The repertory system
is alive and
very well at the Shaw Festival this season. In my
recent visit,
six plays and a reading of a seventh made it abundantly clear that the
company
is as skilled and as wide-ranging as ever. And accepting that with so
many
productions running there are some that work better than others, the
overall
impact is impressive. There is nowhere else in the country, and perhaps
no
where else on the continent, where one can see such disciplined and
assured
ensemble playing.
Over the course of
this summer,
there appears to have been some media effort to draw lines between the
Shaw and
the Stratford Festivals. That latter highly regarded company is in its
first
year with new artistic leadership and has had some immediate growing
pains. It
escapes me why anyone would try to compare the two.
Each festival has its
own mandate
and each is doing what it can to expand that mandate in order to avoid
becoming
predictable and repetitive. To this end, Stratford seems to have had
more
leeway. For its part, the Shaw is evolving more cautiously but it is
evolving
nonetheless. Both of these companies offer us a great deal and each
deserves
the place it has earned in our national profile.
The Shaw’s greater
strength is
its ensemble approach to the work. Unlike at Stratford, there is
nothing
approaching a star system. In a play such as The President,
which runs at the Royal George Theatre during the one-hour
lunchtime
slot, festival heavyweights Michael
Ball, Guy Bannerman
and William Vickers play cameo roles
while relative
newcomer Chilina Kennedy runs wonderfully amok
in a
leading part. That is how the Shaw works, and has always worked, and
that is at
the heart of its continuing success.
The three venues,
which house the
season’s eleven productions, present some challenges at the same time
as they
offer benefits. The Royal George Theatre, the smallest of the three,
works
splendidly for both The President and After
the Dance, but it works against
The
Little Foxes,
which might have played better in the Court
House Theatre.
The Court House, a three-sided and very intimate venue, is the right
home for The Stepmother but reveals its
inadequacies by
denying A Little Night Music the space that it
needs to
breathe. The Festival Theatre, the largest of the
three and
occasionally too large for the musicals that play there (the
non-musicals tend
to work better), was the ideal venue for Follies, a concert staging of
the
Sondheim-Goldman musical. An orchestra of twenty-five and a cast of
twenty
filled the space and the audience responded with enthusiasm and
spontaneity as
if to advise the programmers that more of the same would be very
welcome in the
future.
Jackie
Maxwell
has also inaugurated a play reading series, which is held in the new
rehearsal studio, and the response has been both immediate and
overwhelming.
Festival diehards arrive for these morning readings early and wait
patiently in
line to sit and listen to plays by Sebastian
Barry, Caryl Churchill, Athol
Fugard and
Jason Sherman. Company members, both
senior and junior, read from scripts and the
audience marvels at the power of language, stripped of any stage
setting or
effects or costuming or lighting. In the same space where the season’s
fully
produced plays began their lives, these plays provoke thought and
inspire the
possibility of the live theatre experience.
Attendance at the
plays I
selected to see was inconsistent. The musicals and the comedy were
full, but
the dramas, a couple of them little known and rarely produced, were
not. The
age range of audiences continues to challenge all performing arts
groups,
regardless of their festival status. And even though the Shaw reports
an
increase this season, there is a sharp reminder that, while the streets
of the
town are filled with day-trippers buying fudge and other local
favourites, the
festival itself exists slightly apart from the bustle. It’s an active
reminder
that there is no basic equation linking tourist traffic to ticket
sales.
Marketing challenges
never stop,
even during seasons that boast increases. Tourism is down everywhere in
Ontario, the energy crises aggravate an already difficult economy and
performing arts companies compete for what some label ‘disposable
income’, a
term that puts into sad context how too many view the place of the arts
in our
daily lives. But that is a reality and, for this season at the very
least, the
Shaw Festival has come through in splendid form.