In summer, a Chicago theatergoer’s fancy turns to thoughts of Ontario.
Here, via a long car trip or a short plane hop, lie two major North American theater festivals: the 47-year-old Stratford Festival, about two hours’ drive west of Toronto, and the Shaw Festival, established in 1962 in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, about two hours south of Toronto.
Originally founded for short summer seasons, with their schedules devoted to the works of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, respectively, the two festivals have expanded both their artistic range and their calendars, adding modern works to the classics and extending their seasons so that they now run from midspring well into midautumn.
Stratford is the larger operation and has the larger budget (about $23 million, compared with the Shaw’s $7.3 million), but both fests have fostered substantial tourist industries, drawing thousands of visitors from the United States and presenting customers with packages that offer much more than playgoing. Visitors to the Shaw, for example, can combine rounds of golf or tours of the local wineries with their theater attendance. And both Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake have plenty of boutiques, gift shops and restaurants to while away the time between matinee and evening shows.
Even with a long list of hotels and bed-and-breakfast homes, the towns become jammed on weekends, and “No Vacancy” signs are everywhere.
Critics complain that this tourism boom has diluted the purity of purpose in the theater agendas. Stratford particularly has come under fire for becoming a kind of “Shakespeareland” theme park, and both festivals rely on musicals to lure customers into their theaters.
This season, in fact, the big hits at Stratford and Niagara come not from Shakespeare and Shaw but from composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick. “Fiddler on the Roof” is selling out at the main Festival Theatre in Stratford, and “She Loves Me” is doing so well at the Shaw’s 328-seat Royal George Theatre that it has been extended into mid-December, a feat unprecedented in the festival’s history.
Both successes are deserved. “Fiddler,” one of the war horses of American theater, has been revitalized on the Festival Theatre’s thrust stage, thanks in large part to Susan Schulman’s fresh, colorful direction and the performance of Brent Carver in the lead role of Tevye, the impoverished Jewish milkman in the tiny Russian village of Anatevka.
Carver, who won a 1993 Tony Award for his portrayal of the cross-dressing Molina in the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” is playing against type. Beginning with the man who originated the role, Zero Mostel, actors portraying Tevye have tended to be large, lumbering men. But Carver, an actor of quicksilver emotions, is a thin, skittering, on-edge Tevye — and he is completely convincing in both the comedy and pathos of the role.
“She Loves Me,” from Bock and Harnick (1963), is a charming, melodious work, based on the 1940 film romance “The Shop Around the Corner,” about two co-workers in a Budapest perfumerie who don’t realize they are lovelorn pen pals. The score is lovely, and the performances, strong in both dramatic and vocal range, showcase the Shaw ensemble style.
But there are other attractions.
Among Stratford’s 13 productions, there are works by Moliere, Oscar Wilde, Euripides, Alexandre Dumas — and Shakespeare.
“Hamlet,” a staple of the festival over the years, this season is featuring Paul Gross, familiar to American television audiences as the stout-hearted Mountie in the series “Due South.” Under Joseph Ziegler’s direction in the Festival Theatre, Gross portrays the melancholy Dane as an antic, intense fellow, traumatized by his father’s death and given to sudden outbursts of wicked humor. The result is a Hamlet spoken in a strangled voice, somewhat between Jack Nicholson in full cry and the comic delivery of Bobcat Goldthwait.
Brian Bedford, a Stratford stalwart, is having his fourth crack at the title role of the religious hypocrite in Moliere’s “Tartuffe” on the Festival stage. He leads a fine ensemble in a performance that, while milking comic business and double takes for humorous effect, also eloquently delivers Richard Wilbur’s brilliant English verse adaptation of the Moliere text.
In a season marked by excellent box-office returns, Stratford has developed a hit with a new work too. This is “Elizabeth Rex,” a play by Canadian author Timothy Findley, which imagines a fateful encounter between Shakespeare’s band of players and Queen Elizabeth II. Diane D’Aquila, her shaved head crowned by a flaming red wig, is the imperious queen, who has had to be too much of a man in order to rule her nation. Carver, fragile and forlorn, is the Shakespeare troupe’s flamboyant portrayer of female roles, dying of syphilis and still in mourning for his male lover.
Findley’s script, staged by Martha Henry in the Tom Patterson Theatre, needs astute pruning, but even in its messy state, it has some wonderful scenes and characterizations, and its weaving of Shakespearean lore and language into the plot is often inventive and exciting.
The Shaw works at the Shaw Festival include “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” the master’s wry, witty discourse on art and science and the vagaries of the medical profession, in a brisk, thoughtful production staged in the main Festival Theatre by artistic director Christopher Newton that makes good use of the maturity and dexterity of the festival’s ensemble actors.
Newton also has directed a hearty production of Thornton Wilder’s comedy “The Matchmaker” (the source of the musical “Hello, Dolly!”) for the Festival Theatre.
When “She Loves Me” is not taking its turn in repertory, the Shaw is presenting J.B. Priestley’s 1937 drama, “Time and the Conways.” Middle class in language and atmosphere, the play is experimental in form, presenting a jolly family birthday party in 1919, flashing forward to a bitter family reunion almost 20 years later, and then returning to the happy 1919 scene, but with knowledge of the unhappiness that lies ahead.
Written in the midst of the Depression and with war against Germany appearing inevitable, the wistful, melancholy play, shot through with rueful bits of humor, remains provocative, but the Shaw cast, directed by Neil Munro, does not quite have a grip on the style or character of the drama.
Even lunchtime does not go without a play at the Shaw. Before the day’s matinee, there is an exquisitely turned rendition of Noel Coward’s “Still Life,” the one-act that was the basis for the 1945 English film “Brief Encounter.”
Designed and directed (by Dennis Garnhum) with all the care lavished on a full-length production, the play features deeply felt portrayals by Simon Bradbury and Jan Alexandra Smith as the two nice, middle-aged, middle-class individuals whose chance meeting in a grubby, little railway station leads to a passionate extramarital affair.
Many of the same actors who work in “Time and the Conways” are also cast in “Still Life,” a display of versatility that underlines the pleasures of repertory and ensemble work that both the Shaw and Stratford stress in their work.
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Further information on Stratford Festival scheduling and ticketing is available, by phone, at 800-567-1600, or on the Web site www.stratford-festival.on.ca. For the Shaw Festival, the phone is 800-511-7429. The Web site is www.shawfest.sympatico.ca.
