill’s comedy Ah, Wilderness two years ago, and we’ve wanted to see what it would do with an O’Neill play with a little more angst.

And we admire the work of director Joseph Ziegler, who was in top form with Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married in the season just ending (see the Emsworth review); he also directed Ah, Wilderness.  It’ll be at the Courthouse Theatre. The formidable Jim Mezon will play Josie Hogan’s father.

2. Play, Orchestra, Play (Noel Coward) This show will be made up of three of Noel Coward’s one-act plays: Red Peppers, Fumed Oak, and Shadow Play. Two of these have songs woven into the plot, one (Fumed Oak) is straight comedy. There’s no big musical at the Shaw Festival this year; these take its place. It’ll be at the Royal George Theatre, directed by Christopher Newton.

Lawrence and Coward

We know quite a few Noel Coward songs but not, in general, which of his shows they’re from. But burrowing into our library, we find that Coward and his stage partner Gertrude Lawrence played George and Lily Pepper, a music hall song-and-dance team, in Red Peppers in 1936 (so this show’s going to be lively). We also find that one of the two songs in Red Peppers is “Has Anybody Seen Our Ship?” while the two Coward songs in Shadow Play are “You Were There” and “Then”.

3. The Entertainer (John Osborne) The anti-establishment Englishman John Osborne is legendary; he’s the original angry young man.  But we’ve never seen his work. Existentialism and vaudeville will be a curious combination. 

We'll wait to see Olivier's movie till after we've seen the Shaw production

We learned recently, after watching an old interview with Lawrence Olivier, that the role of the washed-up comedian Archie Rice was written by Osborne for the great actor, who claimed, “”I have an affinity with Archie Rice,” Olivier once opined. “It’s what I really am. I’m not like Hamlet.”

We’re also very curious to see the Shaw Festival’s new small performing space, which is apparently the rehearsal studio at the Festival Theater. And we look forward to Benedict Campbell, a fantastic song-and-dance man in Mack and Mabel a couple of years ago, as Archie Rice. This play will run for less than two months, from July 31 through September 20. We’ll get our tickets early.

4. Brief Encounters (Noel Coward) Three more one-act plays by Noel Coward in this show: Still Life, We Were Dancing, and Hands Across the Sea. It’s in the Shaw Festival’s largest venue, the Festival Theatre. Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan, who were superb in 2008 in After the Dance, are in the cast.

We know one of these plays pretty well: Still Life, also known as Brief Encounter. It’s a painfully accurate sketch of an illicit love affair. We do know and love Coward’s highly-polished short stories; the stories and the one-act plays are closely related (but have some interesting differences that we hope to explore in a later post!). We think Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell is the Shaw’s best director. All in all, our expectations for this show are high.

Watching an episode of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey recently, we were pleasantly surprised to hear a bit of one of the songs from We Were Dancing from Henry, the chambers clerk who is responsible for getting briefs for Rumpole and his colleagues.  Henry and the  chambers secretary are part of an amateur theatrical group that was, in this episode, doing Noel Coward.  We’re guessing the British public has greater familiarity with the Tonight at 8:30 plays than we North Americans do.

Seurat's masterpiece

5. Sunday in the Park with George (James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim)  Somehow we’ve never seen this musical, but we surely know the painting that it revolves around, and so do you. It’s Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Like Ferris Bueller and his friends, we’ve admired it at the Art Institute of Chicago. Stephen Sondheim’s musical is about Seurat and the creation of his painting. There are those who think this is not merely one of the finest American musicals, but one of the finest American plays, period.

We don’t know the songs in the show either, only that they’re said to be written in a style similar to the pontillism (paintstrokes consisting of many small dots) for which Seurat was known. Steven Sutcliffe (Seurat) and Julie Martelli (his lover “Dot”) will have the lead roles. With Sunday in the Park with George, we will get to indulge our interests in art, music and drama all at once.

Bernard Shaw

6. The Devil’s Disciple (George Bernard Shaw) Honestly, the plays by Shaw are what we usually look forward to most.  And in 2008, the Shaw plays Getting Married and Mrs. Warren’s Profession were what we liked best at Niagara-on-the-Lake. 

But we didn’t take much to The Devil’s Disciple when we saw it in 1996, we haven’t enjoyed reading it since then, and we can’t get over feeling annoyed with the old lefty for feeling free to moralize about the American war for independence.

On the other hand, our acquaintance with Bernard Shaw is deeper than it was twelve years ago, so maybe our encounter with the play will be different this time around. And Evan Buliung will play Dick Dudgeon. We’re big fans, and even though we liked Buliung a lot in The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet in Stratford in 2008, we think he belongs at the Shaw Festival.

7. Ways of the Heart (Noel Coward) As noted, the three full-length Coward shows at the Shaw in 2009 are collectively titled Tonight at 8:30, and Coward meant them to be presented as a group, though not necessarily in any particular order.

This is the third of the Tonight at 8:30 shows : The Astonished Heart, Family Album, and Ways and Means, directed by Blair Williams, in the Shaw Festival’s smallest venue, the Courthouse Theatre, which could well be the best place in Niagara-on-the-Lake to see short-form Noel Coward. We know Ways and Means, an absolutely pitiless portrait of a young couple who sponge off their high-society friends. The cast includes Claire Juillien, David Jansen, and one of my favorites at the Shaw, Laurie Paton.

The Shaw Festival is doing all ten of the Shaw one-acts in the same day, starting at 9:30 a.m., on three separate days (August 8, August 29, and September 19, 2009). Too intense for us.

8. Star Chamber (Noel Coward) This Coward one-act play will be the Shaw’s lunchtime offering at the Courthouse Theatre. The Shaw’s promotional materials say that it’s “rarely produced,” but that’s an understatement. Coward apparently wasn’t happy with it; in 1936 he pulled it after only one performance and didn’t publish it with other plays. We doubt that Coward was a good judge of his own work.

9. Born Yesterday (Garson Kanin) By coincidence, Emsworth, who likes old films, happened to see the 1950 movie, starring Judy Holliday, and based on the original stage production, for the first time not long ago on Turner Classic Movies. So how do we feel about seeing a new stage version with Deborah Hay as Billie Dawn? Not very strongly, we guess.

Tremblay

10. Albertine in Five Times (Michel Tremblay) In our parochial ignorance, all we know about Michel Tremblay, the French-Canadian playwright, is that he wrote Hosanna, the flamboyant play with which the late Richard Monette (long-time artistic director at the Stratford Festival) made his name as an actor in 1974.

Albertine in Five Times appears to have an all-women cast, as did Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, one of Jackie Maxwell’s adventurous play choices early in her tenure at the Shaw. The cast will include Mary Haney and Patricia Hamilton.

What we want to know is, when are we going to have another Lorca play at the Shaw Festival?

11. In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (George Bernard Shaw) Even with the talented Peter Hutt (alas, he’s deserted to the Stratford Festival for the 2009 season) as King Charles, we remember the Shaw’s 1997 version of this Bernard Shaw as an extraordinarily talky, sleep-inducing play, even by Shaw’s standards of talkiness. It’s pretty far down on our list of favorite Shaw plays. But the 2009 cast for this show is very strong, with Benedict Campbell, Laurie Paton, Lisa Codrington, Mary Haney, and Graeme Somerville.

All in all . . . We think that putting all your eggs in one basket with four shows consisting of one-act plays no one’s ever heard of — and not including any popular musical in the playbill — is a bit risky. The Shaw plays are two of our least favorite. But we think we’ll like this season all right.

AUGUST 2009: We’ve seen a number of the 2009 Shaw Festival shows now; here’s what we thought of them:

Bernard Shaw’s comedy The Devil’s Disciple, set in America during the Revolutionary War (see this post)
Garson Kanin’s classic American comedy Born Yesterday (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)

After the Dance at the Shaw Festival

After the Dance, playing through October 6 at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), is a terrific play, and director Christopher Newton and his cast are putting on a first-class show.

Reading the program notes, Emsworth was reminded that many of his most memorable experiences at the Shaw Festival have been directed by Mr. Newton, not just plays like Noel Coward’s Cavalcade and Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan that are revived with some regularity, but also plays like Hobson’s Choice and Journey’s End that may have been popular in their day but are less known now.

After the Dance falls in neither category. It was a comparative flop in 1939, and in America we don’t know much about the playwright, Terence Ratigan. Yet Coward himself might have been proud to have written this witty, insightful play.

Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan as Joan and David Scott-Fowler

It is 1938, and Joan and David Scott-Fowler have been married for twelve years. In the roaring twenties, they were among the bright young things whose drunken parties and carefully cultivated poses were chronicled by Evelyn Waugh in his wickedly funny novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Now, twelve aimless years later, life has become too, too boring for Joan and David and their friends.

David and Joan (played by Deborah Hay) are fond of each other, but their married life is as superficial as their social life. They hold parties in their stunning London apartment (designed by the Shaw’s William Schmuck), go to other people’s parties, and talk about parties past. And they have a permanent house guest in John Reid (played by Neil Barclay), who is witty, rotund, and unemployed.

They all drink, but David (Patrick Galligan) drinks too much. A history student in his university days, David works now and then on a biography of an obscure 19th-century Italian king; he has even hired his cousin Peter (played by Ken James Stewart) to take dictation and act as his secretary. But he knows his scholarship is shallow and that his prose is riddled with cliches.

Marla McClean and Ken James Stewart as Helen and Peter

As the play begins, a new friend has come into David’s life, Peter’s 20-year-old fiance Helen (played by Marla McLean). Peter wants desperately to marry Helen, but his income is too small. What Peter does not know, but what everyone else sees, is that Helen has fallen in love with David and wants to rescue him from self-destruction. David and Joan’s marriage hangs uneasily in the balance.

It is easy to care about these characters and to hurt when they hurt. In a brilliantly-penned scene at the end of the first act, David tells Joan that his book is worthless and that there is no point in starting over. We know — as does she — that he is also talking about their wasted life together.

David is a marvelous role for the square-jawed, silver-haired Patrick Galligan, one of our favorite actors at the Shaw Festival. We couldn’t help being reminded of his role several years ago in Journey’s End, set twenty years earlier in a foxhole during the Great War, in which he held together his embattled platoon (and anchored the play) with nothing more than his character’s decency and calm good sense.

And we can’t remember when we’ve enjoyed the talented Neil Barclay quite this much. Barclay has exquisite comic timing, and his scenes with Galligan and with Jay Turvey (who plays one of the few characters who has actually made something of himself, and who wants to give John Reid a job) are highlights of the play. The only disappointment in the show is the role of young Peter Scott-Fowler, played by Ken James Stewart, whose acting skills fall short of the standards set by the rest of the cast.

Neil Barclay and Deborah Hay

As Julia Browne, a party friend of the Scott-Fowlers who sweeps on and off the stage, carrying all before her, Lisa Horner is a standout. Best of all is Deborah Hay as the vulnerable, intelligent Joan Scott-Fowler, who realizes all too late what keeping her emotional distance from her husband has cost her.