Three days at
the Shaw Festival is good for the soul, the mind and the smile on
your face. The drive (or flight or bus ride) is more than worth your time and
effort, especially when four out of five plays attended are of consistently
high quality. The festival’s range of styles continues to expand from the
familiar drawing room plays to include large-scale musicals and less
traditional approaches to traditional plays that could otherwise be predictable
fare.
Mack and Mabel, the major musical of the season, is a risky
choice. The show does not precede itself with audiences humming tunes and with
memories of earlier productions or the people who made them famous. In fact,
the original Broadway production closed almost immediately after it opened and,
aside from the original cast recording beloved by many musical theatre
fanatics, vanished from sight. The Shaw Festival production is upbeat,
fast-paced, brilliantly orchestrated and conducted and boasts an
eager-to-please company on and offstage. However, there’s nothing that all
these efforts can do to save a script that is ragged and piecemeal, a series of
scenes that fail to reveal any character development between the principals or
of the separate characters themselves. An odd choice, perhaps, and certainly
not a commercial insurance policy. What strikes me most, now that Jackie
Maxwell, the festival’s artistic director, has programmed a Festival Stage
musical for the third consecutive season, is that her economic resources seem
just too thin to produce the works she has chosen for that large and beautiful
venue. Is she lacking the background in musical theatre to make more suitable
choices? Is she trying too hard to fill a space that is too greedy for
resources that the festival cannot secure or invest? Is audience loyalty to
each season’s musical a risk or an educated certainty? Can last year’s
demonstrated enthusiasm for High Society (a box office winner and critical casualty) be
compared to this season’s response to Mack
and Mabel (cautious audience
interest and strong critical praise) with valid long-term conclusions?
Meanwhile, at
the
The Circle, by Somerset
Maugham, also at the Royal George
Theatre, reinforces one of the festival’s greatest strengths – the early
twentieth century drawing room play. Christina
Poddubiuk’s exquisite set and
costume designs pitch us into the heart of Maugham’s world. Neil Munro,
directing with no less insight than he brought to Summer and Smoke, serves
the text and is content to leave the actors to hypnotize the audience. Grace,
wit and unerring intellectual precision make the most of this play. The first
act charges ahead and makes the audience keep up with it, in the very best way.
The second-act writing is less engaging. But the second act has a scene with
three of the company’s senior actors – Wendy Thatcher, Michael Ball, and David Schurmann – that could be boxed and used as a lesson
in what stage acting can be but so rarely is. This trio simply sit and talk to
each other – one or two may even stand from moment to moment -- but the
sheer ease of delivery washes over us and, drawing room artifice aside, we are
transported to a time when language was the key to communication.
The Cassilis Engagement, a hardly-known play by hardly-known playwright St. John Hankin (his play, Return
of the Prodigal, was produced at
the Shaw Festival previously) is a standout. Christopher Newton
directs a powerful ensemble that inhabits William
Schmuck’s masterful design. The
Court House Theatre, my favourite of the festival’s three venues because of an
intimacy that doesn’t choke the people living and working in it, frames Hankin’s
world, his characters and his ideas. Among others, Goldie Semple, Mary Haney, Laurie Paton and Patrick
Galligan re-assert the value of
true repertory theatre. The actor you saw the day before in a supporting role
is now a leading player, and vice-versa. Over a long history, the Shaw Festival
demonstrates consistent devotion to theatre as community. How lucky we are that
Niagara-on-the-Lake has the Shaw and we, in turn, have them both.
Hotel Peccadillo, a farce by Georges
Feydeau that has been adapted by Morris Panych, also the production’s director, is playing at
the Festival Theatre. Of the five plays that I include here, Peccadillo is the one I cannot strongly recommend. Panych has worked overtime,
or far too hard, to make something funny that may have been funny without all
his assistance. In this he has been aided and, at the same time, hobbled, by
his long-time design partner, Ken
MacDonald, whose love of forced
perspective, successful in some of his previous work, requires the actors to
bend and squeeze through entrances and exits that serve only to highlight their
discomfort. The standard boulevard sex farce that made, and makes, Feydeau one
of the champions of this impossible-to-solve genre, is here adapted in a crude
and crass fashion. I don’t refer to obscene language or vulgarity. I do refer
to Panych’s attention to the obvious and the pedantic. He has created a new
character for the play, Feydeau himself, who enters and exits throughout with
asides tossed to the audience. On occasion these asides are funny, but their
sum in no way adds to the play’s value or the production’s purpose.
Furthermore, Panych has provided several characters with their own
to-the-audience asides that remind us that they are, after all, actors trapped
in a play from which they cannot easily exit. Moments into the second act, I
felt much the same way sitting in my seat. But notwithstanding my lack of
enthusiasm for the production, members of the ensemble -- Goldie Semple,
Patrick Galligan, Laurie Paton and Lorne
Kennedy among others --.fuel
their high-powered performances with invention.
These five
productions are only half of the season’s offerings. Two more plays, Tristan, a musical premiere, and The
Kiltartan Comedies, are about to
open. The season carries on through the fall. Please do yourselves a great
favour by checking out the festival’s web site – www.shawfest.com – and book an experience you will not soon
forget.