Assume you can manage one night at this summer’s Stratford Festival. Even then, it will be costly — B&B’s, the good restaurants, and tickets have risen dramatically in recent years. But if you’re willing to set the alarm for an ungodly hour to make the four-plus-hour drive in time, you can complete a four-play marathon. […]
Stratford Festival
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Dark, exciting final three
Stratford made news with its last three openings, starting with one of its finest productions to date. Two, however, close at the end of September and should be seen. The superb production of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark marks many Stratford debuts: of theatrically and intellectually original French playwright Anouilh, of renowned actress Amanda Plummer as […]
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Onstage 8.10.05
Hard to sell Except for the enchanting double-bill with three divas in the small Studio Theatre, Stratford’s new productions of modern plays may be hard-sells. James Reaney’s The Donnellys: Sticks and Stones is a seminal play in modern Canadian drama, admired for its historical and social significance. But this play is the first in a […]
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Onstage 7.27.05
Making characters human This season at Stratford artistic director Richard Monette completes his presentation of the entire Shakespeare canon — as well as continues his expansion of the contemporary repertoire. Jonathan Goad, whom I have admired as an excitingly developing young actor, brings Dostoevsky’s passionate Dmitry to pulsing life in Jason Sherman’s The Brothers Karamazov. […]
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Find entertainment in singing and clowning
Yes, it’s our leading classical theater company, but the openings at Stratford Festival also include lighter fare: two major musicals, an updated Shakespeare comedy, and a silly sex farce. Michael Stewart & Jerry Herman’s Hello Dolly stars Lucy Peacock and Peter Donaldson, last year’s Lady Macbeth and Timon of Athens, in a brassy comic […]
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On stage 6.15.05
Stratford’s opening week showed eight fine, greatly varied productions with seven to come. This season completes Artistic Director Richard Monette’s presentation of the entire Shakespeare canon and continues expanding the contemporary repertoire. Monette’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is dominated by its towering Prospero. Supposedly the final farewell performance by William Hutt — at 85 […]
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Dispatches from Canada
I missed parts one and two of Peter Hinton’s The Swanne and just now caught the finale of this ambitious new Canadian trilogy, The Swanne: Queen Victoria (The Seduction of Nemesis). The title may suggest some of its problems. The play is a too-elaborate historical fantasy in which the young Queen Victoria writes a work […]
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Rediscovering great comedy and one whatsit
Three more knockout productions at Stratford present a gentle comedy, a laugh riot, and a Shakespeare whatsit. Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens partly seems to be written by someone else, is both tragic and garishly comical, and brilliantly and really badly written. Yet, this is the third Stratford production of Timon that has made it look […]
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Great theater: bad ideas, miscastings, and all
Several hundred amazingly respectful school kids attended the matinee I saw of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and seemed to really enjoy it, despite the wrongheaded production. Stratford’s eye-popping, elaborate stagings, performed by some of the world’s best-trained, most gifted classical actors in these state-of-the-art theaters are likely to be the best you will see, […]
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In love and war, from Ontario to ancient Greece
The Stratford Festival brought out big guns for its last salvo. I’d only heard about Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land.In1981 it was commissioned by, and premiered at, the Blyth Summer Festival, whose plays typically deal with rural Canadian settings and history. Quiet in the Land is about the pacifist Amish in southwestern Ontario. […]
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Feeling bewildered at Stratford
Canada’s great Stratford Festival continues its 51st season’s bewildering variety with six productions of classic plays, all well-known but not previously performed at Stratford. Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exitteases intriguing variations out of the cliché that “Hell is other people.” Its perfect dramatic structure counterbalances three opposed new arrivals in hell who are trapped in […]
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Mixed Bill Shakespeare festival
This 51st season of Canada’s Stratford Festival is dedicated to the recently deceased great international designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch. She set the Festival’s incomparable design standards for many years, and invented Stratford’s much-imitated combination Elizabethan/ancient Greek/modern thrust stage. I don’t know what the outspoken Ms. Moiseiwitsch would say about the peculiar mishmash of spectacles in Stratford’s […]
