Proud to be Canadian ....

.... and related to two of these talented young Canadians!

My cousins, Willie and Grace Stratton with their band mates Kristen and Daniel, covering "O Canada" for Roots Canada.

A gift....

.

...from my garden to you.

Wilder classic the comic match for Stratford

Mike Shara, Laura Condlln, Seana McKenna, and Tom McCamus (Andrew Eccles photo)

The Matchmaker

Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Written by Thornton Wilder

Directed by Chris Abraham

Festival Theatre

Runs until October 27

Review by Geoff Dale

Why would a host of borrowed literary characters, dozens of time-honoured theatrical conventions and enough scenes of broad slapstick to make the likes of Abbott and Costello blush with envy have a Stratford Shakespeare Festival audience figuratively rolling in the aisles with laughter?

Check out The Matchmaker. Discover what all the roars of approval on opening night were all about and why an old chestnut that spawned one of the most popular Broadway musicals of all times 49 years ago is still a classic bit of farcical nonsense.

Despite the numerous twists and turns in the story and changes in locales from Yonkers to New York City, the plot is straightforward, as are its main protagonists.

An irascible, wealthy but penny-pinching store owner from Yonkers, Horace Vandergelder (Tom McCamus), a widower who plans to re-marry, refuses to let his niece Ermengarde (Cara Ricketts) marry her love, a poor artist Ambrose Kemper (Skye Brandon).

Matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi (Seana McKenna) pretends she is helping Vandergelder find a suitable bride, but is scheming to marry him herself. Meanwhile, Vandergelder’s beleaguered clerk Cornelius Hackl (Mike Shara), longing for excitement that includes kissing a girl for the first time, meets the woman of his dreams, a widowed New York milliner Irene Molloy (Laura Condlln). Ironically but predictably Molloy happens to be the one Vandergelder intends to marry.

Pulitzer Prize winning writer Thornton Wilder made no apologies for borrowing characters and even some scenes from other literary works with wild abandon. Dolly Levi came from French playwright Molière’s comedy L’avare.

Wilder referred to his play as a ‘‘free adaptation’’ of Johann Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich Machen , which was adapted from British playwright John Oxenham’s 1835 comedy A Day Well Spent.

Yet liberally pinching from others didn’t guarantee immediate success. His first adaptation – The Merchant of Yonkers – failed on Broadway in 1938, running for only 28 performances.

The Matchmaker, which was released as a film in 1958 with Shirley Booth (Hazel), Paul Ford (Sergeant Bilko) and a pair of youngsters Shirley MacLaine (The Apartment)  and pre-Psycho Anthony Perkins, was adapted as Hello, Dolly!, which began in 1963 and became one of Broadway’s longest-running musicals.

The Stratford Company, expertly guided by director Chris Abraham and his talented technical crew, have a theatrical field day with the old standard, reveling in broad characterizations, tipping over chairs and tables, exploding tomatoes and delightfully unveiling and racing through scene after scene of utter confusion that would have made the Marx Brothers proud.

McCamus is at his scene-stealing best, chewing up and spitting out his dialogue in almost vaudevillian fashion. Even without a song in her heart, McKenna makes you forget Barbara Streisand for the evening, perhaps even relegating Booth to the status of distant memory.

As the hysterical funny innocent Hackl, Shara almost tops the first-rate buffoonery he trotted out earlier in the week in Cymbeline. Geraint Wyn Davies, as Malachi Stack, is a delightful drunkard in search of momentary employment. Condlln is a wonderfully entertaining Molloy while Ricketts and Brandon round out the class nicely in what are essentially minor roles.

And what about all those theatrical conventions? They are still there and handled with great ease and comic skill by the wonderful cast. So if you’re looking for characters hidden under tables and in closets, men disguised as women and a convoluted conspiracy to bring young lovers together and result in a happy marital ending, the Festival Theatre is the place to be until October 27.

**** out of 4 stars.

Approximate running time: 2 hours and 45 minutes

Tickets: 1-800-567-1600 or online http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/

This review is also posted online at:  the beat magazine

Pirates on an oddly uneven voyage

Kyle Blair as Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance. (Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann) 

The Pirates of Penzance

Stratford Shakespeare Festival

By W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

Directed by Ethan McSweeny

Musical direction by Franklin Brasz

Set design by Anna Louizos

Avon Theatre

Runs until October 27

Review by Geoff Dale

Given the Festival’s past stellar record with Gilbert and Sullivan productions, it’s fair to say that neither the late and much lamented D'Oyly Carte Opera Company nor Queen Victoria would have been particularly amused with this year’s rendition of the rollicking The Pirates of Penzance.

After all, it’s been 18 long years since the company last tackled the wonderfully witty Victorian satire of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, so one might have expected something a tad more than the uneven presentation the Festival has dished up of one of the duo’s most famous operettas.

So what exactly happened opening night? To be fair, the production has its share of ups and down.

First the good – first time G&S director Ethan McSweeny is true to the essentials of the story both in locale and content. The plotline remains virtually intact and the action thankfully still takes place along the coast of Cornwall.

Frederic is destined to be an apprentice of a pilot but his nursemaid Ruth mistakes her master's wish for the young man to pursue adventure as a pirate.

Years later, the 21-year-old Frederic is ready to leave his pirate comrades. Ruth pleads with him to take her with him. He agrees but then spots the frolicking daughters of the Major-General, falling in love with their obvious charms. He rejects Ruth. While most of the young ladies shy away because of his pirate past, Mabel is won over.

The plot caveat is his lingering sense of duty as a pirate and a cleverly concocted trap that involves a leap year birthday.

Musical director Franklin Brasz successfully captures the robust whimsy of the familiar score; Steve Ross is an engaging sergeant of the police; Kyle Blair’s Frederic is a delightful yet innocent seeker of adventure, while Amy Wallis, as she did as Lucy in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, shows once again – this time as Mabel – that she possesses one of the finest set of pipes the festival is showcasing this year.

One more positive – the incorporation of elements of the Steampunk movement into the basic design is both successful and unique. In McSweeney’s own words in the program notes:

“I was thrilled to learn more about these retro-futurists in our midst and to incorporate into the design parts of their glorious expression of neo-Victoriana through the lens of Jules Verne. I think an important aspect of Steampunk is its efforts to render increasingly invisible and virtual world into ostensible and visible machines.”

A bit wordy perhaps but McSweeny got it right on that score.

On the down side is C. David Johnson’s bumbling Major-General Stanley. For the most part he gets much of the nonsensical aristocratic posturing, and even the accent but he stumbles badly in the delightful and usually show-stopping I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major- General, garbling much of the humorously awkward phrasing while appearing to be at least two beats behind the orchestra as the number comes to a conclusion.

Sean Arbuckle has moments as Thomas the Pirate King but a little more along the lines of a swashbuckling Errol Flynn might have given his character more gusto. Gabrielle Jones is a fun performer to watch but as Ruth, she seemed to be endlessly playing about with accents from different regions of the British Isles.

With largely perfunctory choreography and middling stock characterizations, the 2012 Pirates probably has some G&S aficionados sadly longing for a return to the glory years and the likes of the late Eric Donkin, the boisterous antics of Douglas Chamberlain and the gangly nimble-footed Richard McMillan.

Eighteen years is a long wait for such a so-so musical voyage.

**1/2 out of four stars.

Approximate running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes

Tickets: 1-800-567-1600 or online http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/

This review is also posted online at:  the beat magazine

The drive home from the dentist

Our dentist's office is about a 35 minute drive from where we live.  I rarely complain about the drive because I get to see scenes like this.

Cymbeline a stunning jewel in the Festival’s crown

Geraint Wyn Davies (centre) as Cymbeline with members of the company in Cymbeline. (Photo by David Hou)

Cymbeline

Stratford Shakespeare Festival

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Antoni Cimolino

Tom Patterson Theatre

Runs until September 30

Review by Geoff Dale

If you’d had any qualms up to this point in time about celebrating the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s 60^th season, the reason to dispel any ill-conceived notions of not attending officially arrived this week in one simple word – Cymbeline.

For three glorious hours in the intimacy of the Tom Patterson Theatre, director Antoni Cimolino, a gifted acting company and a bold technical crew held a packed house spellbound opening night with one of Shakespeare’s most compelling yet often ignored works.

A multi-layered romantic comedy with splashes of intense tragedy, blazing battle scenes and even a thunder and lightning accompanied appearance of the god Jupiter, the plot focuses on Cymbeline, King of Britain, who marries a widow with an arrogant son Cloten.

The King expects his beautiful daughter Innogen to marry the cloddish Cloten but instead she secretly weds the poor but proud Posthumus Leonatus.

Before Posthumus is banished from Britain and leaves for Rome, the couple exchanges love tokens with Innogen giving him a diamond ring while he presents her a bracelet. The villainous Iachimo wagers 10,000 ducats against the ring that he can seduce Innogen.

Although Cymbeline has inexplicably fallen from grace in some circles over the years, the play is arguably one of the Bard’s most magnificently constructed pieces – a wonderfully complex play with over-lapping plot lines brimming with deceit, cross-dressing, poison, treachery and even moments of laugh-aloud humour.

The text is as rich and full as one will find in any of Shakespeare’s more famous works:

No more, you petty spirits of region low,

Offend our hearing; hush! How dare you ghosts

Accuse the thunderer, whose bolt, you know,

Sky-planted batters all rebelling coasts? – Jupiter (Act V, Scene 1V)

A master craftsman, Cimolino skillfully guides his company and, ultimately the audience, through the revealing first act, with the opening scene firmly planted in the middle of the action.

Playing with and delineating the complexities about to unfold throughout the lengthy production, he sets the giddy pace for a wonderful journey of exploration that becomes even more intense in the second act.   

The battle scenes staged by fight director Todd Campbell are nothing short of spectacular. Loud, gripping and exuberant, the actors do not miss a step in these action-packed moments of mayhem.

Lighting designer Robert Thomson and his crew bring Jupiter to life in vivid sky-shattering fashion, ensuring the sequence is one filled with awe, terror and mythological majesty.

The actors are picture perfect with Tom McCamus a delightfully evil Iachimo; Yanna McIntosh a subtly evil scheming Queen; Geraint Wyn Davies a grandiose King Cymbeline torn apart by wildly conflicting emotions arising from continuously evolving plotlines.

Posthumus – one of the play’s most physical demanding roles – is handled with both grace and power by Graham Abbey. Eloquence and truth ring from the lines of one of his moving monologues:

Is there no way for men to be, but women

Must be half-workers? We are all bastards,

And that most venerable man which I

Did call my father was I know not where

When I was stamped.

Cara Ricketts is both beautiful and endearing as Innogen and convincingly boyish in her cross-dressing role as a page. The complete opposite, Mike Share offers up a comic masterpiece as the none-too-bright Cloten, evoking some much-deserved heckles and boos from audience members at curtain call.

The gifted trio of John Vickery, E.B. Smith and Ian Lake, as Belarius, Guiderius and Arviragus respectively, add even more intrigue and touches of almost slapstick comic relief, in yet another sub-plot weaving its way into the main core.

Brian Tree, a Festival favourite fan for many a year, lands a juicy role he can sink his teeth into as the loyal Pisanio. Along the way, the veteran actor displays some remarkable physical skills, taking two nasty tumbles at the hands of his assailants that might have crumpled a lesser actor, even one much younger.

Stephen Page’s music is an added bonus to the production, adding ideally-suited mood to the Bard’s literary magic.

Cimolino and company should be justifiably proud of this magnificent achievement – an unforgettable moment in the Festival’s 60^th anniversary celebrations and quite simply theatre at its finest. **** out of 4 stars.

Approximate running time: 3 hours

Tickets: 1-800-567-1600 or online http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/

This review is also posted online at:  The Beat

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You’re an even better dog, Snoopy

Snoopy (Stephen Patterson) is set to do air battle with the infamous Red Baron. (Cylla von Tiedermann photo)

You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown

Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Presented by Schulich Children’s Plays

Book, music and lyrics by Clark Gesner

Additional dialogue by Michael Mayer

Additional music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa

Directed and choreographed by Donna Feore

Avon Theatre

Runs until October 28

Review by Geoff Dale

When Charles Schultz started a cartoon strip for the St. Paul Pioneer Press back in 1947 he called it L’il Folks. It flopped.

Three years later he repackaged the material, selling it to the United Features Syndicate, which promptly changed the name to Peanuts. While the name stuck, Schultz initially disliked the new title because he felt it lacked “dignity and significance.”

Nonetheless it’s been around in various forms of print, screen and stage for more than six decades.

In 1967 the lean but very popular musical production You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown hit the off-Broadway circuit with the likes of Gary Burghoff (M.A.S.H.) as the round-headed hero Charlie and Bob Balaban (Seinfeld, Gosford Park) as the security blanket hugging Linus.

After taking in the opening night of the Stratford Festival’s charming version of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, Schultz might have opted for yet another name switch – this time perhaps choosing You’re A Good Dog, Snoopy.

With all due respects to the fine company of  young actors/singers/dancers portraying the other five characters, it was simply that the two-hour musical ended up being something of a showcase for the brilliantly funny and extremely agile Stephen Patterson in the role of Charlie’s independent-minded dog – a canine that clearly lives in his own separate dimension.

The cynics among us might suggest that Snoopy’s bravado number atop his doghouse called Suppertime, was a tad over-the-top, and with some justification. When his simply-structured wooden home split wide open, revealing a staircase for the canine to do a dazzling dance down, it appears as if the household pet had transported himself back in time – specifically to Tuesday’s opening night of 42^nd Street.

That aside, the third-year Festival veteran Patterson – who previously appeared in Camelot, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jacques Brel in Stratford and Les Misérables on Broadway– charmed the audience of both young and old, demonstrating he is a virtuoso musical star of considerable merit.

Along for the ride was Ken James Stewart as the ever-hopeful yet never-fulfilled Charlie Brown – a youthful case of depression that would have any shrink, aside from Lucy, licking his/her lips with anticipation.

Erica Peck shows that her Lucy, while raising bossiness and self-centeredness to a high art form, also proves without question to be the premiere singer of the troupe – a vocalist with equal measures of power, control and emotion wallop.

Andrew Schroeder’s Beethoven-loving Schroeder is not only true to Schultz’s creation but also, thanks to some generous musical updates, comes off with a bit of a swagger and youthful hipness lacking in earlier characterizations.

Still woefully insecure but sheepishly philosophical, Kevin Yee is a delightfully mixed-up Linus, strutting his stuff in the number My Blanket and Me.

Charlie’s younger sister Sally, as played by Amy Wallis, has moments of youthful rebellion but sadly has to contend, along with Schroeder, with the underwhelming song My New Philosophy.

Michael Gianfrancesco’s relatively simple set and the video work of Sean Nieuwenhuis complement the company’s theatrical efforts focusing on love, frustration and friendship, although at times some of the visuals come off as minor distractions in need of being toned down.

Director/choreographer Donna Feore (Oliver, Oklahoma) clearly knows her stuff, ultimately creating a lively, engaging and energetic package that should please all family members throughout its run until late October.

While a good portion of the music may not be in the realm of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, there are enough catchy pieces to keep the pace moving along quite briskly for two hours.

In the end, how can anyone resist the aeronautic marvels of World War 1 ace pilot Snoopy as he does battle with the nefarious Red Baron?

A fun evening for the whole family gets *** out of 4 stars.

Approximate running time: 2 hours

Tickets: 1-800-567-1600 or online www.stratfordfestival.ca

This review is also posted online at: The Beat