The Shaw Festival is entering its 50th
season in 2011 and the very good news is that its age is an intoxicant rather
than a matter of anxiety. The Shaw
Festival is, after all these years, solidly rooted in itself .
I spoke with three of the company’s long-time
members and asked them to reflect on their past years as well as to try looking
ahead. Neil
Barclay and Anthony Bekenn are both actors with 21 and 18 seasons at Shaw,
respectively. Paul
Sportelli, Music Director, is entering his 18th season.
All three speak warmly and almost lovingly of
the opportunities they’ve had. Neil Barclay, the youngest of the three, is
particularly grateful to Christopher Newton, the Artistic Director who first brought him
into the company. To be part of an ensemble like the one Newton shaped and
developed has allowed Neil to grow in a caring and nurturing environment. In
Canada, where The Shaw, as it is fondly called, is one of only two repertory companies,
and one of only two companies that offer such long-term contracts to its
performers, is a relationship that is rare.
Anthony Bekenn has been with the festival
since 1993, though he has lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake from 1988. That was the
year that his future wife, Sharry Flett, began her even longer relationship with The Shaw.
Yet, Bekenn’s name didn’t get added to the company list until 1993, the year
that the couple would have moved to Vancouver had Newton not offered them both
a season. So, with Michaela, their 7-month old daughter, they set up house in
the town where they have lived ever since.
Sporetlli’s arrival seems to have been more
focused, or at least more premeditated. He wrote to Newton after hearing that Christopher Donison
(the Festival’s musical director) was leaving. Newton was intrigued enough with
Paul’s extensive educational and professional resume to arrange an interview
and in very short order he, too, was setting up a life in the town renowned for
its fudge, jams and, most of all, extensive acres of wineries.
Not everyone who is contracted is offered the
opportunity of establishing roots in both personal and professional lives. But for those who do, many options seem
to lie ahead.
The rep system seems to be ideal, enabling
artists to develop skills and extend artistic range without having to
criss-cross the country to do so. I asked Sportelli if the festival afforded
him the opportunities he had hoped it might? Sportelli says, without
hesitation, that at Shaw he “gets to flex so many different musical muscles. I
get to musical direct, conduct, play piano, orchestrate, compose for plays
– plus get two musicals I have co-written produced.” (The second of the
two, Maria
Severa, is on this season’s playbill.) Barclay accepts the cyclical nature
of any theatre career, even one spent in the same company for so many
continuing seasons. Performing in After the Dance,
by Terrence Rattigan, is among his most cherished memories. It was a role that,
Barclay says, came closest to being who he is himself. He added that although
he is not a dedicated musical theatre performer, he was cast in musicals once
his skills had been noticed. This season he will be playing Alfred P. Doolittle
in My Fair
Lady, perhaps the finest vehicle in which to combine both dramatic and
musical skills. Bekenn points to the ‘98 production of John Bull’s Other Island, the ’99 Getting Married,
the ’05 Journey’s
End and the ’10 Serious Money as the roles he favours from among the 33 productions
in which he has been seen.
The typical Shaw season runs from February,
when rehearsals begin for the early openers, until late October or early
November. As a result, those with full contracts (some artists are hired with
shorter contracts that bring them in later or send them home earlier) tend to
define their careers by the work they do in the course of a season. Still,
there are opportunities that arise between contracts that each of these three
company members has been able to accept. This past year, Sportelli was given a
leave of absence to work at D.C.’s Arena Stage on its production of The Light in the
Piazza, which he followed with productions in Toronto of Parade and The Fantasticks.
Barclay has been able to split his off-Shaw time between extensive international
travels and work at theatres across Canada and in the United States. This past
year he performed in the Toronto production of Parade. Last year, Bekenn joined the
Studio 180 production of Stuff Happens when it played at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, in Toronto.
The Shaw is likely unique in that it has had
very few artistic directors in the course of its fifty years. Paxton
Whitehead guided the formative years and instilled the value of an ensemble
rather than a star-based approach. Christopher Newton led the company and the
administration through its period of major growth for half of the festival’s
lifetime and his successor, Jackie Maxwell, spent a year with him as a transitional strategy
that, according to all the men interviewed here, helped to foster as seamless a
changeover as a change in leadership can be.
There is no doubt that Maxwell has her own
preferences in programming and artist selection, as was also the case with
Newton. Under her direction, the festival is striving to extend its mandate and
to include plays that more aggressively reflect a contemporary landscape and a
contemporary cultural climate. Pressures to include a greater diversity in the
acting company have also prompted Maxwell to expand the reach of The Shaw’s
mandate. The effort to extend and expand may be occasionally strained and
artistically unsatisfying, but the effort is sincere and the results, it is
hoped, will become more consistent in the years ahead.
I travel to the Shaw Festival every season.
There is a genuine atmosphere of collective ownership in the air that I have
felt in only a few settings: Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow, both located in
northwest Massachusetts (the area known as the Berkshires), do for music and
dance, respectively, what The Shaw does for theatre. There is nothing else that
I have found in Canada to match. The Stratford Festival is a larger enterprise,
of course, and it employs many more people in a much larger town where there is
probably no room for a sense that the cultural heart and the civic soul are one
and the same. But deeper than numbers or scale is the fact that while
Stratford’s mandate is to produce plays and musicals that make money (and if
this is not their stated mandate, it is the public mandate that their
programming seems to reinforce), the Shaw Festival is tied to a theatre legacy
of ideas, language and audience engagement.
Asked to speculate on the second 50 years at
the Shaw Festival, Bekenn said that he would like to see “growth of the company
– plays that will entertain and inform and keep people coming to the
theatre in the digital age.”
I share his vision for the future of both The
Shaw and for theatres everywhere. Digital technologies, audiences removed from
the theatre-going culture of older generations and a mandate that is a
reflection of the past rather than a vision of the future will continue to
challenge the Festival. And as challenges emerge, it is hoped that the
foundation of all things Shaw will support and reinforce decisions that will,
in good time, lead to a centennial celebration.