What to see at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2010

The 36-year-old Michael Therriault, who once played Ariel in The Tempest, will play Peter Pan at Stratford in 2010

Life is too busy and money too scarce for us to drive all the way to Stratford, Ontario to see a disappointing show; we’ve got to be selective.  The eight shows we saw in 2009 were mostly worth it; Julius Caesar and the musicals A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and West Side Story were memorable. But Bartholomew Fair and Macbeth left us fidgeting and annoyed, respectively, and made us feel we might have saved our swag.

Happily, for 2010, the powers at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival have decreed that there will once more be four Shakespeare plays on the playbill (there were only three in 2009) out of a total of 12 shows. Here’s what we think of the menu, which also includes Kiss Me Kate, Evita, and J. M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan:

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (at the Tom Patterson Theater)

This is the 2010 Stratford show we’re looking to most. It’s the story of Leontes, a Sicilian king who becomes violently jealous of his wife Hermione’s friendship with his friend Polixenes.

Ben Carlson

The Winter’s Tale should have a lot going for it. Marti Maraden was one of the main victims of the Stratford’s ill-conceived and short-lived experiment in having three co-artistic directors a couple of years ago, but she apparently holds no grudges and is coming back to direct this play.  We like her Shakespeare better than anyone’s. Ben Carlson, a first-rate Shakespeare actor (Hamlet in 2008, Brutus in 2009), will play Leontes. Tom Rooney’s first two seasons at the Stratford have made him one of our favorite actors; he will play the philosopher-peddler Autolycus, just as in 2009 he played the philosphical Porter in Macbeth. Sophia Walker will, thankfully, take the place of the worst actress we’ve ever seen in a Shakespeare play, Nikki James, who was originally scheduled to play Hermione.

In one scene, the playwright directs that the character Antigonus, sent by Leontes to Bohemia to abandon Hermione’s (and his) baby to the elements, should “exit, pursued by a bear.” Back in 1600, coming up with a suitable live bear for a show couldn’t have been very hard, since the drama theaters were also used for bear-baiting exhibitions. Fortunately, Ontario practically swarms with bears, so getting one ought to be a cinch. Should make for a lively show.

James M. Barrie

Peter Pan (by James M. Barrie, at the Avon Theater)

This is not, repeat not, a musical play, and it won’t be much like the treacly, annoying thing with Mary Martin that you’ve seen on television.  It’s J. M. Barrie’s original stage play, first performed in 1904, and it’s one of the finest plays in the English language.  At Stratford in 2010, the androgynous Peter Pan will be be played, not by a slender woman, but by Michael Therriault.

With Peter Pan, the Stratford Festival is trying to tap the kids’ market. But when we first saw the play at the Shaw Festival a few years ago, we found that Peter Pan was a dark, decidedly adult play, apt to scare the bejeezus out of the average five-year-old. Then again, maybe today’s five-year-olds, weaned on Darth Vader and Spiderman, can take it. 

Shakespeare’s The Tempest (at the Festival Theater)

Christopher Plummer, who be 80 years old next summer, is coming back to Stratford to play Prospero. Surely there’s no finer Shakespeare actor in the world; seeing Mr. Plummer’s King Lear at Stratford seven years ago was hands down the most breath-taking theater experience we’ve ever had. We were mesmerized by the zillions of great theater anecdotes in Mr. Plummer’s recent autobiography, In Spite of Myself (see Emsworth’s review at this post).

So even though it was only five years ago that we saw the late William Hutt in a marvelous performance of The Tempest at Stratford, we wouldn’t think of missing the 2010 show, though we do wish someone besides Des McAnuff were directing it. Folks will need to get their tickets for The Tempest early; the show is only running from June 11 through September 12, and at a relaxed schedule designed no doubt to keep Mr. Plummer from wearing out. Don’t plan to save money at a preview performance; the Stratford Festival is charging full price for every single performance of The Tempest.

Cole Porter, no doubt in the process of composing songs for Kiss Me, Kate

Kiss Me, Kate (music by Cole Porter, at the Festival Theater)

Another opening, another show.  We love the songs of Cole Porter, and the plot of Kiss Me, Kate might have been written by P. G. Wodehouse himself, so this classic musical is tempting. Like all many musicals, it’s a show business story, and it has a play within a play: one of the characters, Fred Graham, is directing a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, starring Fred’s ex-wife Lilli as Katherine the shrew. Real-life actress Chilina Kennedy will play Fred’s girlfriend Lois Lane.  Our favorite songs: “Always True to You in My Fashion,” “Why Can’t You Behave,” and “So In Love.”

Dangerous Liaisons (by Christopher Hampton, at the Festival Theater)

This is the racy play on which the 1988 movie, starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer, was based; you probably saw it. It takes us back to eighteenth-century France, when the amoral, idle nobility amused themselves by playing humiliating practical jokes on one another.  Tom McCamus and Seana McKenna will play the jaded aristocrats whose game is to bring about the deflowering of a young girl and the fall from virtue of a married woman. Martha Henry will also be in the cast.

Shakespeare’s As You Like It (at the Festival Theater)

This would be among our top choices at Stratford for 2010 if it weren’t for our fear that the Stratford Festival’s Artistic Director, Des McAnuff, who has designated himself to direct it, will spoil the play with distracting gimmicks. (We have the same fear for The Tempest, but trust that Christopher Plummer will keep his director focused on the story of the play.) We have now seen two deeply unsatisfactory Shakespeare plays directed by Mr. McAnuff: 2008’s Romeo and Juliet and 2009’s Macbeth, and we are not alone in thinking that this is not where Mr. McAnuff’s talents lie. Couldn’t he have taken on Kiss Me, Kate instead? This is sheer stubbornness.

Tom Rooney

But As You Like It seemingly has a foolproof cast, with Paul Nolan (star of 2009’s West Side Story) as Orlando, Tom Rooney in the dual roles of the good duke and the bad duke, Ben Carlson and Lucy Peacock as the unenthusiastic fiancées Touchstone and Audrey, and Brent Carver as Jacques. How badly could the play be spoiled? We won’t pass it up.

Evita (by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, at the Avon Theater)

This is not our favorite Rice-Webber show; indeed, we have only lukewarm enthusiasm for Andrew Lloyd Webber shows after Jesus Christ Superstar. But Evita should pack them in, as did West Side Story in 2009. And as the very first rock-style musical presented at the Stratford Festival, it’ll presumably draw a younger audience.

Not a bad marketing move, considering that the Stratford Festival depends so heavily now on revenues from its high-priced musicals. Evita will be directed by Gary Griffin, who did practically everything right with West Side Story, and it will star Chilina Kennedy, who was dazzling as Maria in West Side Story and is now clearly Stratford’s diva of choice. Ms. Kennedy will play the charismatic wife of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron, and everyone will sing along with “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (at the Tom Patterson Theatre)

This is a musical show — the third in the season! — but one more in the nature of a revue, with commentary from the performers, than a play. Brent Carver will be the lead troubadour, singing the songs of the late Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel, who wrote his songs in French.

We know a few Jacques Brel songs that were translated into English and became hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s, like “If You Go Away” and “Seasons in the Sun.”  But most of the songs in the show won’t be familiar to us. Will there be English subtitles? We’re probably not adventurous enough to find out.

Shakespeare’s The Two Gentleman of Verona (at the Studio Theatre)

Emsworth has never paid much attention to this early Shakespeare play, let alone seen it performed, but a recent reading has whetted his interest. It’s the story of two pals, Valentine and Proteus, and their women; no sooner has Proteus successfully courted one named Julia than he leaves for Milan, where he promptly forgets her and falls in love with a duke’s daughter, Silvia, who falls in love instead with Valentine even though the duke intends her for someone else.

In 2009, instead of a fourth Shakespeare play, the Stratford Festival put on Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, which had a large cast and a lot of fancy original props. It couldn’t have been cheap to mount. The Two Gentlemen of Verona will be more economically performed at the small Studio Theatre space, where the audience surrounds the stage. There will be only a short window of opportunity to see this play; it will run for less than two months (from July 30 to September 19, 2010).

For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (by Michel Tremblay, at the Tom Patterson Theatre)

In its 2009 season, the Shaw Festival offered Michel Tremblay’s Albertine in Five Times; in 2010, the Stratford Festival will put on Tremblay’s well-received 1998 play For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, a comedy based on the gay French-Canadian playwright’s relationship with his mother.

Lucy Peacock will play Nana (the mother character); Tom Rooney will be the Narrator (presumably a stand-in for Tremblay himself). This play will run for only two months, from July 27 to September 26, 2010.

Do Not Go Gentle (by Leon Pownall, in the Studio Theatre)

A one-man show starring Geraint Wyn Davies could be really good; our appreciation for Davies grows year by year. He will play Dylan Thomas soliloquizing about his life and how he rates as a poet compared to William Shakespeare. It will run only from July 2 through August 22.

King of Thieves (by George F. Walker, in the Studio Theatre)

This play is actually a musical — the fourth musical of the season! — but the Stratford Festival evidently doesn’t dare to risk putting this world-premiere piece in one of its larger theaters.  Wonder what Mr. Walker thinks of that!  The show is a new take on old material, a tale of a couple of crooks (Mac, to be played by Evan Buliung, and his father-in-law Peachum, to be played by Sean Cullen).

George F. Walker

Its source is John Gay’s 1720 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera (whose characters included Macheath and Polly Peachum), but most of us are more familiar with Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s 1928 The Threepenny Opera. Those were both set in London; Walker’s version is set in New York City in 1928.

This is the second year in a row that the Stratford Festival has put on a work by Walker; we didn’t see last year’s Zastrozzi. A few years back, we saw Walker’s straight play Nothing Sacred at the Shaw Festival, but it didn’t make a lasting impression.

From the press releases, it seems that the Stratford Festival will have avoided losing money during 2009 on the strength of two extraordinarily popular musical shows. By offering Peter Pan and Christopher Plummer in The Tempest on top of Evita and Kiss Me, Kate, management has probably taken its best shot at increasing the number of sold-out shows in 2010.

We can’t help noticing that there’s nothing on the 2010 playbill even remotely comparable to the Ben Jonson, Racine, and Chekhov plays that were seen in 2009.  In fact, aside from the Shakespeare plays and Peter Pan, the Stratford is offering mostly contemporary shows. The Stratford Festival will be that much less of a “classical” repertory theater company in 2010.

Macbeth at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Timothy D. Stickney playing Banquo as a twentieth-century European general in Africa

Macbeth deals with historical figures in 11th-century Scotland, and they call it “the Scottish play.” So why would any director place its setting in central Africa, circa 1950? We knew there couldn’t be any good reason. But we figured something must have triggered director Des McAnuff’s thought process.

Colm Feore as Macbeth with Yanna McIntosh as Lady Macbeth

At first we thought this was another unfortunate case of clumsiness in dealing with a racially mixed cast. (The same director bungled this elementary task in 2008’s Romeo and Juliet, as we observed in this post a year ago.) Could McAnuff have thought that audiences would never “get” a Macbeth with black actors in key roles (Lady Macbeth, Banquo, Macduff, and Lady Macduff) unless it were set in Africa?

Anyway, that’s not our theory anymore. We think now that the seed was sown when McAnuff was watching the second season of the sadly short-lived Slings and Arrows television show, which we dug out of our stack of DVDs after we got back from our last visit of the year to Stratford, Ontario.

As many of Emsworth’s readers will know, this Canadian show, which ran for three seasons beginning in late 2003, chronicles three seasons in the history of the fictional New Burbage Shakespearean Festival, an Ontario repertory company that bears hilarious similarities to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The second season of Slings and Arrows deals mostly with the Festival’s production of Macbeth.  As the season begins, the Festival’s artistic director, Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), is being pressured to put Macbeth on the playbill for the upcoming season. Reluctant to do it, he talks it over with his friend Nahum (Rothaford Gray), a security guard at New Burbage who once directed theater himself in his native Nigeria:

Tennant: They want me to do Macbeth.
Nahum: Dammit!
Tennant: Why does that bother you?
Nahum: I do not like that play. It teaches us nothing.
Tennant: It teaches us about evil.
Nahum: No! It shows us evil. It’s a portrait of a psychopath. Where I come from in Nigeria, it is a familiar sight. I’ve had my fill of psychopaths.

Bingo! Nigeria! Macbeth reimagined as the rise and fall of a murderous, monomaniac, twentieth-century African dictator!

It wasn’t a good idea, anymore than this sort of thing usually is. (For instance, we’ve talked to several people who were so distracted by the contemporary-ish costumes and machine guns in this year’s Julius Caesar at the Stratford Festival that they seemed not to have noticed how superbly acted that show was; they judged the show a failure based on how it looked.)  Post-colonial Africa had almost nothing in common with eleventh-century Scotland.  Did McAnuff seriously think it would help audiences understand this challenging play to have King Duncan hold a press conference (complete with an array of microphones and photographers with bulky flash cameras) to welcome Macbeth and Banquo back home? Or to have Macbeth’s armies fighting Malcolm’s on a battlefield with an army jeep and soldiers wielding automatic rifles?

And didn’t it occur to McAnuff that audiences would find it odd to hear Banquo’s assassins report to Macbeth that they’d cut his throat, when we’d just seen Banquo mugged and shot?

There was so much good acting in this year’s Macbeth at the Stratford Festival that it’s a shame the overall production wasn’t more satisfying. We found the unmodulated high pitch of the play wearing, not enervating. The sets, the props, the costumes, and the special effects were distracting and incoherent. We were given a series of memorable visual images, which is something, but telling the story of the play seemed to be the last thing on the director’s mind.

The performance we saw got off to a poor start. We could hear only a little of the dialogue in the stage-setting opening scenes, in which many of the play’s principal characters are introduced.

Now, in some Shakespeare plays — Julius Caesar, for instance — the playwright helped audiences keep track of who’s who on stage by having the characters repeatedly address each other by name. Unfortunately, he did very little of that in Macbeth, in which help would have been especially welcome because of the play’s large cast of characters. It is therefore all the more important that a director of Macbeth ensure that the opening scenes are not only lively, but audible. But in this show most of the actors in the first scene (after the witches) failed to project well enough for us to hear — and we weren’t far from the stage. Sometimes the problem with audibility was due to the background music, which was a lot like a movie score. Did McAnuff think that would make the play feel more comfortable for theater-goers who are more used to watching motion pictures?

At any rate, it was a great relief when Macbeth (Colm Feore) and Banquo (Timothy D. Stickney) appeared on stage. Both have strong, expressive voices, good diction, and the indispensable ability to make Elizabethan English heard and understood in the too-big Festival Theater.  (The talented Feore also had a wonderful role in the second season of Slings and Arrows — but not as Macbeth; he plays a wacked-out marketing consultant hired to “re-brand” the financially struggling New Burbage Festival.)

They were by no means the only actors we especially appreciated. Tom Rooney was wonderful in his brief appearance as the Macbeths’ porter; now we understand, for the first time, why this comic philosopher’s scene belongs in the play.  Also strong were Geraint Wyn Davies (Duncan in the play; he played an actor playing Macbeth in the second season of Slings and Arrows), Gareth Potter (a much stronger Malcolm than he was a Romeo a year ago), and John Vickery (Ross), who had the challenging task of breaking the news to Macduff (Dion Johnstone) that his family had been slaughtered.

For all that, the narrative power of the play just wasn’t there. We’ve commented before on the Othello we saw in Chicago a couple of years ago (directed by Marti Maraden, who is, thankfully, returning to Stratford in 2010 to direct The Winter’s Tale). Simply reading the text of Othello, we always found it hard to understand how the noble Moor could so quickly become so morbidly suspicious as to believe that his new wife was doing him dirty. On stage, however, his transformation was absolutely convincing, to the credit of both the director and Derrick Lee Weeden, who played Othello.

We’ve had a similar problem wih Macbeth.  Reading the play, we find it hard to understand how Duncan’s trusted general could so suddenly be overcome by ambition that he would embark on a series of savage murders to achieve what the witches had already pronounced as his destiny. (We don’t buy the notion that a soldier like Macbeth is such a “killing machine” that murdering friends in cold blood isn’t much different from what he does on the battlefield.) We hoped this Macbeth would show us how, but it didn’t.

 

P. G. Wodehouse quoted from Shakespeare more than any other poet, and (we think) from Macbeth more than from any other work of Shakespeare.  See this post.  Other posts from Emsworth about shows he saw during the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

Jean Racine’s classic French drama on the ancient Greek tale of Phèdre (see this post)

Anton Chekhov’s wonderful The Three Sisters (see this post)

The Ben Jonson play Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)

Emsworth’s list of his own ten favorite Shakespeare plays (see this post).

The hilarious musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at this post

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (at the Stratford Festival)

We thought West Side Story was remarkably good (see the Emsworth review), but it turned out that the other musical at the Stratford Festival, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, was even better. It has zillions of little comic touches; we can’t remember when we’ve ever seen a funnier show.

Hysterium (Stephen Ouimette), a Roman slave, submits to his owner, Domina (Deann deGruijter)

A Funny Thing is set back in the golden days of Rome. As in the pre-war American southern states, these were golden times mainly for the masters, not so much for the slaves. So perhaps we should feel guilty about laughing at the plight of Pseudolus (Bruce Dow) and Hysterium (Stephen Ouimette), the two slaves who are the stars of this show — but we don’t. They belong to the family of Senex (Randy Hughson), hen-pecked, love-starved husband of Domina (Deann deGruijter), and father of Hero (Mike Nadajewski).

The story begins when Domina drags Senex off to the countryside for a vacation, leaving Pseudolus in charge of their son Hero. Domina leaves strict instructions that the boy is to be kept away from the house next door, which is occupied by a bevy of scantily-clad young women who are for sale as courtesans.

Hero’s parents do not know, however, that he has already fallen in love with Philia (Chilina Kennedy), a virgin courtesan whom he has seen at her window next door. Desperate to meet her, Hero enlists the help of Pseudolus, who spots a chance to make a bid to be freed. The resourceful Pseudolus extracts a promise of freedom from Hero if Pseudolus can help Hero (in his parents’ absence) win Philia’s affections.

The lovers’ first meeting is a great success, as they agree and harmonize on the important point that Philia is “Lovely” (one of the show’s best songs). Their future together is cloudy, however, because Philia has already been sold to a Roman warrior, Miles Gloriosus (Dan Chameroy). Her owner, Marcus Lycus (Cliff Saunders), knows that it would be death to fail to deliver Philia when the sword-happy Miles Gloriosus calls.

Cliff Saunders as Marcus Lycus, Stephen Ouimette as Hysterium, and one of the naughty parts of the scenery

The writers of the show, Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, must have had a blast coming up with the names for the characters. In the show, Pseudolus is a talented liar and a schemer; his schemes invariably leave the effeminate Hysterium in a state of nervous distraction; Senex’s wife Domina is a sadistic tyrant; and the preening, muscle-bound Miles Gloriosus is hilariously high on himself.

This is not one of the many musicals whose plots are paper-thin; A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum would be a marvelous farce if it had no music at all. And the writers (Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart) had a lot of fun with words in this play. For instance, try saying “the house of Marcus Lycus” two or three times in a row, and you’ll get an idea why it’s so funny when Pseudolus says it. In fact, pretty much everything Bruce Dow says and does in this show will crack you up; he’s a wonderfully talented comedian. Still, the actor we enjoyed most was Stephen Ouimette as Hysterium, always on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Bruce Dow, as the slave Pseudolus, puts it over on Dan Chameroy, as Miles Gloriosus

Director Des McAnuff has arranged for more funny things to be done on stage at any given moment than anyone will ever see; you don’t dare pay too much attention to one side of the stage for fear of missing good stuff at the other. One of the best touches in this show are the “Proteans” — three acrobatic actors who appear as mimes and in various hysterically comic guises all through the show.

Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for A Funny Thing. We certainly have heard a lot of Sondheim in the last six months: the Stratford Festival’s West Side Story (see our review), for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics; the Shaw Festival’s Sunday in the Park with George (music and lyrics) (see our review); Sweeney Todd (music and lyrics) at Rochester’s GeVa Theatre (see our review). But this is the Sondheim show we liked best.

Other posts from Emsworth about shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

The Scottish play, set in Africa! Shakespeare’s Macbeth at this post.

Classic French drama: Jean Racine’s Phèdre at this post.

Anton Chekhov’s wonderful The Three Sisters (see this post)

The Ben Jonson play Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)

Color-blind casting and other distractions at the Stratford Festival

Gareth Potter and Nikki M. James as Romeo and Juliet

This year’s Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario) has a racially mixed cast. Emsworth is fine with color-blind casting and wouldn’t ordinarily think it worth mentioning unless it’s botched. That’s what happened here. (Emsworth reviews this unsatisfactory show at this post.)

In this production, Juliet is played by Nikki M. James, a young black woman, while Romeo is played by Gareth Potter, a young white man. At first I thought that director Des McAnuff was casting the entire Montague clan as a white family and all of the Capulets as a black family, all in a patronizing attempt to make the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets “relevant”.

Selfishly, I welcomed the prospect of a Romeo and Juliet in which I would be able to tell the factions apart by the color of their skin, for the same reason I am grateful that football players wear uniforms. Emsworth isn’t good with faces, and visual cues help keep him track of large numbers of characters on stage.

But this was not to be. Juliet, it turned out, had a black mother and a white father. Romeo, on the other hand, had a white mother and (how’s that? was he adopted?) a black father.

Mr. and Mrs. Montague, played by Irene Poole and Roy Lewis

Two multi-racial couples at the head of the feuding families? Too much of a coincidence to reflect color-blind casting; the director did this on purpose. But why? I missed several speeches during the play while I tried to figure out what he might have intended. I never did.

This was a distraction we could have done without. As it is, an audience trying to follow a play performed in Elizabethan English needs all its concentration to hear and understand what’s being said. A director owes it to his audience not to use gimmicks that draw attention away from the dialogue.

For that matter, what was director McAnuff’s point in having this Romeo and Juliet start in modern times, move back 400 years, and then revert to modern times? (In the last scene, coroners in modern dress arrive at the scene of the carnage at the Capulet crypt.) I didn’t get it. Once again, I was distracted from the play while I tried to make sense of it.

Personally, I don’t need gimmicks like color-coded casting, or like setting Hamlet in 1938 (as in another play at Stratford this season), to help me understand Shakespeare’s “relevance” to modern society. I wouldn’t buy tickets in the first place if I didn’t think Romeo and Juliet still speaks to the way we live now.

The cult of multiculturalism and its priests give the Stratford Festival their stamp of righteous approval, but say the Shaw Festival still hasn’t gotten religion on “diversity”. Emsworth loses patience in this post.

Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival (a review)

The 2008 production of Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario) has its moments. But the lead actors are so weak that the show can’t be recommended.

As directed by Des McAnuff, Shakespeare’s tragedy opens in 21st-century Verona, in a public square, with motorized scooters, young women text-messaging on their cellphones, and two servants of the Capulets who are itching for a fight with the Montagues. The brawl is broken up by authorities who wield (and fire) automatic pistols.

Gareth Potter as Romeo

Meanwhile, Romeo, the pride and joy of the Montagues, decides to crash the Capulets’ masked ball, along with his friends Mercutio and Benvolio, in the hope of meeting Rosaline, with whom he is infatuated. As he sheds his modern clothing for his ball costume, the time of the play shifts backward four centuries to 16th-century Verona, where Shakespeare actually placed his play. (After the ball, the cast appears in nifty 16th-century costumes.)

At the ball, Rosaline is forgotten when Romeo falls for the Capulets’ 13-year-old daughter Juliet. The attraction is mutual, and knowing that the Capulets will never consent to their daughter’s marriage to a Montague, the lovers arrange for Friar Lawrence, a local priest, to marry them secretly.

But Romeo (Gareth Potter) gets caught up in another streetfight with the Capulets and stabs Juliet’s favorite cousin Tybalt in a swordfight. Will Juliet (Nikki M. James) forgive Romeo for dispatching her cousin? Will Romeo escape punishment from the Prince of Verona, who is disgusted with the endless feuding? Will the violence escalate? Will the lovers ever be united?

Nikki M. James and Gareth Potter as the star-crossed lovers

Unfortunately, this show is spoiled by frankly amateurish — Emsworth doesn’t mean to be harsh, but how else to put it? — performances from the actors playing Romeo and Juliet.

The program bios indicate that director Des McAnuff has recently directed Nikki M. James as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. No doubt she shone in that role, which doesn’t require much expressive range.

But how could McAnuff have thought James could do justice to some of the most poetic lines in Shakespeare? James delivers each line in the same soprano range of her voice that she must have used to call Toto. Nor does she do well without the microphone with which she was surely equipped in The Wizard of Oz; she seems to think that the only way to be heard in the spacious Festival Theater is to shout. The most that can be said of the casting is that James is a lithe and attractive Juliet who passes convincingly as a 13-year-old.

Des McAnuff

In the program, McAnuff indicates that he sees the first half of this play as a comedy and the second half as a tragedy. That’s a reasonable way of approaching the play, given the tone and the sweetly romantic scenes in the first two acts.

But Nikki M. James and Gareth Potter seem to have misunderstood what McAnuff meant about “comedy.” They perform the famous balcony scene as if it were a joke that everyone in the theater is in on — almost as parody. And Juliet wakes everyone up everyone in the house when she screeches “Anon” to her nurse at the top of her lungs in the middle of her tender speeches to Romeo. After hearing these outbursts, I fully expected Romeo to make his excuses and slink out of the garden, grateful that he had not committed himself too far to this petulant, shrill-voiced child.

Nor does James seem comfortable with Shakespeare’s language. When Juliet learns that her new husband has been banished for slaying Tybalt, she does an extended riff on “banished.” Unfortunately, each time she bellows the word, she places the accent on the third of the syllables: “ban-i-SHED.” The effect is alarming. (A scene or two later, Friar Lawrence, Romeo, and the Nurse all pronounce it with only two syllables.)

As Romeo, Gareth Potter delivers his lines with little more real expression than James, and his voice has an indistinct quality that makes him hard to hear. Seated only a few rows from the stage, off to one side, we hardly caught a word of one key speech that he delivered from the front of the stage.

I suppose the casting of Romeo and Juliet always presents problems like this; by definition, young, relatively inexperienced actors must be called upon to play the parts.

Lucy Peacock as the Nurse and Nikki M. James as Juliet

Despite the leads, there are some fine performances in this show. As the garrulous Nurse who can never be brought to the point, Lucy Peacock is magnificent. So is Peter Donaldson as Friar Lawrence; his rich baritone, perfect diction, and sympathetic understanding of Shakespeare’s language are a treat. Both Roy Lewis, as Montague, and John Vickery, as Capulet, convey power and dignity as heads of the warring families.

I especially enjoyed Evan Buliung as Romeo’s friend Mercutio, and could not help thinking that either he or Timothy D. Stickney, who had a strong stage presence as Tybalt, would have been better cast as Romeo.

The set for Romeo and Juliet at the Festival Festival consisted of a cleverly-constructed, versatile Italian bridge that morphed, as needed, into a ballroom, a balcony, and a crypt. It also facilitated some exceptionally rapid and well-choreographed scene changes. We wished, though, that its moving action had operated more quietly.

Emsworth carps about the recent leadership debacle at the Stratford Festival, as a result of which Des McAnuff became sole artistic director of the Festival last winter, in this post.

See Emsworth’s review of the Stratford Festival’s 2008 production of All’s Well That Ends Well at this post, and his review of Hamlet at this post.

The priests of multiculturalism give the Stratford Festival their stamp of righteous approval, but say the Shaw Festival still hasn’t gotten religion on “diversity”. Emsworth loses patience in this post.

The leadership debacle at the Stratford Festival

From a distance, Emsworth has followed the shenanigans at the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario) over the last year with more than his customary irritation. Let us review the chain of events:

Richard Monette

     1. In late 2006, Richard Monette retires as the Festival’s Artistic Director after 14 extraordinarily successful years, leaving the Festival in solid shape.

     2. Incredibly, the Festival’s board of directors, under no particular pressure to do so, decides to replace Monette not with one person, but with three: a triumvirate of Marti Maraden, Don Shipley, and Des McAnuff. The three are supposed to have “equal” responsibility for programming and the hiring of talent. Decisions are to be made by “consensus.” Antoni Cimolino is made General Director of the Festival on the understanding that he will keep his fingers out of artistic decisions.

     3. The three co-artistic directors plan a 2008 season with five Shakespeare plays instead of the usual four.  They also include a play by Euripedes, an obscure Spanish play from the late 1500s, and an adaptation of Moby Dick that has essentially no dialogue. They put four of of the five Shakespeare plays in the 1838-seat Festival Theater.  They program two popular musicals (The Music Man and Cabaret), but put both in the smaller, 1083-seat Avon Theater.  They give the Festival a cumbersome new name, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

Marti Maraden

     4. Throughout the fall and winter of 2007-08, the three co-directors can’t agree on much of anything.  More often than not, Des McAnuff is off in London and New York on other projects, making it difficult for Shipley and Maraden to collaborate with him.  Cimolino interferes and makes artistic decisions that Shipley and Maraden think belong to the co-artistic directors.

Antoni Cimolino

     5. On March 8, 2008, Shipley and Maraden quit as artistic directors, citing Cimolino’s interference.  The finger-pointing begins. In an interview, the frustrated Maraden complains there was “no protocol for decision-making.” Cimolino claims he intervened only when the three couldn’t agree on major points. To her credit, Maraden keeps her commitment to direct All’s Well That Ends Well and The Trojan Women during the 2008 Stratford season. (See the Emsworth review of All’s Well at this post.)

Des McAnuff

     6. Des McAnuff — the member of the triumvirate who apparently had the least time to devote to the job, and whose resume is thinnest in classical theater — is installed as sole Artistic Director. In July, Dean Gabourie is appointed as assistant artistic director.

     7. Predictably, The Music Man and Cabaret are popular with Stratford audiences, and tickets for these shows are scarce. Meanwhile, the Shakespeare plays are performed before hundreds of empty seats in the Festival Theater.

     8. In mid-July, Cimolino and McAnuff warn Stratford personnel that the Festival is on track to lose as much as $5 million during the 2008 season. They blame gas prices, the U.S.-Canadian currency exchange rate (currently disadvantageous to us Americans), and a general decline in Ontario tourism — everything but the directors’ programming decisions. Personnel cutbacks and a less ambitious season are forecast for 2009.

Any fool who has spent any time with artistic types would know that appointing three experienced, strong-willed directors who don’t know each other very well to be co-artistic directors of a major repertory theater company, with all major decisions to be made by “consensus,” is a recipe for disaster. What was the Board of Directors thinking?

Anyone could also have predicted that feelings would be hurt and relationships damaged upon the inevitable collapse of the triumvirate. One can only hope that Don Shipley and Marti Maraden will not be so soured by their leading roles in this debacle that Stratford audiences will be deprived of their talents in future years.

Stratford's Festival Theatre

But the Board’s decision to place the Festival’s artistic direction in the hands of a three-person committee can also be blamed for the programming decisions that will apparently cost the Festival millions of dollars this year. (Emsworth gloomily predicts that it will not be long until he and other members of the Stratford Festival are called upon to to help narrow the deficit.)  Not one of the three, I would wager, if the responsibility had been his or hers alone, would have gambled the 2008 season on the proposition that large audiences would fill the Festival Theater to see The Taming of the Shrew and All’s Well That Ends Well, or that audiences would buy tickets for a lesser-known Shakespeare play (Love’s Labours Lost) as readily as they would for (say) a popular work by Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, or Tennessee Williams.  But responsibility was diluted.  When you bargain for decision-making by committee (“the buck stops nowhere”), that’s what you get.

Robin Phillips

Most irritating of all is that the Stratford Festival has been through this before.  A friend recently lent Emsworth a copy of A Stratford Tempest, a 1982 book by the Toronto journalist Martin Knelman about the leadership debacle that followed in the wake of the 1980 resignation of another highly successful artistic director, Robin Phillips. Amazingly, the book relates, the Board of Directors chose to replace Phillips with a committee of nine co-artistic directors!

In short order, most of this unwieldy committee resigned.  The remaining four put together a promising 1981 season — but then the Board of Directors panicked, fired the four, revamped the season, and hired a single artistic director, John Hirsch.  The Festival lost a lot of money that year, too. Many of the survivors of the 1981 debacle are still associated with the Stratford Festival, including Brian Bedford, Marti Maraden, Martha Henry, and others.  Why can’t an organization like the Stratford Festival learn from its own mistakes?