Jesus Christ Superstar at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

(May 20, 2011) We really didn’t know quite what to expect from a live performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. Would there be dialogue between the musical numbers to flesh out the rock opera’s storyline? (There was none.) Would the musical arrangements be similar to those in the legendary 1970 recording? (They were, though a few changes to the songs jumped out at us, like a new verse in “Hosanna”.) Would the orchestra appear on stage? (For the most part, the musicians stayed in the pit.) Would the orchestra really rock? (It really did.)

Importantly, how would it all sound? To our great relief, the audio mix in the Avon Theatre was superb — clean and crisp, loud but not overwhelming. The instruments and voices were all clearly heard (too often in musical productions, when everyone’s wearing mics, the sound of a large ensemble, with everyone wearing mics, is shrill and muddy), and the stripped-down but full-sounding orchestra couldn’t have been better. An able French horn player, identified in our program as one Derek Conrod, made the most of his opportunities.

Des McAnuff

The excellent sound meant that there was nothing to interfere with the enjoyment of the performances of Josh Young, as Judas, and Chilina Kennedy, as Mary Magdalene. Before the end of the first verse of “Heaven on Their Minds” we’d forgotten all about Murray Head; Mr. Young has a better voice. And he’s a rocker; Van Halen should call next time he needs a new lead singer. We had had trouble imagining how an actor could truly “act” without any spoken lines (our experience at the opera had left us with low expectations). But Ms. Kennedy was wonderfully expressive, visually as well as musically. In fact, there was plenty of acting; as in any well-directed musical, director Des McAnuff made sure his audiences never lacked for something to watch on stage.

Chilina Kennedy

We love the music of Superstar enough that we probably would have been satisfied if the performers had simply stood at the front of the stage and given a concert. But this show succeeds as a dramatic production.

Of course, no show is perfect. Although Paul Nolan has a fine voice and nails the look with his long wavy locks, his Jesus seemed unnecessarily passive at times, and his vocal numbers all got off to weak starts. In his grand Tchaikovsky-esque ballad “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say),” we heard too little of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s melody — and Mr. Nolan didn’t seem comfortable yet with the improvisations that someone was teaching him. The supporting cast, including Aaron Walpole as Annas, had strong voices across the board, but Mr. Walpole seemed glued to the stage and looked very much as if he was wearing one of those blow-up sumo wrestling costumes that you see at neighborhood carnivals.

For Christian believers, the new production of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario) is a bracing reminder that Jesus of Nazareth was equipped with a full range of human emotions. Orthodox Christians understand, of course, that Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine, but despite the New Testament evidence that he also exhibited feelings of anger, betrayal, weariness, and fear, we often avoid thinking about his human side; we tend to think of him primarily as an idealized, living embodiment of the Beatitudes.

That may explain why, 40 years ago, many Christians reacted strongly to Jesus Christ Superstar‘s focus on Jesus’ human side, an emphasis that was interpreted as implicitly denying His divine nature. Perhaps the hardest pill for believers to swallow was the suggestion in Superstar (for which there is no evidence in the Gospels) that Mary Magdalene was romantically attracted to Jesus. Yet it is plain from the Gospels that men and women saw Jesus as someone who could help them gratify other kinds of worldly desires and ambitions; it’s no great stretch to imagine that a woman might have found Jesus sexually desirable. It’s true that the prophet wrote of the Messiah that “he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). But Jesus was still a man; do Christians really think that He wore a magical protective shield that made it impossible for women to see Him in “that” way? Of course, if Superstar had portrayed Jesus as reciprocating lustful feelings, that would have been another matter. We’re grateful that, in this show, Des McAnuff didn’t go there.

Back when the two-disc album was released in 1970, Emsworth listened to Jesus Christ Superstar over and over and played the tunes with high school friends (our little band did an instrumental version of “Superstar” for the senior talent show). We still know the music backwards and forwards. We were therefore startled, midway through the second act, to hear one of the guitarists playing an intro to a song we didn’t recognize. There it was in the program: “Could We Start Again, Please.” We did a little research when we got home and saw that the song was in the original 1971 London production and has been in other productions since. We didn’t know! We’d never managed to see Superstar on stage and had deliberately avoided the movie versions.

Perhaps Webber and Rice left “Could We Start Again, Please” off the original 1970 album for reasons of space. Or perhaps they wrote it specially to bulk up the stage production, or perhaps to give the actor playing Peter another featured number. Either way, we thought the musically cliched soft-rock duet was a weak number that would have fit better in Sunset Boulevard (think “As If We Never Said Goodbye”) than in Superstar, where it interrupted the momentum of Passion week. And what sense did it make for such a song to be sung by Peter and Mary Magdalen? The song’s theme is that Jesus’ ministry took a wrong turn — but it was Judas, not Peter, who had become dissatisfied with the Messianic aspect of our Lord’s ministry.

On the day we saw a Superstar matinee, director Des McAnuff surprised everyone by appearing on stage to introduce himself and the show. Since we were about to see only the third preview performance, he explained, the show was still being tweaked; nevertheless, he assured us, it was for all practical purposes in “final form”. (There wasn’t much that seemed to need “tweaking”.) Only afterward did we wonder how to account for Mr. McAnuff’s cameo. Since it was already ten minutes past two when he stepped up, we figure that that the stage manager asked him to vamp while the crew took care of technical difficulties backstage. (Given his relationship with Tim Rice, we hope Des McAnuff has been thinking about the possibility of mounting Chess at the Stratford Festival. But the Festival doesn’t need a rock musical every year.)

Jesus Christ Superstar isn’t a long show. Despite the delay, Mr. McAnuff’s remarks, and an intermission, the performance we saw was over before four.

We preview the Stratford Festival’s 2011 season

In 2010 fanfares still reminded theater-goers at the Festival Theater in Stratford that a show was about to begin

It was a decent 2010 season at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, though not a great one.  As chronicled in this blog, we saw only one truly memorable show (a marvelously acted The Winter’s Tale) and only two that we could rate as solidly entertaining (Kiss Me, Kate and Two Gentlemen From Verona).  Three were disappointing in various respects (The Tempest, Peter Pan, and Dangerous Liaisons), and As You Like It) was an outright stinker. We know they hardly ever do this — but The Winter’s Tale was so good that we can only hope that the management will consider reviving the production in 2012.  We’d see it again in a heartbeat.

We had fun pointing out how political correctness sucked some of the joy out of Peter Pan (see this post), and we wouldn’t have missed Christopher Plummer as Prospero (see this one).  Mr. Plummer isn’t scheduled to be back at Stratford in 2011.  But if he returns in 2012 we’d love to see him as the Duke in Measure for Measure.  We were reading the play recently and could hear, in our mind’s ear, Mr. Plummer’s rich baritone delivering the Duke’s lines. Update (12-13-10): We saw that Mr. Plummer told a Toronto drama critic recently that last summer’s Prospero would be his last Shakespeare role, because there weren’t any more age-appropriate roles he hadn’t done. We hope he changes his mind.

There will still be four Shakespeare plays on the 2011 playbill, but we figure to be skipping a couple of them.  Here’s what we like best on the 2011 menu, which also includes the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar and and the classic musical Camelot.  In order of interest, more or less:

Moliere

Molière’s The Misanthrope (at the Festival Theater)

We’ve been interested in French drama since our college course in French literature, but unfortunately we’ve never seen much of it.  So Molière’s The Misanthrope is a top priority for us as we order tickets this week, especially with Brian Bedford directing and acting.  Update: Bedford won’t be directing the play after all, because his The Importance of Being Earnest, which originated at Stratford in 2009, is still running on Broadway, but he will still be acting in The Misanthrope.  David Grindley is now announced as the director.

By reputation Bedford is the world’s foremost English-speaking interpreter of Molière, but we’ve seen him only in other roles till now.  He’ll be 76 years old during the 2011 season; his character in The Misanthrope (Oronte) is at least half his age.  But we saw Bedford pull off the same sort of thing a few years ago when he played the lead in Private Lives.  Ben Carlson, who was brilliant as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale in 2010, will play Alceste.  Kelli Fox, another favorite of ours, is shuttling back to Stratford from the Shaw Festival to fill a supporting role.  This 1666 play is a satire of French high society.

Update 2 (7-8-11): We just saw that Mr. Bedford won’t be appearing in The Misanthrope either because of a medical issue. That’s disappointing. The estimable Peter Hutt will take his place. We’ve enjoyed Hutt’s work over the years at both the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival.

Hey!  When is the Stratford Festival going to offer a play by Victor Hugo?  We’d jump at the chance to see Ruy Blas or Hernani.

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar (at the Avon Theater)

We heard a fair amount of casual grousing in Stratford last summer about how the Festival was going to the dogs with shows like Evita – not simply musicals (bad enough!) but rock operas!  Personally, we don’t have a problem with rock musicals per se, though a lot of them, including Evita, don’t amount to much.  They’ll run out of worthy rock musicals a lot quicker than they’ll run out of classic American musicals.

the classic album cover

Jesus Christ Superstar is another story.  We’ve loved this rock musical account of the last days of Jesus’ life (told from the perspective of Judas, our Lord’s betrayer) since our high school years, when the two-disc LP first came out and the buzz started.  We listened to it incessantly and played and sang the tunes over and over – “I Don’t Know How to Love Him, “Everything’s Alright,” “Superstar,” and the Tchaikovsky-esque “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say).”  This music hasn’t gotten stale over the last 40 years. 

But this will be our first chance to hear it/see it live.  Paul Nolan and Chilina Kennedy, the stars of 2009’s remarkable West Side Story in Stratford, will sing the parts of Jesus and Mary Magdalene; Josh Young, whom we don’t know, will channel Judas.  Des McAnuff will be directing.  We expect good things.

Richard III (by William Shakespeare, at the Tom Patterson Theater)

In this Richard III, the lead role will be played by Seana McKenna. As a general rule, we’re not keen on “non-traditional” casting, but we fully expect Richard III to be the best Shakespeare in Stratford next summer. It’s the loosely historical story of how the hunchback Richard, Duke of Gloucester, schemes and murders his way onto the throne of England.  We learned recently that there are still people in Great Britain who insist vehemently that this play is a gross libel on Richard and that he wasn’t the monster of Shakespeare’s play.

Ms. McKenna is at the peak of her powers; we loved her last summer in The Winter’s Tale.  As for Richard’s being played by a woman — well, Richard is not a very manly man; he seems interested in women mainly to humiliate them and to blight their lives. An sexually ambiguous Richard may be just the ticket.  The rest of the cast is strong: Martha Henry, Peter Donaldson, Martha Henry, Sean Arbuckle, and Yanna McIntosh.

The Merry Wives of Windsor (by William Shakespeare, at the Festival Theater)

This is a Shakespeare play we hadn’t even read until a year or so ago, figuring that it was only a minor work.  Maybe it is, but after seeing The Gentlemen of Verona transformed into a first-class piece of entertainment last summer, The Merry Wives of Windsor is one we’ll see. 

The cast will have several of the Stratford Festival’s best, including Tom Rooney, Tom McCamus, Janet Wright, and Lucy Peacock.  Geraint Wyn Davies will play Falstaff, the fat, lecherous knight who is trying to get into the sack with two married women at once, but who is blockheaded enough to send the same love letter to both. 

Camelot (by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, at the Festival Theatre)

The musical Camelot is based on one of our all-time favorite novels, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, a whimsical retelling of the legends of Arthur, Gwenevere, Lancelot, and the rest of the gang at Camelot.  We’ve never thought Camelot had an especially memorable score, compared to shows like South Pacific or My Fair Lady, but three hours in Camelot can be special.  Geraint Wyn Davies will play the cuckolded king, Brent Carver the magician Merlin. 

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (at the Avon Theatre)

Emsworth has a long-standing prejudice against theatrical and cinematic adaptations of classic novels.  As readers, we form our own mental pictures of the scenes and characters of a novel.  Why let a play or a movie forever displace those images with someone else’s? 

Nevertheless, Frank Galati’s 1988 adaptation of Steinbeck’s 1939 novel won a Tony, the wife of our bosom loves Steinbeck’s book, and one of our favorite actors, Evan Buliung, will play Tom Joad.  (We have just remembered that the wife went happily to see the last Steinbeck adaptation at Stratford (Of Mice and Men) while we saw something else.)  It’s the story of the Joad family and their struggles to make it during the Great Depression. 

Titus Andronicus (by William Shakespeare, at the Tom Patterson Theatre)

We’ve read Titus Andronicus, and we’re just not inspired to see this convoluted story about the succession to the Roman throne, a mind-numbing tale of mayhem, rape, cannibalism, and murder.  We’re curious as to how they’ll accomplish the special effects – there’s some really nasty stuff to be staged.  But Titus Andronicus simply doesn’t strike us as a very good play.  The experts say good parts of it were written by someone other than the Bard. 

Not all Shakespeare plays are equally worthy.  If we see this show, the main reason will be that we’d like eventually to brag that we’ve seen the entire Shakespeare canon.  John Vickery will play the title role. 

The Homecoming (by Harold Pinter, at the Avon Theater)

You’d almost have to say that nastiness will be a running theme at Stratford in 2011. Titus Andronicus is all blood and carnage, Richard III is a story of sociopathic, bloody cruelty, Jesus Christ Superstar ends with a brutal whipping and a crucifixion, and Harold Pinter’s 1964 Tony-award-winning play may be the most disquieting of all.  The Homecoming is even more trying to the nerves than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which came out around the same time. It’s about what happens in a lower-class North London family when the oldest son, Teddy, brings his slutty wife Ruth home to meet his father and brothers. 

The play is violent from its realistic beginning to its surreal end, mostly verbal violence.  These people use words to hurt.  We happened to see the 2008 revival in New York City and thought it was an extraordinary play, but still don’t feel braced enough to see it again. (Another Pinter play, we’d probably spring for.)  The Homecoming is not for the squeamish, any more than Titus Andronicus.  The Stratford’s cast includes Stephen Ouimette, Brian Dennehy, and Cara Ricketts.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (at the Festival Theater)

Twelfth Night is one of our very favorite Shakespeare plays (in this post we made a list), and it would be our top priority for 2011 if it weren’t being directed by Stratford Festival Artistic Director Des McAnuff.  As we announced after seeing the McAnuff-directed As You Like It in September (see this post), we’re going to pass on Shakespeare plays directed by McAnuff for the foreseeable future.  No one can say we didn’t give them a fair trial: we also suffered through his Romeo and Juliet in 2008 and squirmed through his Macbeth in 2009.  Directing Shakespeare is simply not where McAnuff’s considerable talents lie.

They’ve done this play in Stratford a lot.  Since 1953 only A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been played there as often as Twelfth Night; this will be the eleventh production since 1953.  On average it comes up every five years, so if we miss this one . . . . It’s a shame, though, especially considering the talent in the 2011 cast, which includes Stephen Ouimette, Tom Rooney, Ben Carlson, and Brian Dennehy. 

The rest: Shakespeare’s Will (by Vern Thiessen, in the Studio Theatre); Hosanna (by Michael Tremblay, in the Studio Theatre); The Little Years (by John Mighton, also in the Studio Theatre)

The talented Seana McKenna will also be playing Anne Hathaway in Shakespeare’s Will, a one-woman play about how William Shakespeare’s wife felt about being left his second-best bed in his last will and testament, together with other reflections on what it was like to be the great poet’s wife.  Unfortunately, we’re hung up on the premise.  We doubt that Anne Hathaway’s husband actually wrote the plays and sonnets that have come down to us under his name (see this post).

But we’re intrigued by Hosanna, the play with which long-time Stratford Festival artistic director Richard Monette made his mark as an actor, and just might manage to see it.  There will be a cast of two: Hosanna, a transvestite, will be played by Gareth Potter, and Hosanna’s partner Cuirette will be played by Oliver Becker. 

The small, almost claustrophobic Studio Theatre will host a third play in 2011.  The Little Years was written by John Mighton, a Canadian playwright who also has a Ph. D. in mathematics.  The play, set in the 1950s, is about a teenage girl who’s interested in physics.

We observed a year ago that the 2010 playbill consisted of mostly contemporary works, other than the Shakespeare plays and Peter Pan.  This will be true in 2011 too: except for the Shakespeare plays and Molière’s The Misanthrope, every show on the schedule was written after 1960.

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)