"Birds of a Kind" at Stratford Festival

Stratford Festival production photo by David Hou

For the last show of this year's visit to Stratford, we caught another premiere, Birds of a Kind, by Wajdi Mouawad. This was the English-language premiere of the work, but more about that later.

The Play

I wasn't sure what to make of this play when we were deciding which shows to see. My wife and I both kept calling it "Birds of a Feather", which is how "La Cage Au Folles" was sometimes translated into English, and that is totally not what this play is about (though ironically, it was originally written and produced in French). The show itself had a fairly interesting and long journey into production, but it all seems to fit.

So what is it? This is a play about identity and belonging, about prejudices and karma. We start with the rather odd meeting of a couple of college students: she (Wahida) an Arab-American, but very much American, he (Eitan) an Israeli-American Jew who is somewhere on the autism spectrum. They manage to overcome the awkwardness of the meeting and fall in love.

Things start to fly apart at a family Passover seder where Wahida is to meet Eitan's family. It does not go well. We start seeing the layers of experience and prejudice that underlie the attitudes of Eitan's family members. His parents live in Germany, though the father grew up in Israel. The grandparents are estranged for (initially) unexplained reasons.

None of this description is going to do justice to the play. It's deep and complex, and the characters are rich and interesting, and the language bounces among English, Hebrew, German, and occasionally Arabic and bits of Yiddish. Projected supertitles appear during the non-English parts, and it works well. But the key is noting how various characters slip in and out of languages as they change topics and/or feel the need to exclude others from the conversation.

Eventually all the questions are answered fairly well. Some of it I found fairly predictable, but nonthing about it was trite or simple, and there are layers of the plot and story that we're still talking about almost a week later. This is a good and interesting play.

The Production

Super complex. I believe all the actors in the play had to speak in at least two, and often three, languages. That's fairly common in Canada, which famously has two official languages. But finding that many fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers might be tough. Indeed, talking with people around the Festival, we heard stories of some of the actors struggling a bit to learn such large parts in unfamiliar tongues. But to our ears, it turned out pretty convincingly, though at least one of the actors seemed to struggle a little with the Hebrew.

The acting was unsurprisingly strong, this being Stratford. Jakob Eiman as Eitan and Baraka Rahmani as Wahida were a strong core, and Sarah Orenstein as Norah and Alon Nashman as David were quite powerful, though in very different ways. David is loud and angry and opinionated; Norah is reticent and rather mournful. But both project great power on stage. This was a great use of the close quarters of the Studio Theatre, where every seat feels right on top of the stage.

But what really comes through is the stories. The refugees of various sorts adjusting and surviving in unfamiliar lands, the vows never to return to places that must be broken, the stories one tells oneself to get through a day, a year, a lifetime. And ultimately, the importance people put on belonging to a group, and how that relates to race, to genetics, to family, and to acceptance or the lack thereof.

Bottom Line

It's a really powerful story, told in a very challenging way. It's not always pleasant, and it's not about struggling to a happy-ever-after ending. But it feels very real, in a difficult and searching way. A lot gets crammed into a small space and condensed time, but that's the beauty of theater.

The show runs in Stratford through October 13. This one would justify a trip to Canada--it's really that good.

"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.

"Henry VIII" at Stratford Festival

Stratford Festival production photo by Emily Cooper

Sometimes it feels like I've seen all the Shakespeare plays (though there are still about a handful I have neither seen nor read), but there are quite a few that I have seen rarely, or once. I have great memories of seeing Henry VIII at Ashland on my first trip there, about ten years ago. It was wonderfully done, and riveting in the outdoor Elizabethan theater. So given the choice of seeing it in Stratford this week or joining the rest of the family to see Billy Elliot, I chose Shakespeare.

The Play

My strong memory was that although King Henry VIII provides the context for the play, it was largely a play about Cardinal Wolsey and Katherine of Aragon. And that is really the case, at least for most of the play. The political machinations of Wolsey (Rob Beattie) do occupy much of the bulk of the play, and they largely come at the expense of Katherine (Irene Poole). I found the play engaging and the politics fascinating, though I gather my reaction is somewhat atypical. I was looking at a cute poster they sell in the Festival shop, depicting a flow chart for determining which Shakespeare play to watch, and Henry VIII is indicated for those who want to take a nap.

The play is talky--there isn't a lot of action. But in the intimacy of the Studio Theatre it's all right there in front of you, and even from my position in the front corner where I was often behind the actors, there was always a lot to see, and the actors mostly play the thrust stage almost as if they were in the round, so I didn't feel like I was missing much.

I will say toward the end, after the rather unremarkable transition from Katherine to Anne Boleyn and the subsequent birth of Elizabeth, the play gets a bit mawkish in foreshadowing the amazing impact she will have on the nation. With this play coming out relatively soon after the death of Elizabeth, it's understandable that there is some necessary hagiography, but it really kind of diminishes the impact of Henry as a historical figure if he's just the necessary forebear of the future Queen Elizabeth I.

The Production

This is a sort of play where the Stratford Festival really excels. Although there are not a lot of big roles, there are a lot of actors required, and the repertory company has plenty. Plus, they have a huge storehouse of period costumes, so even though the little theater doesn't accommodate a lot of set pieces, the costuming is lush and varied, and the lighting makes it all quite vivid.

King Henry himself (Jonathan Goad) is good, though hardly the major force one expects from other depictions of that ruler. This Henry seems quite willing to let others run rather amok and only sort it out when he must--much more passive than I would expect. On the other hand, if Henry is diminished by his lack of vigor, it gives more room for lesser characters to shine a bit. Tim Campbell's brief early stint as the Duke of Buckingham is one such, and Stephen Russell as the Lord Chamberlain is another.

But really, as usual, the cast and designs are just solid throughout. It's really a joy to see such vibrant, detailed renderings of Shakespeare's plays.

Bottom Line

Maybe I'm weird, but I really liked this play. And judging from the enthusiastic response from the full house, I'm not the only one.

I find this history play rather more approachable than most (perhaps because I'm not particularly steeped in British history myself), and quite enjoy the politics and such. I'm happy I got to see it again. The play runs through at least mid-October, and is well worth seeing if you're at the festival.

"Little Shop of Horrors" at Stratford Festival

Stratford Festival production photo by Chris Young

We're making a quick stop at the Stratford Festival this year on our way to New York. Only two days here, but two plays each day. First up is a musical for everybody: Little Shop of Horrors. I've seen this on stage once before, and also enjoyed the musical version of the movie, so really, what could be bad?

The Play

I think this story is pretty well known. On Skid Row in New York City there is a flower shop run by Mr. Mushnik. He has two employees, Seymour (an orphan who Mushnik raised from childhood) and Audrey, the battered girlfriend of a sadistic dentist. Business is bad on Skid Row, and so is life. Just as Mushnik is about to give up and shutter the business, Seymour puts one of the exotic plants he raises as a hobby in the window. Suddenly, everything changes, seemingly for the better, but of course there is a price to pay.

As musicals go, the songs are mostly pretty good (written by the team of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, who combined to write a lot of successful Disney movie scores). But this is also an adaptation of a Roger Corman "B" movie from 1960, so it's a bit dark. All in all, that blends pretty well. Some of it is a bit dated, but like most older movies about even older periods, you have to look at the intentions of the time as well as the sensibilities of the present. For the most part, it works well.

The Production

As with every production I've seen at Stratford over the last two years, this one is excellently done. Great acting, design, and direction. This is a particularly tricky show to produce, requiring as it does some major mechanical puppetry, but it seemed to work pretty flawlessly. The lead actors all have strong voices, and the trio of singers who act as sort of a Greek chorus were really very good.

I didn't especially love the set design, which puts Mushnik's flower shop in a circle in the middle of the stage, but I also realize that all the mechanics required to handle the exotic plants limit what one can do. The projections in the background were fun and interesting.

Bottom Line

There's not a lot to say about this show. It's fun, and the production is top quality. The crowd loved it, and the run has been extended well into November. This is the kind of thing I've come to expect at Stratford.

Stratford Festival 2018

Festival Theatre and swan. Stratford Festival photo by Krista Dodson

This will be a somewhat different sort of post, partly because I'm so backed up, and partly because I don't really feel it's worth writing 5-or-more posts on this festival visit. So...consider this an experiment (much like this trip was!).

What am I doing in Canada?

I've been hearing for years about this Stratford Festival, usually in the context that it's sort of Canada's version of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival we've been attending for the last decade or so. Stratford is a bit less convenient to this Bay Area resident than Ashland, but when the opportunity presented itself, we decided to go.

Specifically, we won an auction at a local theater fundraiser that gave us airfare and lodging and maybe two tickets to a show. Clearly we were not going all the way to Ontario just to see one show, so we planned out a long weekend trip. Last year. Personal circumstances kept us from going last year, but we were able to reschedule for this year's Labor Day weekend, so here we are in Stratford!

Stratford is a lovely little down in Southern Ontario, population something like 32,000. It seems like the main industry is this festival, though there are some others. Mostly it has struck us as a quiet little rural town, quite pleasant and walkable (which is good, because parking is difficult). We have basically parked the rental car we drove down from Toronto at our lodgings and not used it since. Lots of walking! Very pleasant.

We scheduled five plays over three days, with a travel day on either end. We wouldn't have minded adding a sixth play, but the schedule didn't permit it. We had already seen the show(s) on offer tonight, and we didn't want to see the other options we could have swapped for.

Much like the Ashland festival, Stratford's is a large, rotating repertory company spread across three theaters in town. (A fourth is undergoing major renovations/replacement and will reopen in 2020.) Each venue basically has a matinee and an evening show every day, with Mondays dark. All three theaters are indoors.

The main theater, the Festival Theatre, is the heart of the festival complex, housing both the 1800+-seat room with a 3/4 thrust stage and the rehearsal spaces, administrative and creative spaces. The 550-seat Avon Theatre is a converted vaudeville house with a standard proscenium stage. Adjacent to it is the Studio Theatre, a roughly 250-seat black box that is at least currently set up in 3/4 thrust.

It's about a 20-minute walk from the Festival Theatre to the downtown area where the Avon and Studio theaters are. If you want a more leisurely stroll, you can walk along the river and see ducks, geese, and swans in abundance. It's quite a lovely feature of the town.

OK, enough of that...let's talk about plays.

Bronté: The World Without

Small play, small theater, and a commissioned premiere at that. This one is in the Studio, and it has only three actors, portraying the Bronté sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. It's basically a historical piece about these three sisters growing up in poverty, largely confined to the parsonage where they live with their aging father and dissolute brother. For a literary group, they seem remarkably poor at communicating among themselves. They seem mostly to live by insulting one another, and barely seem to even realize they are all writing poetry and novels. Eventually they have to decide whether to publish their work, and that puts additional strains on the relationship.

Overall, it's pretty interesting and quite well acted. Jessica B. Hill as Emily was truly outstanding, and Andrea Rankin as the youngest and least-known sister Anne really blossoms as the play progresses. Beryl Bain plays Charlotte as something of a cipher, so stoic that it's really hard to understand her character's motivations and development.

I found the play itself somewhat lacking in an overall message, but it was a well-done portrait of three characters I knew little about. I would have appreciated a bit more background on how they got to the point they started from. The sibling rivalries are evident, but unexplained, so I'm left to speculate, which seems a bit unsatisfying.

It was a pretty easy introduction to the festival, however.

Paradise Lost

Yet another commissioned work and world premiere--not bad for our first day in town! This one, as the name implies, is based on John Milton's epic poem of the same name, but it's a new play written by local (Hamilton, Ontario native) playwright Erin Shields. It also tells the tale of humanity's fall from grace (including the retelling of the revolt of Lucifer/Satan and the angels), but from a rather different, more modern perspective. The first and most obvious change is that Satan is female (played by 30-year Stratford veteran Lucy Peacock, who is terrific in this role). That changes a lot of the dynamics, and many of the other angels are also played by women.

I thought the best bits in the play came early, as the newly-fallen angels debate how to deal with the fact that they are now in Hell, but the later scenes leading to Adam and Eve (and a clever handling of the serpent) were good, too.

I came in expecting something a bit more staid and Miltonian, but I was pleased with the creative effort in this new show.

Coriolanus

I'm getting really close to fulfilling my goal of seeing the entire Shakespeare canon performed, and one of the plays I hadn't ever seen was this one, about an ambitious and arrogant Roman soldier who moves into politics but has a huge falling out that leads him to join with his rival to come back and fight against Rome.

André Sills as the title character is quite brilliant, as is Lucy Peacock (again!) as his mother, Volumnia. And the conception of the production, from Director and Set Designer Robert Lepage, is clever, maybe even brilliant. The execution of that design seems a bit self-absorbed; particularly early on, there are transitions that are just too long and slow. But the overall presentation, very cinematic and paced more like a TV drama than a Shakespearean play, does highlight the interactions of celebrity, media, ego, family, class, and connections that all combine to bring down Coriolanus.

But there are other elements that I just couldn't quite fathom. The dress and setting is contemporary, but the projected sets are (largely) Roman period, so there is a lot of dissonance that I can't quite reconcile. And underlying everything is probably the fundamental reason this play isn't produced very often: the main character is just really problematic. It's really hard to understand how he ends up in the situation he does, how the combination of his ego and his boosters' interests culminate in a  thoroughly unstable position. But the bits around it are all really good, so I guess that's forgivable.

One special treat for us was seeing Stephen Ouimette as Junius Brutus, one of the tribunes. Having just rewatched "Slings and Arrows" shortly before our trip, it was really fun to see him on stage.

On the down side, the access in the lovely Avon Theatre is terrible. We were seated rather near the front, and it took nearly the entire intermission to get out to the lobby. Luckily we were able to obtain drinks we could bring back in, but I shudder to think what would happen if they needed to clear the building quickly.

Overall, an impressive production, and a satisfying way to add another tick to my list of the Shakespeare canon.

A Comedy of Errors

While the rest of the family went off to see The Rocky Horror Show, I decided to see how the festival would treat one of my favorite comedies.

The answer is: very well. This is a crisp, clear, pretty straightforward rendering of this classic mistaken-identity play. Most of the productions I've seen of this play have tried setting it in a different time period (e.g., prohibition-era Chicago or the Harlem Renaissance), those settings generally add a layer of complexity to this already-complex scenario. I appreciated the way director Keira Loughran mostly just let the words and actions handle the humor.

What they did play with a lot was gender. Right off the bat, the Duke is cross-dressed as a dutchess, and we'll soon see that both sets of identical twins (the Antipholuses and the Dromios) are both male/female pairs. But importantly, none of this is an issue: each of the pairs is as interchangeable as if they were truly identical, and it never causes any issues. The androgynous costumes for both sets works really well, definitely less distracting than the drag characters, but those are peripheral anyway.

With my fourth play, it was the third time in the Studio Theatre, and interestingly, all three of the actors who were in Bronté were also in both Paradise Lost and The Comedy of Errors. So I got to see the repertory company in action, with all three in quite varied roles. The Studio is small (about 250 seats), but the seats are rather steeply raked, so you feel as if you're right on top of the thrust stage.

All in all, I was quite pleased with my choice, though the family loved the production of Rocky Horror next door.

An Ideal Husband

Last but not least, back into the Avon Theatre for a matinee of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. None of us had ever seen the play, but it seemed like it would be fun. We found the first two acts to be a bit tedious, but after the intermission the play picked up nicely and the witty banter and plot twists kept us quite thoroughly engaged. But it definitely felt like the first half could have been either trimmed or somehow paced more quickly.

Other than that, I don't have a lot to say. It was well done, particularly by Brad Hodder as Lord Goring and Zara Jestadt as Mabel, with a comic boost from Joseph Ziegler as the Earl of Caversham, Goring's father. The whole ensemble is quite capable, though, and the sets are well done.

We were glad we persevered and stayed to the end, as the post-intermission acts were quite satisfying. It's not a show I would go all the way to Stratford to see, but being there, it was a perfectly good play to see.

Reflections on the Festival

The first visit to a festival such as this is a bit intimidating. There is a long-time crowd that has a relationship with the town, the theaters, and of course the company. Of note this season was long-time performer Martha James (who we didn't see at all!) starring as Prospero in The Tempest, where her first appearance at the festival in 1962 was as Miranda in the same play. Through 44 years, 65 plays (30 by Shakespeare), she is obviously an institution and a real draw for the long-time attendees.

We got a definite sense of some of this when we took some of the excellent tours offered at the festival. The backstage tour of the Festival Theatre is quite impressive--the size and scope of that complex is rather daunting. But I think we got the best feel for the festival itself with the tours of the warehouse and (especially) the archives. The festival has retained a vast amount of material over the years: scripts, costumes, props, photos, and video, and it's all available to researchers and theater makers. That's pretty awesome. And it also illustrates the long-standing community that has grown up around the festival.

We had a similar experience a decade or so ago when we first went to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It was a little like walking into someone else's family reunion. But eventually we settled in and now we feel comfortable there, looking forward to seeing what our favorite artists are doing each year, noticing the changes, etc.

I think it's safe to say we'll be going back to Stratford, though perhaps not as often or as religiously as we do to Ashland. The quality of the plays is comparably high, and the little community is quite nice as well.  There is definitely more to see.

In retrospect, it would probably have been nice to see more of their signature productions, the big shows in the Festival Theatre and some of the smaller shows such as Long Day's Journey into Night with several of their long-time stars. I heard great things about both The Tempest and To Kill a Mockingbird, neither of which we had scheduled. Unlike Ashland, it really didn't seem like there was a good way to come in and see everything (or nearly so) in a relatively short period, and that seems unfortunate for a destination theater festival such as this. I know not everyone wants to see two shows a day, every day, but some of us do!

All in all, it was a good trip, and one we'll look forward to making again.