The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Stratford Festival

We’d never seen The Two Gentlemen of Verona on stage and had no particular expectations, but it was easy to see that the Stratford Festival’s production was trying something new with it.  It worked well, and we thought it was a lot of fun.

Dean Gabourie

The plot of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is thin (even by the undemanding standards of Shakespeare comedies), the situations are formulaic, and some episodes don’t really have anything to do with the story.  Director Dean Gabourie’s bright idea was to suppose that Shakespeare conceived Two Gentlemen as a variety show, with song-and-dance numbers, comedy skits, animal acts, and scenes from well-known plays, and so on.  This sort of entertainment was apparently usual in the late sixteenth century, as it was 200 years later when Nicholas Nickleby joined Vincent Crummles’s troupe of players (see this recent Emsworth post; we’ve been reading Dickens) and through the vaudeville era (see this post). 

In this show the two young “gentlemen” and the women they love appear as vaudeville performers; the show opens with bosom friends Proteus (Gareth Potter) and Valentine (Dion Johnstone) dancing in striped suits, tophats, and canes.  Valentine is on his way to Milan to get on in life and make new friends; Proteus is content to stay in Verona because of his infatuation with Julia (Sophia Walker).  

Once in Milan, Valentine promptly falls for Silvia (Caire Lautier), whose father wants to bestow her on another man, the wooden Sir Thurio (Timothy Stickney).  When Proteus follows Valentine to Milan, he too falls in love with Silvia, forgetting all about Julia, with whom he exchanged rings before he left. 

In this show the story moves along briskly despite interspersed songs and comic vignettes from the gentlemen’s servants, Speed and Launce, whose dog Crab is played by a lethargic, short-legged, decidedly male beagle.  As a bonus, Mr. Gabourie throws in a melodramatic rendition of the murder of Desdemona from Othello, in which Timothy Stickney plays Sir Thurio playing Othello and Stacie Steadman plays Silvia playing Desdemona). This interpolation was purely Mr. Gabourie’s idea, but it’s undoubtedly Shakespearean (think of the play scene in Hamlet) and fully in the vaudeville tradition.

The entire cast is fine, but the characters we found the most fun were Julia’s mildly disrespectful maid (Trish Lindström), Silvia’s strutting, self-important father (John Vickery), the quipster Speed (Bruce Dow), who pronounces that “love is blind,” and the philosophical dog-owner Launce (Robert Persichini). 

Robert Persichini

Despite its vaudevillian trappings, this production gives us Shakespeare’s language in full flower, especially as it comes from the mouths of Ms. Walker (Julia has the most poetic lines in the play) and Mr. Persichini, who delivers the play’s wonderful comic monologues to the dog Crab.  (These really come alive in performance; the lines seem disjointed on the printed page.)  One of the things that make some of the Shakespeare comedies difficult for some people, including Emsworth, is that the jokes tend to be based on wordplay involving words that aren’t part of our vocabulary anymore.  But a reasonably acute playgoer is likely to “get” the puns and malapropisms of the comic characters in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, as when Launce refers tells us he has received his “proportion,” like the “prodigious son.”

Several years ago, here in Rochester, we saw a community theater version of Edward Albee’s bizarre play The Goat, or Who is Silvia?, which is about a man who falls in love with a goat.  We now realize for the first time that the title of the play was taken from a song Proteus sings under Silvia’s balcony, “Who Is Silvia.”  But we still don’t get the connection.

Peter Pan at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

The Stratford Festival's Peter Pan is not a stage version of the Disney movie, nor is it the dreadful musical play version that schools often do. It's the original.

Two minutes before showtime, the only empty seat in the Avon Theater was right in front of us.  A woman explained to us that when her little son saw the gauze screen veiling the stage, he remembered a movie that had scared him, began crying, and had to be taken out.  The boy never did see the splendid sets or costumes or any of the wonderfully choreographed action of Peter Pan in person; he watched it all on the lobby monitor with his grandmother. 

This was a shame, we thought afterward, because this was just the sort of Peter Pan that a fainthearted child could safely enjoy.  The Darling children’s father (Sanjay Talwar), lampooned and patronized by his wife and children, is neither formidable nor fearsome.  The pirates are lovably cartoonish, and the bumbling, benign Captain Hook (Tom McCamus) won’t inspire nightmares. 

As for Neverland’s savage Indians — wait, this Peter Pan doesn’t have any Indians!  – merely playful, posing, sexy ”Amazons”.  We’ll have more to say in a later post about this alarming capitulation to the tyranny of political correctness.  (Here it is.)

J. M. Barrie

In short, even though this Peter Pan is still a ripping children’s adventure tale, it’s painted in broad strokes and scrubbed of whatever might either offend or stimulate. And it betrays the influence of decades of Disney and Pixar cartoon features. An essay in the program reminded us that Peter Pan topped one drama scholar’s list of the finest English language plays of the twentieth century.  (Emsworth, who is devoted to J. M. Barrie’s novels as well as his plays, would rank it nearly as high.)  But this production does not suggest nearly enough of the psychological complexity of this dark play — too little of what puts Peter Pan in the ranks of plays like Pygmalion, Death of a Salesman, and Fences.  

At the Shaw Festival in 2000 we were fortunate to see a Peter Pan that did, indeed, mine the riches of James M. Barrie’s play, a show that is among our most memorable theater experiences.  We will remember the Stratford Festival’s Peter Pan, on the other hand, mostly because it was our eldest grandson’s very first play.

Boy and swan along the banks of the Stratford-on-Avon

Our excursion to Stratford, Ontario with this seven-year-old was a great success.  He tolerated the long drive and back with admirable patience, had fun trying to feed the swans along the river, was mesmerized by the play, and thrilled at the swordfights and the crocodile. And he never ran out of questions.  Were these real pirates?  Is Captain Hook really dead?  Does the man write a different play every night?  (In this production there’s a narrator — not J. M. Barrie’s idea, but intended to represent him – who sits at a table to the side of the stage writing the play, which unfolds in his imagination before our eyes.) 

Michael Therriault as Irving Berlin in the 2009 Broadway musical "Tin Pan Alley Rag"

There’s still a lot to enjoy in this show, including plenty of clever sight gags and fine acting from the entire large cast.  Michael Therriault bucks the tradition of casting a slender woman as Peter Pan; he is lithe and acrobatic, vain and cocky, with a strong stage presence.  Our grandson noticed right away, though, that Mr. Therriault doesn’t look much like a boy.  We had to agree; in fact, the 36-year-old actor is a good deal closer to his grandpa’s age than to his. We also noticed that the diminutive figure of Michael, the youngest of the Darling children (played by Stacie Steadman), was not very boyish.

We thought Sanjay Talwar was a riot as Mr. Darling and that the ensemble work of the Lost Boys was immensely entertaining.  Sara Topham was an excellent Wendy — although the way she delivered some of her lines gave me flashbacks to The Importance of Being Ernest, in which Ms. Topham played Gwendolen Fairfax last year in Stratford (see Emsworth’s thoughts on that worthy show).  

Sara Topham last season as Gwendolyn Fairfax

J. M. Barrie’s original 1904 stage play has no part for a narrator, but this show does (James Kirriemuir, who, unlike the other actors, is miked for sound). The narration is, at least, still the playwright’s prose, for the most part, taken either from his detailed stage directions, which help make the original play a joy to read, or from Peter and Wendy, the tremendously popular novelization of the play that Barrie himself wrote five years later.  Still, we felt there was too much of it.

Why a narrator at all?  We suppose Brit director Tim Carroll saw it as a device for speaking directly to the patrons; at one point the narrator invited us to chime in on which of several episodes in Neverland they’d like to see played.

But Peter Pan already includes the most famous bit of audience participation in modern theater: the moment when, with the fairy Tinkerbelle’s life hanging in the balance, Peter Pan asks the children in the audience to clap if they believe in fairies.  We thought having Mr. Barrie address the audience detracted from the thrill and uniqueness of the “save Tinkerbelle” moment.

We missed the play’s final coda (Mr. Barrie wrote it but regarded as optional) in which Peter returns to take Wendy back to Neverland for “spring cleaning” after she has grown up and has a daughter of her own.  But this wistful, sentimental scene did not belong, perhaps, in a production like this.

As promised, Emsworth’s thoughts on the Stratford Festival’s thoroughly disgraceful capitulation to political correctness — a Peter Pan without Tiger Lily, the Indian princess! — are at this post.

More broadly, Emsworth’s pre-season thoughts on the entire lineup of shows at the Stratford Festival in 2010 are at this post.

Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Stratford Festival (a review)

I frankly worried that we might be wasting our money on tickets for Love’s Labour’s Lost (Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario). According to the brochure, “The members of the 2007 Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre perform alongside senior artists in this delightful comic feast of language and love,” and we saw on closer examination that the cast would include no fewer than nine young actors from the Conservatory.

Alana Hawley

And the kids weren’t just serving tea on stage. Alana Hawley (Stratford debut) was down to play Princess of France and Trent Pardy (Stratford debut) the King of Navarre, while Dalal Badr (Stratford debut) was cast as Rosaline and Ian Lake (Stratford debut) as Berowne. Were we to pay top buck for a student performance?

Fortunately, we had nothing to worry about. The young actors acquitted themselves very well, the play was a delight, and we enjoyed ourselves very much.

The dialogue in Love’s Labour’s Lost is as witty and erudite — it’s not for everyone — as the storyline is thin. The young King of Navarre (in southern France) has resolved to devote three years of his life to the rigorous study of philosophy, literature, and science; three of his friends (Dumaine, Longaville, and Berowne) have vowed to join him. The four have also agreed that, while they study, they will live monkish lives of fasting and early rising, and they will avoid the fairer sex.

Their vows come under attack almost immediately when the Princess of France arrives in the vicinity on a diplomatic mission from her father. With her is a retinue of lovelies: Maria, Katharine, and Rosaline. Romance and, inevitably, broken vows follow closely behind.

The play satirizes people who make vows of abstinence and asceticism that they cannot reasonably keep. Of course, vows like that seem quaint in our day, where the only vows most young persons make are to live exactly as they please.

But the play also satirizes foolish young men in love, a theme that will never lose its relevance. The latter half of Love’s Labour’s Lost consists mostly of episodes in which the love-smitten scholars try one thing after another — dreadful love poems, showing off for the women in hunting contests, disguising themselves as traveling Russians — to impress the young women, who indeed require little persuasion. In this show, these scenes are played to perfection.

Peter Donaldson as Don Adriano de Armado

Good as the young actors are (we especially liked Alana Hawley as the Princess of France), the show’s best comic lines are delivered by Brian Tree as Costard, a carnally-minded laborer around the court of the King who mucks up everything he tries. He wants to gratify his animal urges by marrying the delectable and willing Jacquenetta (Stacie Steadman), but somehow loses her to Don Adriano de Armado (Peter Donaldson), a pretentious Spaniard who is the butt of the King’s jokes. Asked by two of the scholars to deliver love letters, Costard mixes them up and misdelivers them because he cannot read. (I infer that the original audience for this play was not the unwashed in the mosh pit at the Globe, but a sophisticated court audience who would have found illiteracy amusing.) Our audience at the Tom Patterson theater looked forward to each of Costard’s hilarious appearances on stage.

Michael Langham

Love’s Labour’s Lost is directed by Michael Langham, who has frequently directed the play; this production shows the hand of a director who knows exactly how he wants the lines to be spoken and the scenes to be played. Mr. Langham has just celebrated his 89th birthday. Long ago, from 1956 to 1967, he was Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival. His 1961 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Stratford Festival was, I learn, one of the landmark Shakespeare productions of the twentieth century, demonstrating how much this play can actually be enjoyed in performance.

By contrast, none of the young actors can be much older than 24 or 25. No doubt thanks in good part to Mr. Langham’s direction, their acting was mature beyond their years. Much of this play is written in verse; their delivery preserved a sense of poetry without ever becoming trite or monotonous.