The Divine: Too Much Going On

Fiona Reid in The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt, the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. (Photo: David Cooper)

In 1905, the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt brought a troupe of actors to Québec City to perform three plays in repertory. She was already in her early sixties, but according to the nineteenth-century traditions that still adhered into the early twentieth, great stars were thought of as ageless and inhabited their vehicles for decades. So the idea of “The Divine Sarah,” as she was popularly called, continuing to play ingénue roles like Marguerite in Camille by Dumas or the title role in Scribe and Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur wouldn’t have seemed bizarre to audiences or critics – though realists like Strindberg and Chekhov were breaking ground by challenging this and other implausibilities in a theatre that still clung to the vision of the Romantic age. (Arkadina, the actress in The Sea Gull, is a second-tier diva of the Bernhardt school, and Chekhov has some fun at her expense.) Bernhardt’s visit incited a furor when the archbishop, representing a still feudal and repressive Catholic church, objected strenuously to her appearing on a Québec stage. He would have had many reasons for trying to shut her down: she played male as well as female characters, she didn’t shy away from lurid and controversial subject matter, her offstage lifestyle was unconventional and scandalous, and – not least among the qualities that would have made her an unsavory figure in the eyes of the church – she had been born Jewish, though she’d converted to Catholicism.

This historical incident was the starting point for The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt, a new work by the Québecois playwright Michel Marc Bouchard that the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake is premiering this season (in a translation by Linda Gaboriau). Bouchard has added several narrative layers. The protagonist isn’t Bernhardt (played by Fiona Reid) but a young seminarian named Michaud (Ben Sanders), the son of a cabinet minister and a devotee of the actress, who is sent to deliver the archbishop’s letter denouncing her but winds up writing a play for her. The hero of his drama – the role she is eager to play – is actually based on his dormitory mate Talbot (Wade Bogert-O’Brien). Talbot is a working-class boy whose mother (Mary Haney) has, through considerable personal sacrifice, placed in the seminary (where his classmates are all aristocrats like Michaud) because the priesthood is the only route of escape from poverty for a boy from his background. Mrs. Talbot and her twelve-year-old son Leo (Kyle Orzech) slave in a shoe factory in wretched conditions; children like Leo, whose employment is officially illegal, are especially vulnerable. (Two little girls recently died horrible deaths here when their hair caught in the machine.) And there’s even more plot: Talbot’s entry into the seminary follows his severe beating of a priest who was initially his intellectual mentor and then began abusing him when Talbot was twelve. Brother Casgrain (Martin Happer), the director of the seminary, offers Talbot a scholarship as well as an education for Leo if he agrees not to make an official complaint about the abuse. Casgrain is also Michaud’s protector: the rules here are strict, but Michaud keeps flouting them, and Casgrain lets him get away with it. (Casgrain sees his younger self in Michaud, though his affection clearly has an un-acted-upon erotic component.) The play also covers Talbot’s coming of age, which includes his sowing his wild oats with an actress in Bernhardt’s company (Darcy Gerhart), with whom he visits an opium den and a gambling house before making love to her.

Holmes on the Case: Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart

Damien Atkins and ensemble in Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales have inspired two TV series, a series of fourteen beloved movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce that coincided almost exactly with the Second World War, and many other films through the years. Holmes’s theatrical history is a century and a quarter long. In 1899, only eight years after the most famous detective in the history of fiction first appeared in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, the actor William Gillette adapted Holmes as a vehicle for his own talents. His Sherlock Holmes, loosely adapted from “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem,” was an enormous hit that he performed about 1300 times. Gillette also played the most famous fictional detective in a 1916 silent movie that’s available on Prime. (Newly restored, it was screened at the 2015 Silent Film Festival in San Francisco.)

The first stage Holmes I saw was The Crucifer of Blood on Broadway, written and directed by Paul Giovanni, with Paxton Whitehead as Holmes. It was extremely enjoyable, and that’s a description I would happily extend to Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart, the Holmes play in the current season at the Shaw Festival, where Whitehead was once artistic director. The Mystery of the Human Heart is the third Holmes produced at the Shaw since 1918, all three directed by Craig Hall and starring Damien Atkins as Holmes, Ric Reid as Watson and Claire Jullien as Holmes’s unassailable landlady, Mrs. Hudson. (I didn’t see either The Hound of the Baskervilles or Sherlock Holmes and the Raven’s Curse.)

The Importance of Being Earnest and Too True to Be Good: The Gift of Gab

Martin Happer and Julia Course in The Importance of Being Earnest. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Tim Carroll’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Shaw Festival is no doubt giving pleasure to a great many theatregoers this year.  No one has ever, to my knowledge, written a funnier play than Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy of Victorian manners, and Carroll’s mounting honors both the wit and the style of the text. It is also – thanks to Gillian Gallow’s set (with its multiple frames), Kevin Lamotte’s lighting and especially Christina Poddubiuk’s costumes – lovely to look at.

Ibsen and Barrie Rarities at the Shaw Festival

Moya O'Connell and Ric Reid in The Lady from the Sea, at Niagara-on-the-Lake's Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

The Lady from the Sea is an infrequently performed late Ibsen, one of those realist plays of his that teeters on the edge of symbolism, like The Wild Duck. (He wrote it in 1888, between Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler.) The character who has earned the title moniker among locals in a Norwegian seacoast town is Ellida Wangel. She is married to a devoted doctor but has grown increasingly distant from him and hasn’t quite taken on the burden of stepmother to his two daughters, Bolette and Hilde. He assumes that the problem is her inability to get over the death of their own child (she hasn’t slept with him since), but it’s more complicated. Ellida is haunted by a lost love, an American sailor to whom she was engaged but who ran away to escape imprisonment for the murder of a ship’s captain. The connection she feels to the unnamed American is powerful, primal and also terrifying, because she senses that he is drawing her into the sea itself, where they threw their wedding rings when they plighted their troth. In the course of the play the stranger returns and calls on Ellida to fulfill her promise to him, refusing to recognize her as a woman married to another man.

Lola and Doc: Come Back Little Sheba at Shaw

Corrine Koslo and Ric Reid in Come Back Little Sheba at the Shaw Festival (All Photos by David Cooper)

William Inge’s reputation as a playwright seems to have outlived his plays; they don’t get revived much. But though he’s not in the class of our finest southern playwrights (Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers), his work, which embodies a 1950s realist esthetic, is interesting. The movie versions of Come Back, Little Sheba and A Loss of Roses (the film’s title is The Stripper) linger in the memory for the performances of the leading actresses, Shirley Booth and Joanne Woodward respectively, in the roles of profoundly disappointed women. That’s the Inge archetype; the spinster schoolteacher in Picnic, Rosemary, fits it too, though she’s a supporting character. One of the reasons that Picnic is Inge’s signal achievement – it’s considerably better than the popular 1955 movie suggests – is that it provides a wider spectrum of characters than the others. Still, I was pleased to see the Shaw Festival’s mounting of Sheba, even though Jackie Maxwell’s production is clumsy. It showcases two talented actors, Corrine Koslo as Lola Delaney and Ric Reid as her husband Doc, and unlike most shows it improves as it goes along: the second act is poignant, even gripping.

Shaw Entertainments: The Ladykillers and Getting Married

Chick Reid and Damien Atkins in The Ladykillers at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. (Photo: David Cooper)

Performed by overlapping ensembles, The Ladykillers and Getting Married, comedies of very different stripes, are the most sheerly enjoyable shows I saw at the Shaw Festival this season. The Ladykillers is Graham Linehan’s 2011 stage version of the screenplay William Rose wrote for the beloved Ealing comedy from 1955, starring Alec Guinness – fitted out with hilarious fake incisors that made him look like a cadaverous shark – as the brains of a gang of robbers who work out of his rented room in an innocent silver-haired widow’s house fronting a railroad track. (The Coen Brothers remade it in 2004, with Tom Hanks in the Guinness part.) Getting Married is a George Bernard Shaw comedy of manners that’s little known, at least outside Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the festival has performed it on four previous occasions.

All Hail the Comic Muse

Mike Nadajewski and Kristi Frank in On the Razzle. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

This piece includes reviews of On the Razzle, Blithe Spirit and Village Wooing.

This summer the Shaw Festival has been bowing to the comic spirit. In addition to Shaw’s The Apple Cart and The Playboy of the Western World, which mix serious and humorous elements, the roster has included productions of four comedies from different eras: Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance (1730), performed outdoors in an improvised version – the only one of the quartet I didn’t get to; Shaw’s Village Wooing (1934), this season’s lunchtime one-act; Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941); and Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle (1981). In truth, the last of these can claim connection to several periods. It began in 1835 as a one-act English play by John Oxenford called A Day Well Spent, which the Viennese playwright and actor Johann Nestroy adapted seven years later as Einen Jux will er sich machen (He’s Out for a Fling). Thornton Wilder reworked it for Broadway in 1938 as The Merchant of Yonkers – a failure, despite direction by the legendary Max Reinhardt – and then again in 1955 as The Matchmaker, which altered the story about shop clerks out on the town by inventing the assertive, charismatic title character (played by Ruth Gordon on Broadway) and reconfiguring the play around her. It was filmed the following year with Shirley Booth in the role and featuring three talented young performers early in their careers: Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine and Robert Morse. In 1964 The Matchmaker became the musical Hello, Dolly!, which, of course, ran for years. On the Razzle is Stoppard’s rewrite of the Nestroy, not the Wilder, so there’s no Dolly Gallagher Levi dashing around in aid of the young lovers while manipulating her sour-faced client into marrying her rather than the widow he’s after or the fictitious millionairess she’s promised him.

The Shaw’s Early Shaw: Arms and the Man & The Philanderer

Kate Besworth and Martin Happer star in the Shaw Festival’s production of Arms and the Man (Photo: Emily Cooper)

In George Bernard Shaw’s early comedy Arms and the Man, Bulgaria is at war with Serbia, and the heroine, Raina, the daughter of one major and the fiancée of another, glories in the excitement of the conflict and the swashbuckling self-presentation of the latter, a handsome warrior named Sergius who marches into the fray like a character out of a Walter Scott novel. But on the last night of battle, a Swiss mercenary fighting for the Serbs, Captain Bluntschli, slips into her boudoir to escape from the Bulgarians, and she doesn’t have the heart to give him away. She even feeds him – chocolate creams, his favorite. (She nicknames him her “chocolate cream soldier”; hence the title of the Oscar Strauss operetta version of the material, The Chocolate Soldier.) Bluntschli’s conduct offends her notions of how soldiers should comport themselves, but he and not Sergius is a professional soldier; he finds Sergius’s heroics ridiculous (not to say dangerous). But while Bluntschli undercuts Raina’s schoolgirl notions, he also wins her heart; Shaw’s play may burlesque the romantic temperament, but it’s a romantic comedy and one of his most lighthearted works. It’s also, not surprisingly, one of his most frequently produced plays.

Didacticism and Virtue at the Shaw Festival

Shawn Wright and Jeff Irving with the cast of Androcles and the Lion at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

At every performance of the Shaw Festival’s production of Androcles and the Lion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 dramatization of the Aesop fable, a member of the audience is picked to play the lion. Other theatregoers who have been handed colored balls before the play begins are invited to throw them onto the stage at will, interrupting the dramatic action and prompting a variety of responses from the actors, who have to tell an anecdote or recite a section of Shaw’s preface to the play or share any thought that pops into their heads. This process is in the service of what Tim Carroll, the Shaw’s new artistic director, calls “two-way theatre,” which is intended to break down the barrier between the actors and the audience. Carroll directed Androcles, but his mission is visible in the productions he didn’t stage, too. In Wilde Tales, the lunchtime show, adapted by Kate Hennig from four Oscar Wilde fairy tales and directed by Christine Brubaker, children from the audience sit along the sides of the Court House stage with signs and other props; their participation is encouraged at certain points in the action. In Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George, directed by Kevin Bennett (who trained with Carroll during his tenure as associate director at Shakespeare’s Globe in London), the house lights remain on during the performance and the cast interacts with members of the audience – especially those who are sitting right on the stage of the Royal George – just as actors at the Globe play up to those groundlings who have found standing room right below the thrust, within easy reach of the performers. Five of the six plays I saw at the Shaw began with a member of the staff – an assistant stage manager or head dresser or what have you – addressing the audience and providing some tidbits of information about his or her job.

Delightful Diversion: Shaw Festival's Me and My Girl

Michael Therriault and Elodie Gillett in the Shaw Festival production of Me and My Girl.  (Photo: David Cooper) 

Me and My Girl, the 1930s musical with a revised book by British writer and comedian Stephen Fry, knocked them dead, as they used to say in the theatre, when it opened Saturday night at the Shaw Festival. The audience jumped to its feet for a roaring standing ovation which rightly praised Ashlie Corcoran's rollicking direction along with the crackerjack cast featuring Michael Therriault and Kristi Frank in lead roles.

The show, which continues at the Festival Theatre until Oct. 14, has launched new artistic director Tim Carroll's first season at the helm of Shaw, the Niagara-the-Lake theatre festival committed to staging the dramatic works of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw along with the other works from the Shavian era, with a bang. There's no shortage of enthusiasm here.

The Playboy of the Western World and The Apple Cart: Flying High at the Shaw

Marla McLean and Qasim Khan in The Playboy of the Western World. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

In the preface to his 1907 masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, the Irish playwright John Millington Synge writes, “On the stage one must have reality and one must have joy . . . In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple . . .” This dictum explains the play’s unusual style and texture, realism folded in with folk-fable imagination and humor and language so musical that it sings in your ears even when you’re just reading the text. Synge claims that he owes both the wildness of the narrative and the richness of the vernacular to his close attention to the way rural working-class Irish people speak (or did around the turn of the twentieth century).

Musicals Round-up Part I: Niagara-on-the-Lake and London

Kristi Frank and Michael Therriault in the Shaw Festival production of Me and My Girl. (Photo: David Cooper)

This article contains reviews of Me and My Girl (Shaw Festival), Dreamgirls (West End), and On the Town (Regent’s Park).

Michael Therriault is so thoroughly winning and energetic in Me and My Girl at the Shaw Festival that you feel he could carry the production on his back if he had to. The musical is built as a vehicle for the performer who plays Bill Snibson, the Lambeth Cockney who discovers he has inherited an earl’s title and is expected to relocate to Mayfair, and the diminutive Therriault, with his pop-eyed charm and apparently elastic body, claims squatter’s rights to every scene he’s in. Therriault is a well-known Canadian musical-theatre actor (he played Gollum in the musical of Lord of the Rings both in Toronto and in the West End), but the only time I’d seen him before this summer was in Studio 180’s production (in Toronto) of Parade, as the Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, framed for the rape and murder of one of his employees in pre-World War One Atlanta. He was superb, but the role was so downbeat that I didn’t immediately make the connection to the song-and-dance man who plays the lovable, insouciant Bill. Therriault’s peculiar gift is for balancing charisma with modesty – like Dick Van Dyke, though his musical-comedy gifts are more extensive than Van Dyke’s and he’s more believable as a Cockney than Van Dyke was in Mary Poppins.

Rarities at Stratford and the Shaw Festival: Nathan the Wise, Sex, and Rope

Diane Flacks (centre) with members of the company in Nathan the Wise. (Photo: David Hou)

Nathan the Wise by the German Enlightenment playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (it was written in 1779) is so seldom performed that I’d never heard of it until Canada’s Stratford Festival elected to produce it this summer. It’s a fable, set in ancient Jerusalem, with more narrative complications than a Shakespearean romance. The title character (played by Diane Flacks) is a wealthy Jew who has used his fortune to maintain friendly relations with the powerful Muslim and Catholic forces in the city, represented respectively by the young Sultan, Saladin (Danny Ghantous), and the old Patriarch (Harry Nelken). When Nathan returns from a business trip, Daya (Sarah Orenstein), the Christian woman who manages his household and takes care of his daughter Rachel (Oksana Sirju), tells him that Rachel was rescued from a fire by an itinerant Knight Templar (Jakob Ehman) with whom she has fallen in love. The Knight Templar, a soldier in the service of the Catholic Church, has also won the affection of the Sultan, who slaughtered his fellows – prisoners captured in the holy war between the Christians and the Muslims – but spared his life because he looks so much like Saladin’s long-lost brother. The story is a series of revelations of the true identities of the characters, not just the Knight Templar but also Rachel, and of Nathan’s own past. And of course, it’s a plea for tolerance in which two of the three voices of racial hatred – Saladin and the Knight Templar – prove to be capable of crossing the boundaries that separate Christians, Muslims and Jews. The Patriarch, who at one point advocates burning Nathan at the stake, is the third, and he doesn’t alter his point of view.

New Productions: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Wilde

Moya O’Connell and Neil Barclay in Uncle Vanya at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Uncle Vanya, staged by Jackie Maxwell (in her final season as artistic director), is the crown jewel among the offerings at the Shaw Festival this summer. (At least, among the shows I was able to see; unfortunately, I arrived too early to catch either Sweeney Todd or Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.) The production draws you in from the opening moment, where the old nanny, Marina (Sharry Flett, infusing the character’s grandmotherly warmth with ironic humor), calls Dr. Astrov (Patrick McManus) on his drinking, and you don’t break free of its spell until long after you’ve wandered out of the Court House, the ideal Shaw venue for Chekhov’s delicate, impressionistic “scenes of country life” because of its intimacy. (It’s where the company also performed a memorable Cherry Orchard in 2010.)