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

Julius Caesar at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (a review)

The historical Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar is close to the top of the list of our favorite Shakespeare plays, but we’d never seen it performed until last weekend. The show at the Stratford Festival was tight, tense, and immensely satisfying, and we saw more in the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar than we ever knew was there.

We suppose there’s no danger of giving away the plot. The folks at Stratford evidently think people know the story, too; they left the usual plot summary out of the program. (We renew our complaint that the cost-cutters at Stratford are printing this year’s programs on cheap paper stock in an odd-sized (8 1/2 by 10 3/4) format that doesn’t fit our collection of programs.)

Julius Caesar is one of the plays reflected by relief sculptures along the outside of the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C.

So to review, here’s the story. Around 40 B.C., Julius Caesar (Geraint Wyn Davies) has defeated his rival Pompey and has become virtual dictator of Rome. Jealous of Caesar, a number of Roman senators, led by Cassius (Tom Rooney), are plotting regime change. The conspirators realize, however, that without the support of the widely respected, high-minded Brutus (Ben Carlson), they are sure to be villified for taking Caesar down. Cassius persuades Brutus that, for the good of Rome, Caesar must die.

If Julius Caesar (Geraint Wyn Davis, center) had only read the letter being offered to him, he would have learned of the plot against his life.

On the Ides of March, Cassius, Brutus, and other Roman senators stab Caesar to death. Against the advice of Cassius, Brutus unwisely permits Caesar’s protege, Mark Antony (Jonathan Goad) to speak at Caesar’s funeral. Antony’s oration inflames the Romans against the conspirators. Mobs riot in the streets, and a civil war breaks out, in which Brutus and Cassius are uneasy allies. It all ends with a final battle at Phillippi.

Tom Rooney as Cassius, lean and hungry

As well as we know the play, we still felt the suspense keenly. Would Brutus yield to Cassius’s flattery and join the conspirators? Would Caesar be warned in time? Would the conspirators take Cassius’s advice and assassinate Mark Antony as well?

Domestic tension, as well: would Brutus ever tell his distraught wife Portia (Cara Ricketts) what’s going on?  Would Caesar heed the soothsayer and stay home on the Ides of March, as his wife Calpurnia pleads? Our own wife, who is not politically minded, thought the moral of the play was that husbands should listen to their wives.

We couldn’t have asked for a better cast for our first Julius Caesar on stage.   Geraint Wyn Davies has only a few scenes, but he is positively masterful as a ruler who has begun to believe that he is, indeed, god-like; no wonder Brutus could be persuaded that such a Caesar needed to be stopped. Best of all was Tom Rooney, with his bright-eyed intensity, steely sense of purpose, and ramrod stature. We knew without Caesar’s telling us that Cassius had “a lean and hungry look.”

Ben Carlson (Brutus) and Tom Rooney (Cassius)

Ben Carlson speaks the language of Shakespeare naturally, conversationally, and with effortless diction.  He and Rooney are well paired; the best parts of this Julius Caesar were Brutus’s scenes with Cassius.  The famous “quarrel” scene was just short of perfection (we dissected the quarrel in this recent post); it fell short only in that we felt that Brutus would, for maximum impact, have told Cassius to his face that he had “an itching palm.”  Instead, Carlson delivered the accusation in an offhanded manner as he poured a drink across the stage from Cassius.

Until last weekend, we never fully appreciated the emotional power of the “I am sick of many griefs” scene later in Act IV, Scene 3, in which we (and Cassius) learn of Portia’s suicide. Carlson, Rooney, and Kevin Blanchard (as Messala) play this scene with delicacy and humanity.

We were a little disappointed, however, in Jonathan Goad’s Mark Antony. We have seen Goad described as Stratford’s Johnny Depp, and indeed Goad’s what-me-worry? approach to the part reminded us of the hero of Pirates of the Caribbean. But it didn’t suit here, with the Roman empire at stake. Surely no confrontation in Julius Caesar should bristle more than the scene immediately after the death of Caesar, when Mark Antony comes face to face with the conspirators. But this Antony seemed more annoyed than angry with the conspirators; he hardly seemed to fear for his life. The scene slowed the play’s momentum.

And Antony’s “This was the noblest Roman of them all” monologue, after the death of Brutus, also fell flat.  It ends, of course, with Antony’s pronouncement on Brutus: “This was a man!”  The line needs to be delivered portentously, with equal emphasis on “this” and “man”.  But Goad accented only the first word: “THIS was a man.” It sounded more like a throwaway line.

Still, Goad delivered one of the play’s most thrilling moments with his “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech. For this scene, director James MacDonald resourcefully embedded members of the cast in the audience, they made us feel part of the dangerous mob ourselves. The effect was electric. We had always assumed that Antony began his speech when the noise of the crowd died down. But Goad made us understand that “lend me your ears” (which he was obliged to shout over the din) was uttered in order to get the mob to shut up and listen.

From the supporting cast, we especially enjoyed the performances of Michael Spencer-Davis (as Casca), Cara Ricketts (as Portia), John Innes (as Cicero), and Dion Johnstone (as Octavius Caesar). Skye Brandon was superb as the unfortunate Cinna the poet, whose appearance and rapid demise (the finest cameo role of any play we can think of) seemed even more shocking than the assassination of Caesar himself.

The costumes and the props did not, frankly, make sense. The most that can be said for them is that we didn’t find them terribly distracting. In the first act, the Romans all wore snazzy suits and colorful ensembles (including some very short skirts) that vaguely reminded us of the Berlin street scenes, circa 1914, of Ernest Kirchner. In the second act, the officers in Mark Antony’s camp wore twentieth-century military uniforms; those in Cassius’s and Brutus’s camp wore baseball caps. And the soldiers all carried semi-automatic rifles. We missed the point of these “modern” touches.  We know exactly the time period in which this particular play takes place; it wasn’t the early 20th century.

Ben Carlson deserves credit for remaining unflustered under trying circumstances. During one of his early scenes, quite close to the stage, an extremely loud cellphone went off and played a long passage from Mozart’s C major piano sonata, K. 545. The owner had trouble getting it under control. Carlson never batted an eye as we all finally heard the belltones of a cellphone being turned off.

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

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

The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (see this post)

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (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)

What to see at the Stratford Festival in 2009

We scanned the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s announcement of its 2009 season with interest. If its 2008 lineup lost a lot of money, as was reported, will the 2009 lineup do better? (See my recent post on the artistic director debacle at the Stratford Festival and what it wrought.)

For Emsworth’s take on the shows the Stratford Festival has just announced for its 2010 season, which include Peter Pan, the musical Evita, and Christopher Plummer in The Tempest, see this post.

More selfishly, how many of the 2009 shows will Emsworth personally want to trek all the way to Stratford, Ontario from Rochester, New York to see? Let us compare this year’s lineup with next year’s (my matchups are arbitrary) and judge:

Hamlet (2008) vs. Macbeth (2009) (both at the Festival Theater)

At the box office, it should be a draw. Hamlet is the world’s best known and most popular play, and Ben Carlson gives a strong performance. (See my review of 2008’s Hamlet.) But Macbeth isn’t nearly as long (or as demanding on audiences), and it has witches, Banquo’s ghost (will we see him, or not?), and moving forests. According to the Stratford Festival, Colm Feore has been cast as Macbeth and Yanna McIntosh as Lady Macbeth. Geraint Wyn Davies will be Duncan; Gareth Potter will play Malcolm; and Sophia Walker will play Lady Macduff.

Will we see the 2009 show? Maybe. Macbeth isn’t very high on our list of favorite Shakespeare plays, but we’d like to see Colm Feore as Macbeth. We hesitate when we see that Des McAnuff is directing 2009’s Macbeth; he made a mess of 2008’s Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet (2008) vs. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2009) (both at the Festival Theater)

The 2009 show should be more attractive to audiences. Both plays appeal to the romantically inclined, but people will expect, and will probably get, crowd-pleasing Lion King-style special effects from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And it’s bound to be better than the 2008 Romeo and Juliet production, which was a dud. See my review. Geraint Wyn Davies has been cast as Bottom and Tom Rooney as Puck (that’s something to anticipate!). Dion Johnstone will be Titania; Sophia Walker will be Hermia; Gareth Potter will be Lysander.

Will we see the 2009 show? We hope so. It’s not our favorite Shakespeare comedy because we don’t get its jokes soon enough to laugh in real time. But we’re ready to give it a chance.

The Taming of the Shrew (2008 at the Festival Theater) vs. Julius Caesar (2009 at the Avon Theater)

The 2009 show will be a better draw. A lot of people know Julius Caesar from school. And it’s better crafted than The Taming of the Shrew, which some people may avoid because they see it as misogynist.  (They shouldn’t miss the Shrew, though — see my review.)  A first-rate cast for Julius Caesar has been announced: the 2008 season’s Hamlet, Ben Carlson, will be Brutus, Jonathan Goad will be Mark Antony, and Tom Rooney, whom we especially liked this year in All’s Well That Ends Well, will be Cassius. Geraint Wyn Davies will be assassinated.

Will I see the 2009 show? For sure. I love Julius Caesar, and I’ve never seen it on stage. But if there’s one Shakespeare play that ought to be at the larger Festival Theater, it’s Julius Caesar.

Update: See Emsworth’s July 2009 review of Julius Caesar at this post.

Christopher Plummer as Cyrano in a 1962 show

All’s Well That Ends Well (2008) vs. Cyrano de Bergerac (by Edmond Rostand) (2009) (both at the Festival Theater)

No clear audience favorite. There have been enough different versions of the Cyrano story over the years that audiences will come, especially to see Colm Feore as Cyrano. But will they come in large enough numbers to fill the Festival Theater?

As for me, my level of interest in Cyrano just isn’t that high. (We liked this year’s All’s Well That Ends Well. See my review.)

Love’s Labour’s Lost (2008) vs. Bartholomew Fair (by Ben Jonson) (2009) (both at the Tom Patterson Theater)

In probable popularity, an edge to 2008. The general public doesn’t know either play, but Shakespeare has more fans than Ben Jonson, and this year’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is a delight.

Will we see Bartholomew Fair? We hope so. Undeterred by an eye-glazing Edward II several years ago, we’d like to try another Elizabethan playwright.

Fuenta Ovejuna (2008) vs. The Three Sisters (2009) (both at the Tom Patterson Theater)

Martha Henry

The 2009 show will draw more. Theater-goers who only want to see “cheerful” plays will steer away from Chekhov. But they’ll see Chekhov before they’ll buy tickets for a 400-year-old Spanish drama they never heard of.

Will we see the 2009 show? Maybe. We saw a remarkably fine production of The Three Sisters at the Shaw Festival several years ago and look forward to seeing the play again sometime. But it may be too soon. It’s been announced that Adrienne Gould, Irene Poole, and Lucy Peacock (as Masha) will appear as the sisters — a promising trio. Kelli Fox, another of our favorites from her days at the Shaw Festival, will play Natasha. Martha Henry will apparently not be acting, just directing. Update (August 2009): In fact, Adrienne Gould is not part of the Stratford company in 2009 after all; Dalal Badr was cast as Irena.

Caesar and Cleopatra (2008) vs. The Importance of Being Earnest (2009) (both at the Avon Theater)

Bedford

In probable popularity, an edge to 2009. Sure, Christopher Plummer is a great draw, but who’d want to miss Brian Bedford in drag? Stratford Festival patrons love Oscar Wilde.

As for us, we thought the production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Shaw Festival several years ago couldn’t be improved upon. But we love the play and can’t see it too often. And Bedford slays us.

The Trojan Women (2008 at the Avon Theater) vs. Phedre (by Racine) (2009 at the Tom Patterson Theater)

Jean Racine

The 2009 show may do better. Classical plays have narrow appeal. But one would also guess that interest from French-speaking Canadians would make the Racine play a better draw. And an impressive cast for Phedre has been announced by the Stratford Festival: Seana McKenna as Phedre, and also Tom McCamus, the scrumptious Adrienne Gould, the erstwhile Music Man Jonathan Goad, and Sean Arbuckle. Veteran actress Roberta Maxwell will return to Stratford to play Oenone.

We most definitely want to see Phedre. Our interest in the French classics was whetted long ago by a college course in French literature (in translation), and we are sorry we’ve missed other promising opportunities to see plays by the French master dramatists.

The Music Man (2008 at the Avon Theater) vs. West Side Story (2009 at the Festival Theater)

Two equally popular shows. The Music Man was great, as I reported in this post. But more tickets will be sold for West Side Story in the larger Festival Theater.

We must confess West Side Story leaves us cold, as mentioned in an earlier post praising Bernstein’s Wonderful Town, which is playing at the Shaw Festival this year. But the wife of our bosom is anxious to see it.

Cabaret (2008) vs. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (2009) (both at the Avon Theater)

The 2009 musical won’t outdraw Cabaret. We love Sondheim’s A Funny Thing, but Cabaret has been hot on Broadway, in Toronto, and on the movie screen for the last ten years.

We want to see the 2009 show. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a hilariously funny musical with a great score. And we’ll need something lighter after a heavy dose of the classics.

Brian Bedford as King Lear

There Reigns Love (2008) vs. Ever Yours, Oscar (2009) (both at the Tom Patterson Theater)

In probable popularity, an edge to 2009. The combination of Oscar Wilde and Brian Bedford will pull them in.

Will we see the 2009 show? Somehow, we find we don’t go to see performances made up of readings.

Hughie/Krapp’s Last Tape (2008) vs. The Trespassers (by Morris Panych) (2009)

Palmer Park (2008) vs. Zastrozzi (by George Walker) (2009)

Moby Dick (2008) vs. Rice Boy (by Sunil Kuruvilla) (2009) (all at the Studio Theater)

In probable popularity, an edge to 2008. People know and like Brian Dennehy (Hughie/Krapp’s Last Tape), and everyone’s heard of Melville’s novel. It may be that the three Canadian playwrights scheduled for 2009 have constituencies in Canada, but Americans in general don’t know them.

Will we see any of the 2009 shows at the Studio Theater? Probably not. If so, it might be the Panych play. We’ve seen his work as a director at the Shaw Festival. The Stratford Festival’s affirmative action program for Canadian playwrights is fine, but the Festival should understand that its numerous American patrons don’t care whether a playwright is Canadian or not.

Ben Jonson

Frankly, looking at the 2009 season as a whole, we don’t see why the management at the Stratford Festival would expect a bigger box office than in 2008. It’s a smart financial decision to put a big musical back in the Festival Theater. And personally, we’re glad to have a chance to see Racine and Ben Jonson. But besides the Shakespeare plays, the only straight play that seems likely to draw full houses is The Importance of Being Earnest.

And we’re disappointed that only three Shakespeare plays will be presented in 2009 — a bit ironic, now that they’ve changed the name to the Stratford “Shakespeare” Festival. We wanted a history play this year, like Richard II or Henry V, and are not mollified by the Festival’s explanation that the two musicals have roots in Shakespeare. That’s weak.

And we’re seriously disappointed that no Shakespeare play is scheduled for 2008 in the Tom Patterson Theater, which is where we like our Shakespeare best.

AUGUST 2009: Emsworth has now seen a number of the shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season and offers the following thoughts about them:

The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (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)

Hamlet at the Stratford Festival (a review)

This year’s Hamlet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario) really surprised us, from the casting to the pacing to unexpected moments of humor.  But this show really works.

The ghost of King Hamlet (James Blendick) and Prince Hamlet (Ben Carlson)

We knew we were in for something different from the opening scene.  Everyone knows, of course, how Hamlet begins, with jittery guards pacing over the foggy, ghost-infested ramparts of Elsinore Castle, exchanging folklore about supernatural visitations, and wondering how to let Prince Hamlet know that they have seen the shade of his late father. Like the ominous themes that mark the beginning of a Tchaikovsky symphony, the opening scene of Hamlet sets the mood for an evening of gloom. There’s only one way to play it.

Or so we thought. In this production, this opening scene went by in a flash. The ghost of the late King Hamlet (James Blendick) had given Prince Hamlet (Ben Carlson) his marching orders (“Revenge my foul and most unnatural murder!”) and retreated to purgatory almost before we had settled into our seats and staked our claim to the armrest.  Barnardo, Marcellus, and Horatio popped up through the trapdoor, whipped through their lines, and made their exits.  The scene changed, and Claudius and Gertrude, the happy newlyweds, were leading a promenade at a castle ball.

This Hamlet reminded me of nothing more than fast-paced thriller motion pictures from the 1930s and 1940s like The Big Sleep and Foreign Correspondent, filled with snappy repartee and action sequences. The movie connection was reinforced by the military-looking costumes worn and the rifles carried by many of the male characters (props not mentioned in my edition of Hamlet), and also by the use of blinding spotlights at different points in the play, meant, no doubt, to suggest the play’s probing into the dark recesses of the souls of Claudius, Gertrude, and Prince Hamlet.

Ben Carlson

We know Ben Carlson well from his work at the Shaw Festival. Several years ago, we saw him as Jack Tanner in a full-length version of Man and Superman, in which he had an almost impossibly long part to learn, compared to which memorizing his lines for Hamlet must have seemed like child’s play.

It is now clear that his talents are as well fitted for Shakespeare as for Shaw. Like the very best actors we have seen at Stratford, Carlson manages to make Elizabethan English intelligible to twenty-first century audiences, even when delivered, as here, at hyperspeed. (Instead of a melancholy Dane, this production of Hamlet features a manic Dane; the manic effect is exaggerated by stage lighting that leaves Carlson’s eyes mostly in shadow, not unlike a raccoon.) Best of all, Carlson showed us that Hamlet includes a healthy share of witty lines. I doubt that audiences at Stratford have ever laughed so much during performances of Hamlet.

The casting of this production defied all my preconceptions. In my mind’s eye, I see the Danish prince as a tall, slim, brooding teenager with an introspective, romantic bent. But Ben Carlson is a stocky man of medium height at best, decidedly older than what one might expect from a student at the University of Wittenberg (granted, the character is actually thirty, according to the gravedigger), thoroughly extroverted, with just a hint of incipient middle-age paunch. He’s no heartthrob.

Maria Ricossa as Gertrude

The same went for other characters.  I imagine Gertrude as a full-figured, vaguely sensuous woman approaching middle age, but Maria Ricossa, a trim, brisk Gertrude, is fully satisfactory.  I think of Ophelia as a barely adolescent flower girl who mopes around Elsinore; Adrienne Gould gives us a spunky Ophelia who knows her mind.  We liked her a lot, all the more because our expectations for Ophelias are so low.

Mercifully, this Hamlet spares us overlays of Freudian psychology.  Gertrude has no incestuous designs on Hamlet, and Oedipus does not rear his head. However, this Hamlet was systematically stripped of melodrama, which many theater lovers will miss. The show never slows down, even for dramatic effect, not in the scene in which Hamlet flinches from dispatching the conscience-ridden Claudius as he prays, not even when it is finally time for Horatio to say, over Hamlet’s corpse,

Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Laertes and Claudius

(Act V, Scene 2.) Claudius (Scott Wentworth) and Laertes (Bruce Godfree) keep up a brisk dialogue even as they play billiards (badly) and plot the murder of Prince Hamlet during Act IV, Scene 7. (The large billiard table on which they played was another distracting prop not indicated in my edition of the play.) To my surprise, by the end of the play the rapid dialogue seemed natural; we’d gotten used to it.

The Players

This was still a long play, a little over three hours; not much seemed to be cut. Fortinbras and his army, left out in some modern productions, duly appeared, and the play was better for their presence. The same for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Best of all, we saw and heard much from a marvelous troup of traveling players, who endured Hamlet’s gratuitous advice about how to act their parts with as good a humor as Laertes tolerated Polonius’s advice to be true to his own self.

Hamlet and Ophelia as conceived by Eugene Delacroix and Dante Gabriel Rossetti? See this Emsworth post on painters who’ve done scenes from Hamlet.

Seeing Hamlet reminded Emsworth of how J. K. Rowling lost her nerve in the final volume of the Harry Potter saga. See this post on what Harry Potter could have learned from Hamlet and other Shakespearean tragedies.

For Emsworth’s review of the Stratford’s Festival All’s Well That Ends Well, see this post.  For Emsworth’s review of Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival, see this post.

Other Emsworth posts include reviews of shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season, including Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance (see this post); Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married (see this post), Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (see this post), Leonard Bernstein’s musical Wonderful Town (see this post), and J. B. Priestley’s The Inspector Calls (see this post).

Emsworth gripes about the recent leadership debacle at the Stratford Festival, which resulted last winter in Des McAnuff’s becoming the sole artistic director of the Festival, in this post.