[NEohioPAL]Berko review: Shaw Festival of Canada

[Roy Berko]

SHAW FESTIVAL brims with superb offerings

Roy Berko

(Member, American Theatre Critics Association)

--THE TIMES NEWSPAPERS--

Lorain County Times--Westlaker Times--Lakewood News
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The Shaw Festival, located in Niagara-on-the-Lake,
Ontario, Canada is the only theatre in the world that
specializes in plays by G. B. Shaw and his
contemporaries.   The plays of that era are often
excellent and challenging.  Fortunately, for this
year’s audiences, this is a stellar year for the Shaw.
 With few exceptions, play after play is exceptional.

‘THE CRUCIBLE’ gets a brilliant production


Arthur Miller, one of America’s greatest modern
playwrights, penned ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ as a protest
against Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt for Communists in
the government and entertainment industry during the
early 1950s.  The country was in hysteria for fear of
Russia and its emergence as a major power.  McCarthy
fed on that hysteria, much like the religious fanatics
of Massachusetts colony set upon so-called witches
because of the hard times facing the people of the
late 17th century.

This play is relevant today as the Bush
administration, using the hysteria of 9-11, has
conducted witch hunts and taken away citizen civil
rights.    Much of this philosophy centers on a line
right out of Miller’s play, “You are either with us or
against us.”  The play also reflects attitudes of the
present day religious right, who, much like the Salem
religious fanatics, hunt out those not agreeing with
their interpretation of what is right and wrong.  They
attack homosexuals, those who believe in abortion, 
and those who champion stem cell research, for
“poisoning” the “good” folk. 

The story concerns an accusation against Goode Proctor
by a teenaged girl who, after having a sexual affair
with Proctor’s husband, John, accuses Goode Proctor
and others of being witches.  The chief magistrate,
much like Joseph McCarthy, or today’s right wing
judges, closes his eyes to facts and is swayed by his
own agenda.  In the process, the question of one’s
reputation comes center stage.  Proctor, after
standing up for those who are being killed in the name
of “righteousness,” cries out, after refusing to sign
a document in which he would falsely agree that he has
seen the devil, “My name, I must have my name.”

The Shaw production is brilliant.  This is the finest
staging of ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ that I have ever seen.  It
is flawless.  The acting, the pacing, the staging, the
tension are all perfectly honed.  

Director Tadeusz Bradecki has created a scary, yet
true illusion.  Peter Hartwell’s set design enhances
the visual and emotional imagery.     

Benedict Campbell is brilliant as John Proctor, as is
Kelli Fox (sister of Michael J. Fox) as Elizabeth. 
Jim Mezon is scary as the closed minded “holier than
thou” Deputy Governor.  Charlotte Gowdy, as Abigail
Williams, the lying teenager, is so real, she is
spooky with her total disregard for the truth.  The
rest of the cast is equally superb.

The audience sat in shocked silence at the conclusion
of the play...a perfect tribute to as perfect a
theatrical experience as one might ever experience.

It is a shame and a blessing that a play like ‘THE
CRUCIBLE’ has to exist.  However, as witch-hunts
continue, the theatre must have a voice like Miller’s
to protest the taking away of rights.    And, if such
messages must be given a life, then they should be
presented as brilliantly as the Shaw production!


‘THE HEIRESS’ gets as perfect a theatrical production
as one will experience


The year is 1850.   The setting is a well-appointed
parlor in New York’s very fashionable Washington
Square.  We are introduced to the Sloper family--an
embittered doctor who lost his wife in childbirth, his
widowed sister, and his extraordinarily shy daughter
(Catherine).  This is a family in which civility, a
lack of feelings, and frustrations are ever-present. 
Into this setting comes a handsome young bachelor
(Morris), a potential suitor for Catherine.  Is the
penniless man a fortune-hunter after Catherine’s money
or does he really love her?  Only the startling
conclusion reveals the answer.

Director Joseph Ziegler has created a well-thought out
production.  The play is well paced, clearly builds
the tensions, is perfectly acted, and leads the
audience to a collective verbal gasp at the
conclusion.

The sets and costumes are elegant.  

The drama and humor are perfectly keyed.  Michael Ball
creates a totally believable embittered Dr. Slopes. 
Tara Roisling is flawless in her portrayal of the
tortured Catherine.  Her transition in the closing
scene of the play is an acting tour-de-force.  Mike
Shara is such a cad as Catherine’s suitor that several
audience members booed as he came out for his curtain
call, unable to separate the actor from the role.  As
in ‘THE CRUCIBLE,’ the supporting cast is superb.

Shaw’s ‘THE HEIRESS” is as perfect a theatrical piece
as one will experience.


Hysterical  ‘LOVE AMONG THE RUSSIANS’


The words “Anton Chekhov” and “funny” are not usually
found in the same sentence.  Chekhov, the theatrical
voice that predicted major changes in Russia in the
early 1900s, is credited with being the foremost arts
commentator on the cracks in the veneer of the
aristocracy of the pre-Soviet Union.  As one of the
fathers of the realistic movement in the theatre, his
writing is often philosophical and is dramatic with
occasional humorous overtones.  What many people don’t
know is that Chekhov was a popular faceur. 
Interspersed between his “THREE SISTERS’ and ‘THE
CHERRY ORCHARD’ there were short plays with hilarious
glimpses of love and courtship, and  about peoples’
foibles beyond political and social lessons.

Two of Chekhov’s Russia-lite pieces are ‘THE BEAR’ and
‘THE PROPOSAL,’ which have been coupled by the Shaw
Festival into a 50-minute noon-time delight entitled,
‘LOVE AMONG THE RUSSIANS.’

Plot lines are really irrelevant here.  The important
matter is that Director Eda Holmes has created two 
hysterically funny, audience-loving, enjoyable
tidbits.  Only a person totally devoid of humor could
leave the tiny Court House theatre after seeing ‘LOVE
AMONG THE RUSSIANS’ and not have had a wonderful time.
   As a woman behind me said to her friend as we
exited, “I laughed so hard, I think I wet my panties.”
 Her friend responded, “I don’t have to think about
it, I know I did!”  What better commentary can I give
to this delightful production?


‘ARMS AND THE MAN’ done as a delightful farce 


A director of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘ARMS AND THE MAN’
has a decision to make.  Should the play be staged s a
comedy or as an outright no-holds barred farce?  The
former approach allows Shaw’s lines to carry the humor
and create the message.  The latter requires that the
audience be primed to laugh at what is happening on
stage, in other words, to laugh at the outlandishness
of the actors, the setting, and even the costumes. 
The message then sneaks in.

Jackie Maxwell, the Shaw’s Artistic Director, has
decided to present ‘ARMS AND THE MAN’ as a
no-holds-barred farce.  

The characters are so much bigger than life that they
are totally unbelievable.  The lines are so broadly
presented that everything short of holding up “laugh
now” signs are present. 

Even the costumes are overdone and outlandish.    The
flamboyant military uniforms are brilliant red and
decorated with numerous metals and braid.  The
brightly colored female costumes are harem
dancer-influenced, though the play takes place in 
Bulgaria.

The sets are also overdone.  A huge library,
supposedly the only library in the country, contains
less than ten carefully placed books.  Even the set
changes are overdone.

This is a production played for laughs, which
highlight Shaw’s usual messages including women’s
rights (“People don’t live up to their ideals.”), the
ridiculousness of the upper classes (“Everything I
think is mocked by everything I do.”), the stupidity
of war (“War is a sham, like love.”), and the
absurdity of existence (“Life’s a farce.”).

The story, into which the messages are encased,
concerns Raina, the wealthy young daughter of a rich
nobleman and her relationships with a pompous
weak-minded yet extremely handsome military bumbler as
well as the “Chocolate Soldier,” an intelligent,
charming mercenary who is befriended when he sneaks
into her bed chamber in order to avoid being killed by
her countrymen.  Through a series of unbelievable and
silly incidents, which is what farce is all about,
everyone and everything turns out exactly as it
should.

The production is a laugh-loaded delight.  Don’t go in
looking for the message, arrive ready to have a good
time and you’ll enjoy the goings-on.  If you don’t
like the outlandish, the over-the-top plea for laughs,
and slapstick comedy,  you’ll be utterly frustrated. 
If you trust Maxwell and her cast and you’ll have fun
and might accidentally learn something.

‘DESIGN FOR LIVING’ is Noel Coward at his best

Noel Coward is the crown prince of sophisticated
comedies.   

As a life-long friend of Alfred Lunt and his wife Lynn
Fontainne, often considered the most famous acting
couple in the English-speaking theatre, ‘DESIGN FOR
LIVING’ has a somewhat historical glow of the
menage-de-trois bisexual relationship between the
trio.

The play opened at the Hanna Theatre in Cleveland on
January 2, 1932 to rave reviews  before going to
Broadway, where the reaction was not quite as
positive.    

The show is a laugh delight as the trio trades
partners, insults and generally causes havoc in the
society and art worlds of New York, Paris and London.

The sets and costumes are wonderful.  The production
qualities are of equal excellence.  The cast is
well-balanced, play well off each other, and create a
grand-old-time for the audience.

‘HIGH SOCIETY’ misses the production mark

‘HIGH SOCIETY’ is the musical version of Philip
Barry’s play and George Cukor’s movie ‘THE
PHILADELPHIA STORY.’    A romantic love story, which
uses cleverness to hide darkness and underlying pain,
concerns a wealthy family’s attempts to find happiness
in all sorts of configurations.   Don’t get the idea
that this is a great script.  It’s not.  It fails to
live up to its birth sources.

Cole Porter is the crown prince of clever musical
theatre lyrics.  He writes outrageously fascinating
rhyme schemes.  In a unique twist, this musical’s
score wasn’t really written for this script.   In
1997, long after Porter’s death, Arthur Kopit, who
wrote the book, was given permission by the Porter
estate to draw freely from the composer’s songbook in
his quest to develop the story.   If necessary, words
were allowed to be adapted to help the song-script
union.  This unusual composing development permits
songs to be dropped in, rather than integrated into
the story.   The musical sounds often don’t fit
seamlessly into some of the scenes into which they
have been transplanted.  The result is a very choppy
show.

The Shaw’s production is not bad, it just isn’t great.
 The show has a Canadian form of aloofness which is
not the same as New England sophistication.  (Think
Katharine Hepburn as an illusion of what the lead
character should be.)   This is a play of polite
cleverness rather than out-and-out US American bite
and edge.

The singing voices are good, the visual illusions are
fine.  There is a degree of slapstick that doesn’t fit
the Porter, Barry or Cukor concept which bother my
sensibility, but probably won’t get in the way of many
enjoying the production.  

Melissa Peters steals the show as a youngster, wise
beyond her years, who manipulates the adults like a
master puppeteer. 


‘THE INVISIBLE MAN’ suffers from special effect lite
 

H. G. Wells perceived the future through a set of eyes
that saw images of what was going to be.  Many much of
his scientific and sociological visions have come true
in one form or another.  In his book ‘THE INVISIBLE
MAN,’ Wells created a situation in which a man could
take a drug and become invisible.  Though this hasn’t
been achieved yet, per se, such devices as x-rays,
MRIs have been developed to allow us to see into the
interior of humans.

The Shaw production gets waylaid by a series of
happenings.  Special effects in movies and on-stage
have become so vivid and real that anything less than
real and spectacular leave much to be desired. 
Staging the show in such an intimate theatre also
makes faking the needed illusionary effects
impossible.  In addition, Michael O’Brien’s script is
not well conceived.  The actions and ideas often don’t
flow clearly.  Adding to the problem is the size of
the Royal George Theatre’s tiny stage.  Everything
seems cramped and actors have to dodge around each
other, creating awkward stage pictures.

Of all the plays I saw at Shaw this season, ‘THE
INVISIBLE MAN’ was the weakest script and production
and the one which received the least applause from the
audience.

CAPSULE JUDGEMENT:  Shaw soars this season!  Of the
plays I saw, I’d strongly recommend ‘THE CRUCIBLE,’
‘THE HEIRESS,’ ‘LOVE AMONG THE RUSSIANS, ‘ARMS AND THE
MAN’ and ‘DESIGN FOR LIVING.’

Side note:  Be aware that the days of low cost due to
the high value of the American dollar against the
Canadian dollar, are over.  The exchange rate is
almost equal, dollar for dollar.  (If you are
interested in info about the whole theatrical season,
which runs well into November, and where to stay, what
to do and where to eat, go to www.royberko.info and
search in the 2006 review summaries for the Shaw
listings.)


Roy Berko's web page can be found at www.royberko.info.  His theatre and dance reviews appear on NeOHIOpal, an on-line source.   To subscribe to this free service via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.fredsternfeld.com/mailman/listinfo/neohiopal.

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