Goodspeed's The Snow Goose: Honor the Source

Eric Graise, puppeteer Leah Hoffman, Ashlyn Maddox, and the company of The Snow Goose. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

In Paul Gallico’s famous World War II novella The Snow Goose (written in 1941), an injured Canadian snow goose that may have lost her way during a storm brings together a young artist named Philip Rayader who has come to live in a lighthouse in the Great Marsh on England’s Essex coast and a twelve-year-old orphan named Fritha. Philip’s physical deformities – a humpback and one hand twisted like a claw – have made him a source of fear among his neighbors; accustomed to being treated like a pariah, he leads a reclusive life, feeding and caring for the local birds. But when Fritha comes across the goose wounded by a hunter’s bullet not far from the lighthouse, she overcomes her trepidation and, aware of Philip’s work with the birds, brings her to his door and implores him to heal her. He does, with Fritha’s assistance, and gives the bird a home for the winter. When the young girl keeps returning to visit the goose, whom they’ve given the name The Lost Princess for her elegance and regal bearing – and, presumably, because her strange appearance so far from her natural habitat lends her a magical aura – Philip is uncomfortable at first because he understands that Fritha’s community would hardly approve of her seeking out so unwelcome a presence. But because what turns into a friendship between them is focused on the Princess, they are able to transcend his reluctance and hers. The goose flies with the other birds when winter comes, but every spring she returns to the lighthouse. Ten years go by, and Fritha grows into a young woman whose feelings for Philip have blossomed yet become unfathomable to her. War breaks out, and when the local men are exhorted to use their small fishing boats to rescue the soldiers trapped at Dunkirk by the Nazis, Philip is determined to answer the call.

Summer Smash: The Producers at Ogunquit

Jason Kravitz, Stephanie Gibson, and Dan DeLuca in The Producers. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

The inspired premise of Mel Brooks’s debut movie The Producers – that a veteran Broadway impresario, trying to save himself from prison for fraud by producing a sure-fire flop, lands on a stunningly offensive operetta with Hitler as its hero – has convinced buffs for six decades that the movie is a comic masterpiece. Well, it’s intermittently hilarious, but it’s a pretty crummy picture. On the other hand, the multi-Tony-Award-winning Broadway musical Brooks fashioned from it a quarter of a century ago, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, is a solid gold entertainment, the most thoroughly satisfying project Brooks ever worked on. He wrote the music and lyrics and collaborated with Thomas Meehan on the book. At the Ogunquit Playhouse, James Gray has replicated Stroman’s original staging and a tip-top company is giving it a splendid twenty-fifth-anniversary revival through September 26.

Short Takes: Farce and Children’s Theatre at Shaw and Stratford Festivals

Jeff Irving, Damien Atkins, and Travis Seetoo in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

P. G. Wodehouse gets the 39 Steps treatment at Shaw in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense (at the Court House, once more open to audiences until the renovation of the Royal George is completed). The narrative justification for turning this particular convoluted farce into a three-hander is that Bertie Wooster (Jeff Irving), inept as always, wants to write down the story of his latest misadventure but cannot do so without the aid of his indispensable manservant Jeeves (Damien Atkins). Jeeves plays himself and a host of other characters; he enlists the help of another domestic named Seppings (Travis Seetoo) who handles the remaining roles. Bertie remains Bertie throughout, while the breathless shifting in and out of multiple personalities by the other two men, often holding on by the skin of their teeth, gives the knockabout comedy a teetering acrobatic quality. As in The 39 Steps (and of course The Play That Goes Wrong and its sequels), the pleasure is in watching deft farceurs pretend to be fumbling amateurs. The co-authors, Robert Goodale and David Goodale, cite “The Works of P.G. Wodehouse” as their source material, but the plot comes mostly out of the 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, wherein Bertie’s tyrannical aunt blackmails him into stealing an antique silver cow creamer for her husband from a rival collector. Under Brendan McMurtry-Howlett’s breakneck direction, the three actors are very funny, though the play goes on for about twenty minutes too long.

Shaw and Stratford Festivals: Twentieth-Century Classics

Julia Course and Martin Happer in Heartbreak House. (Photo: David Cooper.)

The allegorical high comedy Heartbreak House is one of George Bernard Shaw’s strangest plays; it is also, in my estimation, his greatest. (For me the other contenders are Man and Superman and Major Barbara, though I don’t pretend to have seen or read them all: he wrote more than sixty.) Set in a country house in Sussex constructed by its patriarch, Captain Shotover, in the shape of a ship, it brings together a disparate set of characters, a few of whom are related to one or another of the inhabitants but they haven’t seen each other in so long that they don’t always recognize each other. Toward the end some unidentified foreign power begins to bomb England; two of the characters are killed in the midst of attempting to protect themselves by hiding in a storage shed. And though the bombardiers move on, obviously the war goes on and for all we know it will signal the doom of civilization. In the final minutes of the drama Shaw’s characters are as witty as ever, and the mood isn’t Wagnerian, yet the play is a Götterdämmerung. Written in 1916 and 1917 and first produced in 1920, it is the playwright’s response to the First World War – the Great War, as it was called until 1939. The work it feels closest to is a masterpiece from two decades later, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which was released on the cusp of the war that made that descriptor obsolete. Renoir’s movie doesn’t end in an apocalypse, but the tragedy at its conclusion, the senseless murder of a national hero – a case of mistaken identity – feels like an inevitable final act of carelessness and self-involvement that embodies up the attitude of the French nouveaux riches, the new aristocracy that has replaced the old, inherited one, the death of which Renoir had chronicled two years earlier in Grand Illusion.

Musicals at Shaw and Stratford: Funny Girl and Guys and Dolls

Sara Farb as Fanny Brice (understudied by Jade Repetta at the performance our critic attended) in Funny Girl. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Since Funny Girl made Barbra Streisand a Broadway star and the 1968 William Wyler movie version enshrined what may be the greatest musical-comedy performance ever recorded, it took more than half a century for the show to generate a major revival. The one-two punch of Streisand’s stage and film triumphs created the impression that the musical was mostly a decorative shell constructed around her, despite the superb score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill and what the threadbare musical bios of the last couple of decades – Jersey Boys, Beautiful and many others – now reveal by contrast to be a creditable book by Isobel Lennart. Funny Girl was finally revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2015 with Sheridan Smith in the role of the Ziegfeld Follies singer-comic Fanny Brice; Smith was marvelous, but when the show transferred to the West End, her health problems delayed her appearance, and for the first half of the run she was replaced by her understudy, Natasha Barnes, who received reviews that can only be called generous. (I saw both actresses; Smith’s performance was filmed in 2018 and can be seen on BroadwayHD.) And Smith was the only reason to see it: Michael Mayer’s production, with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, was clumsy and looked seedy. Those qualities were very much in evidence when the revival opened on Broadway four years ago, with an apparently disastrous leading performance by Beanie Feldstein, who left the run early and was replaced by Lea Michele. (It was Michele I reviewed.)

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival: Classics

André Sills and Krystin Pellerin in Othello. (Photo: David Hou.)

The question up for grabs in any production of Shakespeare’s Othello is why Iago sets out to destroy Othello and those he loves. In the 1995 movie with Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh’s motivation for Iago’s actions was straight off the surface of the text: he was angry at his general for selecting Cassio rather than himself as his lieutenant and devised a revenge that would punish both of them; Othello’s wife Desdemona, whom he convinced the Moor had been cheating on him with Cassio, is merely collateral damage. It wasn’t an especially interesting choice but Branagh was still the best thing in the picture. When Frank Finlay played it in the famous National Theatre production opposite Laurence Olivier (with Maggie Smith as Desdemona), which was filmed in 1965, his hatred of the Moor derived unmistakably from the fact of Othello’s race. But the best Iago I’ve ever seen was Andre Braugher in a splendid 1991 production at the Shakespeare Theater in D.C.. His Iago caught Othello, Desdemona and Cassio in his web – to quote the character’s own metaphor – for amusement; he was a sociopath. Braugher was the first Black Iago in my experience, and there were also clear nods to the men’s race: you sensed his shock that Othello would prefer a white guy to a brother. That element was prominent in Iobal Khan’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015, which contained a number of Black characters, some African, some Caribbean, one Indian, and depicted a complicated hierarchy where culture determined class in ways that weren’t immediately apparent. Nicholas Hytner’s version at the National Theatre in 2013 was also about class – Rory Kinnear played Iago as distinctly working-class, and his racial discomfort with the Moor was mixed up with his perception that privileged men, one Black and one white, were looking down on him.

Split Screen: Ogunquit's City of Angels

Tony Yazbeck and Ben Jacoby in City of Angels. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

The 1989 City of Angels is one of the wittiest and most original musicals ever written. Its brilliant book by Larry Gelbart, one of America’s premier comic voices throughout a storied career, is simultaneously a musical parody of a film noir and a delectably cynical treatment of Hollywood, set in the golden era of noirs, the late 1940s. The frame story is about a successful detective novelist named Stine who lands a contract to turn one of his books into a movie, and learns the tough lessons that all the literary successes who fell for Hollywood’s tin promises had to swallow in the big-studio era, about ego, betrayal, manipulation and the bottom line. Stine considers himself too wised-up to be fooled, yet he falls for the phony geniality of the producer-director, Buddy Fidler, who softens him up with praise and then rewrites page after page of his screenplay. Buddy is a megalomaniac with a will of solid steel. And Stine is ripe for seduction – by the money, by the notion of seeing his private-eye hero, Stone, on the screen, and by the sex that hangs in the Hollywood air. His sharp-eyed editor wife Gabby opts to stay behind in New York, though she knows that her husband is historically susceptible to the appeal of available young women, and when he takes Buddy’s secretary Donna to bed Gabby sees through his attempts to cover his tracks. One of the best songs in the sensational Cy Coleman-David Zippel score, “It Needs Work,” musicalizes the moment when she tosses it in his face. The other half of the show is a series of scenes from the movie Stine is writing and Fidler is shooting, so Stine and Stone divide the leading man role, and most of the supporting players are double cast. The musical’s winning visual trick is that the Stine story is designed in color while the film-within-the-play scenes are in glistening black and white.

Lesley Manville in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: An Actress Becomes a Legend

Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. (Photo: Sarah Lee.)

It’s not likely that many people read Choderlos de Laclos’ spectacular 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses these days, but Christopher Hampton’s dramatic version, first produced in 1985, has become, deservedly, a repertory staple. In the original West End production and again on Broadway, the matched anti-heroes, Madame de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, best of friends and former lovers who manipulate everyone around them for their amusement and to enact private revenge plots, were played by Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman. In the triumphant 1988 Stephen Frears movie, called Dangerous Liaisons, Glenn Close and John Malkovich took over the roles, a case of seeming miscasting that, as it turned out, worked brilliantly. (There have been two other film adaptations, a very amusing updated one from 1959 directed by Roger Vadim, with Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe and an unfortunate one called Valmont, directed by Miloš Forman, with Annette Bening and Colin Firth, released the year after Frears’s. And Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe are featured in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, which sets the story in a Manhattan prep school. It’s trashy but a sexy, funny diversion.)

Recent Plays: The Balusters, Fallen Angels, Top Hat and The Fear of 13

The company of The Balusters. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters, which enjoyed a twelve-week limited run as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club season, focuses on the tensions between neighbors of different races, cultural backgrounds and predilections whose veneer of politesse cracks under the pressure of their pursuit of different agendas. It’s a distinctly twenty-first century version of a social high comedy built around a melting-pot aristocracy that’s assumed to have eliminated the exclusionary class barriers of an earlier time but hasn’t really: the old divisions keep popping up, along with the old resentments. This variation of high comedy has produced some highly entertaining American plays (like Smart People and last season’s Eureka Day) and one masterpiece, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. The Balusters isn’t on the same level.

Gershwin Redux: Crazy for You

The company of Goodspeed's Crazy for You. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

Crazy for You is the second of three Broadway musicals – so far – to rework hit shows with fabulous scores by George and Ira Gershwin. The first was My One and Only (1983), which had begun life in 1927 as Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire with his first dance partner, his sister Adele. The most recent was Nice Work If You Can Get It (2012), which is based loosely on the 1926 Oh, Kay! – best known as the musical in which the great, one-of-a-kind English performer Gertrude Lawrence introduced the beloved ballad “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

Lemons: Joe Mantello Directs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Laurie Metcalf, a carton of organic milk, and Nathan Lane in Death of a Salesman. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.)

When I heard director Joe Mantello was setting the current revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in a garage, I misheard it as the garage. So I assumed it meant the garage attached to the Lomans’ house. As far as reconceptions of classic American theater go, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. But no: It wasn’t the garage, it was a garage. But what set designer Chloe Lamford provides isn’t even a garage—it’s a huge industrial warehouse with a large rollup metal door and piles of debris and dirt everywhere. (That Lamford won a Tony for her set is far more unsettling than anything in the play.) The characters sleep on metal benches, eat meals at a metal table, and walk barefoot on the dirty floor. The structure earns garage-icity when the metal door ascends and Willy Loman drives his car into the warehouse to begin the play. (It ends with Willy backing the car off the stage. Symbolism.) I get that the America Dream is a lie, that Willie’s life is a big empty warehouse (I would argue that it’s actually a small empty warehouse), but do you need to hit the audience with a sledgehammer (and an ugly one at that) to make that point? Salesman isn’t a naturalistic play--there are flashbacks and fantasy sequences; Jo Mielziner’s famous set for the original Broadway production was widely seen as an expressionistic wonder -- but when the stage is so bereft of any hint of visual beauty or interest, you wonder why Willy doesn’t kill himself sooner.

Hello, Dolly!: Ogunquit Playhouse Puts On Its Sunday Clothes

Beth Leavel as Dolly Levi and company in Hello Dolly! (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

Six decades on, Hello, Dolly! is seen as a prime representative of the golden age of Broadway musicals, but the fact is, that era was rolling into its final years, before rock ‘n’ roll and the bitterness of the Vietnam War wore it down. Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s musical adaptation of the 1954 Thornton Wilder farce The Matchmaker, set in Gilded Age New York, lasted on Broadway for seven years and toured for longer, but its producer, David Merrick, turned it into a vehicle with revolving-door stars stepping in to play the marriage broker Dolly Levi, most of them relics from the 1940s. And the musical, with its overweight production values and its thin farce plot – about how the marriage broker Dolly Levi, commissioned by the Yonkers hay and feed shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder to find him a wife, captures him for herself while abetting the courtship of three young couples – grew more arthritic as time pressed on. When Barbra Streisand took over the title role in the otherwise plodding 1969 movie, her astonishing stockpile of talents and unique old-style/new-style presence lit up the fading material like fireworks; she was a godsend. But what contemporary mountings of Hello, Dolly! have shown – from the version at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2013 to the triumphant 2017 Broadway revival to the newly opened one at the Ogunquit Playhouse – is that, liberated from the notion that audiences are paying to watch a guest star in a variety show, it can be a first-rate entertainment.

No Business Like Show Business: When Playwrights Kill

Beth Leavel and Marissa Jaret Winokur in When Playwrights Kill. (Photo: Jim Sabitus.)

When Playwrights Kill is a comedy à clef whose code can be deciphered by anyone who keeps up with theatrical gossip. In 2019 Faye Dunaway was fired from the Boston tryout of Matthew Lombardo’s one-woman show about Katharine Hepburn, Tea at Five, for physically and verbally abusive behavior backstage, and the production was terminated. Lombardo had written Tea at Five in 2002 for Kate Mulgrew, who played it off Broadway and elsewhere, but it was the draw of Dunaway’s return to the New York stage after nearly four decades that secured the play’s first Broadway contract, which was cancelled following the Dunaway debacle. (A sympathetic 2024 HBO documentary, Faye, chalks her hijinks up to bipolar disorder.) 

Icke/Sophocles

From Left: Jordan Scowen, Olivia Reis, Mark Strong, Lesley Manville, James Wilbraham, Anne Reid and Bhasker Patel in Oedipus. (Photo: J. Cervantes.)

Robert Icke’s Oedipus, newly transplanted to Broadway from the West End, is, like his 2015 Oresteia, a modern version of a classic work that has resonated through time since the Greeks birthed tragedy. These are the weightiest cornerstones of the genre: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the only complete trilogy we have from among the theatrical constructions the ancient Greek playwrights submitted to the City Dionysia festival in Athens, invented dramatic cause and effect, while Sophocles’ Oedipus, which moves backwards and forwards in time without ever altering the setting, is a marvel of dramatic structure that no one has ever surpassed. Aristotle used it as his model for tragic dramaturgy in the Poetics. The ancient Greek world was a treasure trove of firsts – the Poetics pioneered theatrical criticism.

On Repression: Fun Home and Bat Boy

Sarah Bockel and Nick Duckart in Fun Home. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

It’s not the Huntington Theatre Company’s fault that the opening night performance of Fun Home occasioned repeated displays of virtue signaling on the part of the audience; that’s what you get these days when you produce a play that wears its liberal heart on its sleeve. (The cheering began with the pre-show announcement, for God’s sake.) But Logan Ellis’s production of the musical, adapted by Lisa Kron from Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, makes it easy for an audience to declare their allegiance. The show, which premiered at the Public Theatre twelve years ago under Sam Gold’s direction, is already didactic. It’s a memory play narrated by a character based on Bechdel, who grew up in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s, in a museum-like Victorian house that doubled as the small town’s funeral parlor (hence fun home, the family’s nickname for it), with a father who divided his time between undertaking and teaching high school English. Though Alison’s reminiscences permit her to revisit her eleven-year-old self, they focus on her coming out as an Oberlin freshman and, in the wake of that announcement, her mother Helen’s revelation that Alison’s father Bruce was a closeted gay man with a taste for young, sometimes underage men. Bechdel’s trajectory ends happily: she grows up to become a famous cartoonist. Bruce, on the other hand, ends up a suicide.

Killers: Rope and Punch

Ephraim Birney and Daniel Neale in Rope. (Photo: Hartford Stage.)

The English playwright Patrick Hamilton – best known for Angel Street, the thriller that became the classic 1945 film Gaslight – wrote Rope in 1929, five years after the celebrated Chicago murder case that inspired it. Two well-heeled University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who were lovers, kidnapped and murdered Loeb’s fourteen-year-old cousin Bobby Franks to prove that they could commit the perfect crime – and that, as superior intellectual specimens, they had the right to operate outside the realm of accepted morality. (The irony was how badly these self-proclaimed Nietzschean Übermenschen bungled it.) The case, which their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, used as his most famous argument against capital punishment – he succeeded in getting his clients life sentences rather than the gallows they seemed fated for – has never entirely disappeared from popular culture: it has generated plays, films, a musical and one famous novelization, Meyer Levin’s Compulsion. In a 2018 review in this publication of the book The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Infamous Crimes, Devin McKinney conveys with poetic eloquence the enduring power of this murder, which has moved so many interpreters to theorize on the motivation of the killers but has remained an unsolvable mystery.

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.

Stratford and the Shaw Festival II: Shaw

Gabriella Sundar Singh as Barbara Undershaft in the Shaw Festival's current production of Major Barbara. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Is Major Barbara Shaw’s masterpiece? The main contenders would be Heartbreak House and Man and Superman, but when I saw Joseph Ziegler’s centennial revival of Major Barbara twenty years ago – with Diana Donnelly as Barbara, the young Salvation Army major, and Benedict Campbell as her estranged father, Andrew Undershaft, co-head of an armaments empire given the complexly ironic name of Lazarus and Undershaft – I was staggered. Ziegler’s gorgeous, immense production – it unfolded in three hours and twenty minutes and was riveting throughout – was a luminous rendering of Shaw’s brilliant, endlessly surprising dramatic argument that you can’t save the soul without feeding the stomach. (That sly thief Brecht rephrased it for the second-act finale of his Threepenny Opera: “First feed the face / And then talk right and wrong.”) In Major Barbara, Undershaft first proves to his daughter that her beloved Sally Ann is as dependent on the generosity of the warmongers and liquor salesmen as any other institution; then he seduces away her fiancé, the Greek scholar Adolphus Cusins, to become the heir to his business; and finally he sells Barbara herself on his factory, a model socialist community whose workers are beaming with health and pride. In Shaw’s witty and perverse social comedy, Lazarus and Undershaft, purveyors of death and destruction, are the heroes. No wonder Cusins calls his father-in-law-to-be Machiavelli and the Prince of Darkness.

Stratford and the Shaw Festival I: Shakespeare

From left: André Sills as Polixenes, Sara Topham as Hermione, and Graham Abbey as Leontes with members of the company of The Winter's Tale. (Photo: David House.)

Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale is one of the three or four plays I cherish most, and the Canada’s Stratford Festival hits a high mark with Antoni Cimolino’s production at the Tom Patterson Theatre. Cimolino has announced that he will step down from the artistic directorship of the company after one more season, and his Winter’s Tale is so beautiful from start to finish that you can’t help thinking this is the show he would like to be remembered for. He’s staged it on a simple set that the designer, Douglas Paraschuk, has enriched, scene to scene, with lyrical details and Michael Walton has lit exquisitely. One of the most poignant examples is the famous final scene. Paulina (Yanna McIntosh) leads the King of Sicilia, Leontes (Graham Abbey), who has been reunited with his childhood friend Polixenes (André Sills), his former ambassador Camillo (Tom Rooney) and his long-lost daughter Perdita (Marissa Orjalo) into a secret room. There, she tells them all, she has had a sculptor create an astonishingly lifelike statue of Leontes’s queen Hermione (Sara Topham), supposedly dead these sixteen years while Leontes, under Paulina’s guidance, has done penance for the grievous wrongs he committed against her, Polixenes and Perdita (then just an infant). The stage is unilluminated except for three handheld lanterns, so the statue is revealed suddenly, the lantern light painting the darkness. When Paulina works her magic and Hermione moves, the effect is so subtle that at first you wonder if you really saw what you think you saw.