In 2008, the Shaw and the Stratford Shakespeare Festivals remain a study in contrasts. The first is aglow with quiet success while turmoil reigns at the second. The Shaw’s change of leadership in 2003 from Christopher Newton to Jackie Maxwell was smooth, and Newton is still a guest director. Last year at Stratford, general director Antoni Cimolino hired a triumvirate of artistic directors — Marti Maraden, Des McAnuff and Don Shipley — to replace departing AD Richard Monette because, he claimed, the job had grown so big.
Then this March both Maraden and Shipley resigned because, it seems, their views were being systematically ignored. This month McAnuff, the sole remaining AD, agreed to direct Guys and Dolls on Broadway, removing him from Stratford for four months before the 2009 openings. The local Stratford newspaper asked the obvious question, “Who’s at the Helm?,” wondering which of Cimolino’s statements is true: that the festival needs three ADs or that they can get by with only a part-time one. Cimolino claims everything is fine. Others beg to differ.
At the Shaw the top show is clearly Maxwell’s production of The Stepmother (*****) by Githa Sowerby. The recently discovered play from 1924 features an incandescent performance by Claire Jullien as a woman who, in spite of herself, overcomes her deference to her husband to realize her own self-worth. A second must-see is the lunchtime show The President (*****) by Ferenc Molnár, wittily adapted by Morwyn Brebner. This is the funniest play at either festival, and Lorne Kennedy’s amazing, rapid-fire performance leaves you breathless with laughter.
There is no clear third-best show. For work by Shaw, choose Mrs. Warren’s Profession (****) for its trenchant exploration of what parents and children owe each other. For a musical, choose Wonderful Town (****) by Leonard Bernstein with its delightful fairy-tale story of two Ohio girls in 1930s New York. For a rarity, see After the Dance (****) by Terence Rattigan, a gripping tale of a generation immune to the reality of approaching war, featuring a heartbreaking performance by Deborah Hay. The only show at a lower level is the musical A Little Night Music (***), in which director Morris Panych finds only comedy and not its essential bittersweetness.
Stratford’s season mixes stratospheric highs with abysmal lows. The top show is Euripides’ The Trojan Women (*****) directed by Maraden with the finest female cast imaginable, headed by the indomitable Martha Henry as Hecuba. The parallels of the victorious Greeks’ humiliation of their victims to today’s world are absolutely chilling. Next, Adrian Noble’s Hamlet (****) has in Ben Carlson the finest Prince of Denmark Stratford has seen in decades. The third must-see is the festival’s first-ever production of a Spanish Golden Age play, Fuente Ovejuna (****) by Lope de Vega. A town’s solidarity in battling its tyrannical ruler receives a thrilling production with heartfelt performances from the large ensemble cast.
Elsewhere there are superb individual performances. Christopher Plummer is magnificent as Caesar in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (***) but McAnuff’s direction is relentlessly superficial. American Brian Dennehy is mesmerizing in Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie (****), but less successful in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (***). Both musicals have problems. The Music Man (***) is frothy fun but Jonathan Goad shows only one side of his character. Cabaret (***) has wonderful performances from all five leads, but the production’s multiple concepts never cohere.
Definitely avoid McAnuff’s Romeo and Juliet (*), the worst production of the play in Stratford’s history, in which none of the actors have a clue what they are saying. Peter Hinton’s The Taming of the Shrew (*) so wilfully forces the play to be politically correct that there is no shrew, no taming and, hence, no comedy.