Is Stratford better than Broadway?, Part I

Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell.

My recent trip to the Stratford Festival confirmed what I'd already heard via the Web - new Artistic Director Des McAnuff had consolidated, and perhaps extended, the artistic achievements of his inaugural year (which had been been marked by the collapse of a short-lived artistic "triumvirate"). What I saw on Stratford's stages last summer led me to opine that of those three contenders, McAnuff seemed the best man for the top job - so I was happy to take this season as confirmation of that hunch. What's striking about the Festival now is its consistency - under the previous artistic director, Richard Monette, the company hit one or two out of the park, reliably, every year, but each season dropped a few bombs, too. But this time, as last, even the weakest production I saw (Phèdre) was intelligently, if misguidedly, produced, and the acting company struck me as stronger across the board than ever before (perhaps because McAnuff has skimmed some of the cream from the nearby Shaw Festival).

Of course perhaps I just missed the bombs this year (word was not good, I admit, on Macbeth), but the season boasted at least three proper smashes - Brian Bedford's The Importance of Being Earnest, Colm Feore's Cyrano de Bergerac, and an electrifying revival of West Side Story, all of which I caught; meanwhile friends who opted for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum over Cyrano (they were in the same time slot our weekend) proclaimed it a witty hoot (despite having lost its original lead, Stratford stalwart Bruce Dow). I also enjoyed an ambitious production of the more-rarely-done-than-you'd-think Julius Caesar, which proved flawed, but still worthy, as well as a lavish, inventive production of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair that almost succeeded in putting the play's obscurities over. More mottled, but still intriguing, were a new production of Three Sisters (directed by Martha Henry) and a revival of Zastrozzi, an early work by Canadian playwright George F. Walker.



First, the hits. Brian Bedford's production of The Importance of Being Earnest (above), felt at times almost textually definitive, although its pace was perhaps too leisurely (and its Algernon was only adequate). Bedford not only directed but took the role of the imperious Lady Bracknell - he approached the part utterly seriously, however; his Bracknell was no dragon lady in drag, but instead proved a closely observed, delicately scaled skewering of Tory insanity. The rest of the cast was nearly as good, led by Ben Carlson's tormented Earnest/Jack and Sara Topham's breathlessly blank Gwendolen, who were themselves sometimes outshone by supporting players Sarah Dodd and Stephen Ouimette, who made the best Miss Prism and Reverend Chasuble I've ever seen. But what was striking was Bedford's consummate comprehension of every subtlety in the play - as evidenced by the superb set from Desmond Heeley, which neatly tied together a kind of Gorey-esque, end-of-empire morbidity with a strange sense of false spring. Bedford is of course widely known as one of our leading stage actors, but I don't think his accomplishments as a director have been lauded nearly enough. Over the years, Bedford has directed the best Lear and Othello I've been lucky enough to see, as well as the best Waiting for Godot, believe it or not, along with sterling versions of Coward's Private Lives and Present Laughter. So I'll say it out loud, just so someone somewhere has said it once: Brian Bedford is among the best directors working in America.

Another production which had a claim to the title "definitive" was Cyrano de Bergerac, featuring Colm Feore, a former Stratford leading man who left to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Feore didn't quite attain stardom, but did appear in several blockbusters, before notoriously stealing a New York production of Julius Caesar right out from under its under-trained American stars. At any rate, he has now returned (along with other Stratford stars like Geraint Wyn Davies and Christopher Plummer, who'll be back next summer for The Tempest), with the clout to pick his own projects, and he's chosen the perfect vehicle to showcase his strengths in Cyrano. Feore was never the most interior of actors, but his physical gifts are superb (and he needed them all in this three-hours-plus lead performance) - and he's been technically trained to a level that's almost unheard-of today. All this, plus the crafty intelligence of a born actor, and the thoughtful direction of Donna Feore (his wife!) led to a Cyrano that never devolved into grandstanding or ham, but grew steadily in emotional stature over the course of the play; by its finish, this cynical old critic was misty-eyed, and many in the house were weeping.


Colm Feore as Cyrano, with Tom Shara as Christian.

The rest of the Cyrano cast was solid, but only occasionally sparkling (although the reliable John Vickery was a standout), but Feore was matched by a truly smashing physical production, which came complete with pyrotechnics, convincing swordplay, full moons of course, and even autumn leaves drifting down into the crowd. It was the kind of old-fashioned, satisfying spectacle that lets its audience out into the night in a happy buzz of romantic amazement - and utterly eclipsed the last Cyrano I saw, with Derek Jacobi in New York.


The dance at the gym from West Side Story.

But then "better than New York" was what you also heard about another show, Gary Griffin's restaging of West Side Story. (The same comparison was whispered a few years ago about Stratford's South Pacific, too, but this time the murmur has grown to a chorus.) To be honest, Griffin, of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, has embellished West Side with a few unwanted accoutrements: having a young, modern-day boy wander through the proceedings to warble "Somewhere" like some second coming of the promised Obama-child, for instance, was a little dumb, and a little much. But generally Griffin colored energetically within the spectacular lines of the great original, and choreographer Sergio Trujillo expertly retooled Jerome Robbins's famous choreography for the Festival's thrust stage. And the cast all but tore through the material, dancing and singing its heart out, led by Paul Nolan's amazingly athletic Tony (his hand-over-hand up Maria's balcony was a hoot), Chilina Kennedy's refreshingly earthy, at times even knockabout, Maria, and Jennifer Rias's happily snappy Anita. West Side Story is rarely revived because of its intense demands - Bernstein at times pulls his vocal lines up into operatic territory, while Robbins pushes the dancing past the brink of ballet - and yet the pay-off when a production is firing on all cylinders is intense, and immense; it is probably the single most exciting musical ever written, and Stratford more than delivered its inherent thrill.


The climax of Bartholomew Fair.

Meanwhile, on its smaller Tom Patterson Stage, the Festival was mounting a piece nearly as challenging: what may be the North American premiere of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, a sprawling Jacobean hootenanny that cynically casts a large cast of Puritans into the labyrinth of the eponymous fair, a notoriously debauched public spectacle in Jonson's day. Unsurprisingly for this particular playwright, everyone pursues their particular "humour" (or obsession), which results in adventures that reveal (or confirm, in the case of the earthier types) their true natures (Justice Overdo, played by Tom McCamus, at left, receives a particularly brutal comeuppance).

What's unusual for Jonson, however, is how in the end he forgives his many hypocrites and fools; Bartholomew Fair may be cruel, but the playwright skips his usual final damnations for a surprisingly touching moment of (unlikely) community, that reads as his own sleazebag version of a Shakespearean comic climax: the humiliated Justice Overdo, at last converted to an appreciation that he is, in the end, mere "flesh and blood," invites the bawds, pimps and whores to dinner at his home (!), an invitation which is enthusiastically accepted.

This proved a hearty dénouement to what was admittedly a brilliant production, the best version of any Jonson play I've seen. Director Antoni Cimolino (who also administers the Festival) poured resources into the project, and cast many of the company's leading actors in key roles (backed by up-and-coming youngsters from the Birmingham Conservatory). The results were studded with brilliant performances (from Lucy Peacock, Juan Chioran, Cliff Saunders, Kelli Fox), and Cimolino's stagings and musical interludes were clever, apt, and fearless (I won't soon forget Peacock, locked in a grotesque fat suit, spreading her legs and fanning her privates - likewise the jar of communal urine that gets tossed about onstage is seared into my memory).

Still, despite just about the best production it could ever hope to receive, the play eventually seemed to be grinding on, as in my opinion Jonson always does. The trouble is that he's such a schoolmarm - a dirty-minded schoolmarm, true, but a schoolmarm nonetheless, and one locked in a "humour" as intense as that of any of his characters. And despite the final pseudo-Shakespearean flourish, the play is nothing like those of the Bard, who is continually opening up new perspectives on his characters and even his plots - while Jonson relentlessly drives home, through a zillion variations, a single anti-moral we long ago figured out for ourselves (it's telling that he wraps the proceedings with a caustic puppet-show; that's what he's been writing all along). So while I had to admire this virtuosic production, I have to admit I was happy when Bartholomew Fair finally folded for the night.

Tomorrow: the more problematic Stratford productions.

Wilde card

This is just a quick post-mortem on a truly bizarre Importance of Being Earnest down at Trinity Rep (which I caught with a group of mortified IRNE critics last week). The general response to the show among our merry band was, "What were they thinking?," although to my mind it was rather obvious what they were thinking: make 'em laugh! Which isn't a bad policy in general, of course, and the audience did laugh, although this was mostly due to the fact that everything was played as broadly as possible. Of course to keep up some sense of their own sophistication, the actors played the broadness in self-aware "air quotes." There were also, for reasons unknown, interpolated bits from the music hall (and I think G&S), a strange movement solo that looked like something from Cats, and various little parodies of leaps of joy, etc. But wait, there's more: the set, by Michael McGarty, for other reasons unknown, leaned toward the post-modern autumnal (complete with a self-conscious proscenium), while William Lane's costumes ran toward pant suits and turbans. The whole thing played as a weird, contradictory pastiche of current suburban and theatre-school notions about the Victorians; but about Wilde or his aesthetic it had nothing to do at all. So I guess mission accomplished; at least at a meta level the production played as paradox, although, alas, a slightly crass one.

To be fair, director Beth Milles was not working with an ideal cast; indeed, the show reminded one of the limits of the repertory system (i.e., having to squeeze actors into roles that aren't quite right for them). The usually reliable Mauro Hantmann seemed quite wrong for Jack Worthing, and Angela Brazil chewed the scenery with gusto as Gwendolyn; meanwhile Janice Duclos made a fairly mediocre Lady Bracknell (even flubbing a few of the most famous lines in the play). There was better, or at any rate fresher, work from newcomers Karl Gregory (Algernon) and Rebecca Gibel (Cecily, with Gregory above left), but they could hardly triumph over the director's heavy, indicative hand. Well, at least it's over, I suppose.

Laughing Wilde

The stars seemed aligned this season for a fascinating reconsideration of The Importance of Being Earnest - largely because the Publick just closed a rambunctious version of Travesties, Tom Stoppard's clever repurposing of the play as modernist critique. A return trip to the source material could have been brilliant - a kind of cooperative doubling unknown between local theatre companies, with the two productions orbiting each other like opposed artistic twins (rather in the manner of the play's separated-at-birth siblings, Algernon and Jack).

Alas, that didn't happen - even though the productions actually share an actor (Dafydd Rees). This Earnest, however, makes no pretense to exploring the play's philosophical underpinnings; of what Stoppard was talking about, the Lyric has no clue. To director Spiro Veloudos, Oscar Wilde's masterpiece is simply an arch little farce, perfect in its architecture; it earnestly pursues its laughs, and no more. Not that there's anything wrong with that - and to be honest, Veloudos has never shied away from intellectual challenge (indeed, in between Man of La Mancha and This Wonderful Life he's programmed more genuinely avant theatre than the ART). Still, even if it nails its laughs, the production feels like an opportunity lost; it could have been so much more.

And, truth be told, even as a traditional retelling of Oscar Wilde's masterpiece, it's not all that memorable or subtle. Veloudos is smart, but tends to paint with a broad brush, while Earnest is etched with show-queen precision. And his young cast sends off exactly the "vibrations" (to quote the play) one might expect: they're to this manner neither born nor bred, and are doing their best to simulate it after two weeks' rehearsal. That they manage it at all is to be applauded; their accents are mostly in place, their poise carefully maintained; they're all talented and will go far. But no one who's seen a truly polished Importance of Being Earnest would ever be convinced by them.

On the other hand, if you've never seen Earnest, this will probably strike you as a revelation - in the same way that Vanya on 42nd Street stunned so many film reviewers with its depth. The atmosphere may not be there, but the jokes all are, and the production moves like clockwork (sometimes in a mode unconsciously like the mechanically-played scene between Gwendolyn and Cecily in Travesties). There's only one piece of problematic casting - as the Wilde factotum Algernon Moncrieff, Lewis Wheeler does his flat-out best, but he's still a little flat because he's simply not, at bottom, a bemused bon vivant, no matter how hard he tries. And as solid-citizen, straight-arrow Jack Worthing, Ed Hoopman deploys a sonorous speaking voice, but not much more until the last act, when he finally loosens up and has a little fun. The women fare slightly better - as Gwendolyn, Hannah Barth has the right romantic, daffily alienated sexual presence, but sometimes seems unsteady in her attack; meanwhile the more-assured Jessica Grant makes an appealingly straightfoward Cecily, but could use an ounce more inner mischief.

It's in the older generation that the production sparkles a bit. Beth Gotha makes an amusingly ditzy Miss Prism, and Bobbie Steinbach (above, with Wheeler and Grant) works her usual magic with Lady Bracknell. Steinbach isn't physically imposing enough, perhaps, to command the stage (Bracknell should be a real dragon, or maybe even a dragoon), but her command of the lines - many of which by now are dauntingly iconic - is witty and confidently low-key; she knows the way to land Wilde's insane circumlocutions is with impeccable dignity.

Alas, Steinbach's delivery sometimes reminds one of what might have been, if Veloudos had risked something a bit more surreal, rather than the Lyric's usual suburban naturalism. Earnest endures, of course, not just because of its witticisms but also because of its strange sense of size and weird hints at philosophical depth. Veloudos may understand that Wilde's homosexuality, and "double life," is reflected in the play (let's not parse "bunburying" too closely), but he doesn't seem to understand how it's reflected. To Wilde, as to any gay man, of course, the heterosexual norms of society seem utterly arbitrary - it was his brilliant intuition to take this insight and run with it (in earnest, as it were) in Earnest. Everyone's logic in the play is impeccable; but their premises are absurd. Indeed, Wilde pushes this far past any gay perspective - which is why turning Earnest into a drag show doesn't feel quite right, either. After all, Wilde skewers Eros, too, and utterly: Gwendolyn can only hit her G-spot with the name "Ernest," for instance, which seems ridiculous until you consider how the rest of us do it - with blonde hair, or big boobs, or extremities cut or uncut: all ridiculous conditions, and no more absurd than the desire for a certain Christian name. This utterly free perspective, of course, is why Earnest, which perhaps begins modernism in the drama, could also be turned inside out by Stoppard to critique modernism, and why, in a way, the play supersedes the mode it engendered. I suppose it's a bit much to ask a small company like the Lyric to capture all that onstage; still, I can dream, can't I?