Stratford and the Shaw Festival: New and Old

The company of Forgiveness. (Photo: David House.)

Stratford’s production of Forgiveness (at the Tom Patterson Theatre), Hiro Kanagawa’s adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s book Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, marks the Canadian play’s eastern premiere. (It has been staged in Vancouver and Calgary.) The play’s dual protagonists are Mitsue Sakamoto (played by Yoshie Bancroft), and Ralph MacLean (Jeff Lillico), whose lives were shaped irrevocably by their World War II experiences. Ralph grew up on the Magdalen Islands in Quebec and lied about his age to get away from his abusive alcoholic father and join the first Canadian unit stationed in Japan, before Canada and the U.S. declared war in the wake of Pearl Harbor. He was captured and spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. Mitsue and her Japanese family were deprived of their citizenship rights and forced to leave their home in British Columbia in 1942, first for an internment camp and then to harvest sugar beets on a farm in the Prairies, laboring long hours for a pittance; their initial “home” was a converted chicken coop. The ban wasn’t lifted until four years after the end of the war. What links these two stories together is the romance that flared up in Calgary, where the two main characters wound up, between Mitsue’s son Stan (Leon Quin at the performance I attended, standing in for Douglas Oyama) and Ralph’s daughter Diane (Allison Lynch). The author, Sakamoto, is their shared grandson.

Summer Musicals

Mary Antonini as Reno Sweeney and the cast of Anything Goes. (Photo: David Cooper.)

This article includes reviews of musicals at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as well as at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine.

Anything Goes opened on Broadway in 1934 and proved to be Cole Porter’s biggest hit until Kiss Me, Kate nearly a decade and a half later; it ran for 420 performances, hefty for the time. But it just escaped turning into a fiasco because the book Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, writing from different cities, cobbled together was so scattershot that the producer, Vinton Freedley, asked the director, Howard Lindsay, to rewrite it. With the collaboration of Russel Crouse he did so in three weeks, while the show was in tryouts out of town, and that’s the version audiences saw whenever it was produced over the next half-century. Lewis Milestone made a sweet movie of it in 1936 with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, (the leading lady of the Broadway production), though I suspect even many Porter devotees don’t know it. (The 1956 M-G-M movie with Crosby, Donald O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor, has nothing in common with the show except the title and, in the opening section, a shipboard setting.) There was only one major revival, off-Broadway in 1962, which cut a few of the songs and interpolated others from the Porter archive, like “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue (which has become a permanent addition) and “Take Me Back to Manhattan” from The New Yorkers. When it finally returned to Broadway in 1987, with Patti LuPone in the Merman role, Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman rewrote it, staying faithful to the spirit of the original but making their own emendations to the score. This is the Anything Goes that Kathleen Marshall directed triumphantly in a 2011 Broadway revival starring Sutton Foster and Joel Grey, and it’s the one graced by an ebullient production at the Shaw Festival this season (in their Festival Theatre) directed and choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad.