Canada theater festival roundup

The rarest of combos: theater that can be as good as New York or London, in two charming little Ontario towns, overflowing with flowers and deluxe B&Bs. Both the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival are a long day's journey by car from Philadelphia or an hour and half drive from Toronto. These annual festivals run until November, with 11 shows at the Shaw and 14 at Stratford— not counting the extra pleasures of Monday evening concerts, the daily joy of watching the cygnets swanning around on the Avon River with their elegant parents, and rediscovering ice wine, the delicious Niagara specialty (with vineyards to visit nearby).

If that isn't enough, there are lectures on the plays, backstage tours, tours of the costume and props warehouse, and garden tours. And there are plenty of small towns nearby for antiquing and farmers' markets.

I managed to squash nine shows into five days (including a concert by Tanglefoot, a very spirited old-timey hippy-dippy folk band that sings only Canadian songs).

For economic reasons, Stratford these days leans heavily on big musicals rather than Shakespeare. But I figure you go to a Shakespeare festival to see Shakespeare. Here's what I saw.

Tragic face-off

Two Shakespearean tragedies, each about the assassination of a tyrant; in each, the pivot of the plot is an arrogant misinterpretation of a mystical prophecy; in each, ambition leads to civil war. Both productions update the costumes to suggest the modern world, and both succumb to the temptation of technological hoo-ha to pointless and distracting effect. But the differences between these productions is huge: Macbeth, directed by Des McAnuff, is thrilling if imperfect, while Julius Caesar, directed by James MacDonald, is shallow and boring.

Early in Julius Caesar, Cicero observes, "Men may construe things after their fashion,/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves." That just about describes this production, in which not a single actor seems capable of ambiguity (in a play about ambiguous motives) or subtlety of emotion (Brutus's discovery of his wife's death ought to be breathtaking). The costumes strain for nonsensical relevance: men's suits with skirts over the trousers, soldiers in contemporary camouflage (worn with baseball caps?), while bombs burst in air as Romans fall on their swords.

On display was the most embarrassingly inept stage combat I've seen in a long time. But most outrageous was the throwing away of the great lines, especially by Jonathon Goad as Mark Antony, whose snarky, contemporary manner makes rubbish of "Cry "'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war" (a line guaranteed to raise goosebumps, until now), and this while picking at his earwax.

A play about the dangers of celebrity politicians, about spin rhetoric and nostalgia for the law and order of less decadent times, about self-righteous anti-intellectuality and easily swayed crowds, about ambition masquerading as heroism, and suicide masquerading as honor— such a play doesn't need to stretch for relevance.

The two-time Tony Award winner Des McAnuff is the artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, as well as director of this year's Macbeth. Colm Feore (who also plays the title role in Stratford's Cyrano de Bergerac) is a fierce Macbeth; with his hawklike profile and sinewy walk, he seethes and rages. Feore makes the "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech his own, emotionally rich and shaded from sorrow to bitter resignation. Unfortunately, he's unaccompanied by his Lady, who seems to consist of nothing but raw ambition; there's no visible relationship between them. Michael Walton's lighting design is the production's other star, with its blazing searchlights and thick shadows.

Comic face-off

The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's delectable comedy, is made more so by Brian Bedford's turn as the redoubtable Lady Bracknell in a terrific occasion of cross-dressing. Bedford, who also directed this production, has been a much-honored, never-disappointing figure at Stratford for nearly three decades. With every morsel of Wilde's dialogue quotable, the play requires the highest archness (a tautology that, surely) and the cast delivers with relish. The sets are not only beautiful, they are unabashedly sets— confections clearly pretending to be houses or gardens. After all, "in matters of grave importance, style not sincerity is what matters."

In a wildly different style, the raucous, rowdy, bawdy, jolly Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson's 400-year-old comedy, is enjoying a rare and extravagant production under the direction of Antoni Cimolino. The spectacle is fun to watch— a puppet show, stilt-walkers, pickpockets and the astonishing Ursla (Lucy Peacock in the fattest of fat suits)— and the plot is sympathetic (the fun-lovers win, the censorious Puritans lose). But the real fascination lies in what the play reveals about Jacobean audiences: they must have been ribald and vulgar and altogether noisier and more easily amused than we are. Juan Chioran is superb as chief hypocrite, Zeal-of-the Land Busy, equaled by Tom McCamus as Justice Overdo, who goes to the Fair for the "weeding out of enormity," which he accomplishes with gusto.

Shaw at the Shaw

The Devil's Disciple is both a Shaw melodrama set in the American Revolution (last-minute rescue from the gallows, conversion of namby-pamby husband into war hero) and a parody of melodrama (mistaken identities, last-minute wills, prodigal son, etc., etc). Taking amusing liberties with American history, the play nevertheless contains moments of ardent admiration for the Revolutionaries, Shaw's sympathies always being anti-establishment. (The Devil's Disciple's success in the U.S. gave GBS the economic freedom to resign as a theater critic.)

The play is only mildly entertaining until the one truly Shavian character turns up: General Burgoyne, aka "Gentleman Johnny," the ultra-civilized British wit who understood the ineptitude of the military establishment and gets all the play's best lines. The production loses its way and its energy at the end in a messily staged final scene, followed by a lame jig at the end, and there is much unevenness of audibility.

In Good King Charles's Golden Days is late Shaw at his most demanding and amusing: a banquet of intellectual debates about science, art, religion, love and kingship. Into Isaac Newton's house bursts King Charles II of England, three of his mistresses, the Quaker founder George Fox, the painter Godfrey Kneller and James, the Catholic Duke of York, who will later, briefly, succeed Charles on the throne. The play takes these historical figures and imagines their debates, using all the provocative pleasures of hindsight, anticipating the Einsteinian view of the universe that will replace Newton's, knowing what Charles' dying words were.

Eda Holmes directs with more zest than you could imagine for this very talky play (like so many Shaw plays, it's too long), and consequently the production is both opulent and full of fun: When Newton solemnly announces his new theory called "gravitation," Nell Gwynn accidentally drops something. Shaw, who wrote this play at the age of 83, has King Charles remark, "the settled mind stagnates." If ever a mind wasn't settled….

Osborne seems dated

The Shaw Festival's mission has been stretched to include not only The Master's plays (no shortage there) and those of his contemporaries, but also of his heirs: thus, apparently, John Osborne's The Entertainer, directed by Jackie Maxwell, the Festival's artistic director, and starring Benedict Campbell in a spectacular performance as the monstrous Archie Rice, a music hall performer at the end of that era. But the play is dated, despite the program's claims for the relevance of the Suez Canal crisis that revealed so much about politics and class in Britain in 1956.

It's also unrelievedly unpleasant (more than three hours of nasty, bragging, belligerent drunks, who interrupt themselves with corny jokes and crass songs), so that it seems theatrically heartbreaking: so much talent merely to demonstrate that it is "Better to be a has-been than a never-was." The Entertainer would seem to be that "has-been," and reviving it seems a version of the very nostalgia the play skewers.

The Shaw Festival offers two genuine marvels: First is Campbell's shift from the "merry monarch" Charles II to the vile Entertainer (two gigantic roles, performed afternoon and evening). Second is Shaw's profound optimism— humanity may be acutely flawed and very annoying, but still capable of reaching glorious heights. This contrasts tellingly with Osborne's profound pessimism: His humanity is irredeemably vulgar, grotesque and doomed.

Coward, too

The Shaw Festival also contains a Noel Coward mini-festival: ten short plays— you can see all of them on marathon days or in pieces. I opted for the lunchtime production of Star Chamber—a rarely seen Coward one-act, billed as an "amuse bouche." The title refers to a committee meeting of a charity supporting an old actors' home: "I love committee meetings…they give one a sense of inevitability"— and the play features several Coward songs, including the favorite, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen."

Everyone at the meeting is an actor, except a stagehand and the lawyer who has the facts and figures to be approved. The leading man, eccentric ingénue, film convert, grande dame, and fat vaudevillian all make sensational entrances, not the least being the leading lady with her Great Dane. Chaos and inattention reign until a photographer shows up and everybody is, suddenly, on. An insiders' lark.