"The Front Page" at Stratford Festival

Stratford Festival ensemble production photo by Emily Cooper

This one was a tough call. The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur is a classic of the American stage. Some even think it's one of the two or three most exemplary American plays. So with the Stratford Festival staging Michael Healey's adaptation of this show, I really wanted to see it. Not to mention that it would be my chance to finally see a show in the Festival Theatre. On the other hand, during our visit it was opposite a new and interesting sounding new play (Mother's Daughter by Kate Hennig). So we split up and I went to see The Front Page while the rest of the family went to see Mother's Daughter.

Adding to the dilemma: the morning before these two competing matinees, we attended a panel discussion called "Tudormania", about the ongoing interest in the Tudor family of British royalty. A couple of academics and playwright Hennig made a good bridge between the previous night's Henry VIII and Mother's Daughter, which focuses on Queen Mary, the bridge between Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Countering that is that the previous night while having a nightcap at the pub and trying out our new Trivial Pursuit: The Shakespeare Edition at the bar, we met one of the company members who is in the cast of The Front Page. Moot point, I guess, since I already had a ticket, but definitely added incentive to go see my new friend's play, rather than the play of the writer I briefly met after the panel discussion.

Short answer, Stratford is just a cool place where you can meet interesting theater people.

The Play

So, anyway, the play I did see. It's set in the press room of the Chicago criminal court building, where a group of beat writers are awaiting the execution of a controversial convicted murderer. Writers Hecht and MacArthur were both reporters themselves, so it's kind of a fun insight into the lives of a group who were not highly regarded. It's also a view into the corrupt local government that Chicago was so famous for, particularly during Prohibition. This adaptation also adds some elements of gender (more female roles, with more lines and more agency) and plays up the racial elements more, too.

It's pretty amazing to hear elected officials from 1928 (in this case, the sheriff and the mayor) attacking the free press and accusing them of (literally) "fake news"--there truly is nothing new under the sun. In fact, a lot of the issues raised in the play could easily come out of today's headlines. We have elected officials monkeying with the timing of an execution (and indeed, with whether to execute at all) as leverage for an upcoming election, pandering to specific elements of the electorate. And we have various of the reporters reporting the story with varying levels of, shall we say, creativity.

One of the more pointed sections of the dialogue comes when Wilson (E.B. Smith), the only African American writer in the gang, discusses why he can't afford to write anything that isn't scrupulously sourced and verified, since there are elements in town who would love to shut down both him and his black-run paper for any excuse. Similarly, when the sheriff is handing out tickets to the execution, he gives a pair to each of the writers, but not to Wilson, who has to go a little extra to get his.

As the play progresses and the plot devolves, there are a number of little humorous twists in the plot, all adding up to a developing farce, as we finally get an escaped fugitive hiding out in the press room while one of the writers , Hildy (Ben Carlson), aided by his boss, Mrs. Burns (Maev Beaty), tries to secure an exclusive story without the others even knowing the fugitive is there. It's silly, yet somehow believable that a paper would go to such lengths to score a scoop.

For all the hijinks, there are a lot of meaningful bits and threads running through the play--it is much more than it appears on the surface. I'm not clear that it really qualifies as one of the truly great American plays, but it's not a mere screwball comedy, either.

The Production

By now it probably goes without my saying that the quality of the productions at Stratford is pretty consistently amazing. One of the things this show takes advantage of is the large repertory company. Although there are a good dozen meaty roles in the play, there are also a number of small parts. Rather than doubling or tripling the casting, Stratford can pull actors with big roles in other shows and assign them to small roles. For example, the minor but amusing role of the gangster Diamond Louis is played by Michael Blake, who on a different day will play the title role in Othello.

I should comment on the Festival Theatre, of course. I had taken the backstage tour of it last year, so I'd been inside (and backstage...), but this was my first time seeing a show. It's quite a large house, seating well over 2,000 people, though it wasn't close to sold out for this Wednesday matinee. But the design is wonderful. Built to mimic the original festival tent from the 1950s, the audience nearly surrounds a large, three-quarter thrust stage (i.e. there are people on three sides of the stage). That provides a much more visually rich, intimate experience, even in such a large space. It's a big stage, but it works really well for a show like this, and I know they use it for a lot of their big musicals now, too. As a theater, I have to say I like it better than the Avon Theatre, where we saw Little Shop the previous afternoon, which has a more traditional proscenium setup. And the Studio Theatre is a wonderful little black box with very steeply-raked seats on three sides, so it is also three-quarter thrust, just on a much smaller scale. Next year they will open a new theater, so there will be four--wow!

The combination of the theater and the terrific cast makes the more-than-three hour run time bearable (with two intervals), and director Graham Abbey keeps the pace lively without being too manic (until the farce comes to a head, of course) and the set design by Lorenzo Savoini is really evocative of a government office building of the period.

Bottom Line

I really enjoyed the show. For what it's worth, the rest of the family also enjoyed Mother's Daughter, so we now have a copy of the script so I can read it. As noted earlier, I don't know that this play is really up near the top of the American stage canon, but it holds up remarkably well for a modern audience, at least with the adaptations in this version.

And I'm pretty much coming to the conclusion that any show at the Stratford Festival is going to be worth seeing, between the production values and the choice of scripts. I heard remarkable things, for example, about last season's production of To Kill a Mockingbird, which apparently was able to plumb some of the history of American racism in ways that I've never seen a U.S. production achieve. I'm sorry I missed that one.

So it was fun to see this Canadian interpretation of a different American classic. It's scheduled to run through October 25th, in case you find yourself in Stratford.