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A
one hour drive from Buffalo, New York, or a two hour drive from Toronto,
Canada - at the spot where the Niagara river empties into Lake Ontario after
its spill over the famous falls, is a theater-lovers destination offering
unique pleasures both inside three delightful and varied venues and outside
along the streets, in the gardens and at the up-scale shops and restaurants
of a thriving resort.
The
Shaw Festival began in 1962 in a large hall on the second floor of an 1840s
building that had served as the courthouse for the region. The first year
saw only two shows running in repertory over eight weekends. Today, the
festival mounts ten full productions in three different theaters totaling
1,500 seats during a season that stretches from April to November. The
budget of the organization now reaches over $20 million (Canadian) and about 600
employees work to put on the shows featuring a company of 68 actors. Last
year the total attendance approached 300,000.
While originally devoted to performance of the works of George Bernard Shaw,
the "mandate" of the company has expanded to include works written during
his extraordinarily long life (1856-1950), and even to works dealing with
life during "the mandate period." Since they invented their mandate
themselves, they seem free to stretch it to accommodate many different
desires, and any given season will find classics from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries as well as lesser known works either by Shaw himself or
his contemporaries alongside more modern material that looks back on the
period.
Unique to the Shaw is the actor's company - an ensemble assembled for each
season but with many veterans who appear season after season. Unlike many an
actor's life, at least for a year as a member of this company, an actor has
a sense of job security for an extended period. Most appear in more than one
production simultaneously.
The
three theaters now in use include the main Festival Theatre, an 856-seat
proscenium house with seats in a twenty-row orchestra and a seven row
balcony with side boxes, the Royal George, a 328-seat converted
vaudeville house built during World War I which has sixteen rows in the
orchestra and a small balcony of four rows, and the 327-seat thrust-stage
Court House, where it all began in the imposing 1840s building across from
the brick clock tower shown above.
The
productions are solid, with strong acting, impressive design and often
providing audiences with the opportunity to see rarely performed pieces.
Here's a sampling from the 2006 season:
Fulfilling their
mandate to present the works of Shaw in the best light, the Festival
Theatre mounting of Arms and the Man gives audiences a chance to
experience Shaw's unmatched ability to make social commentary entertaining.
The tale of the love between a soldier who takes refuge in the chamber of an
innocent maid is given a fully satisfying performance by a skilled ensemble
on a trio of marvelous sets by Sue LePage.
Continuing with their
mandate, the production of Shaw's rarely performed
Too True to be Good at the Court
House Theater provides audiences the chance to see the other side of Shaw -
his similarly unrivaled habit of turning potentially entertaining material
into an excuse for social diatribes. A first act is simply delightful
as a microbe complains of having been given the measles by a patient in a
sick room (rather than the other way around). The second act has moments of
high humor as a soldier outsmarts his commanding officer, but often bogs down
over subplots concerning occupation policy and colonialism, while the third
act completely disintegrates into harangue.
Arthur Miller
wrote The Crucible some three years before George Bernard Shaw died,
so it qualifies for presentation. The production in the
Festival Theatre is notable in part for Paul Sportelli's dramatic incidental
musical accompaniment that turns hymns of the seventeenth century into a
kind of cacophony that falls on modern ears as dramatic and disturbing, just
right for this play that draws modern parallels to disturbing history.
In the Court House Theatre,
Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell directs a superb ensemble cast in the
unaccountably rarely performed drama,
The
Magic Fire by Lillian Groag, which premiered at the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival and came to the Kennedy
Center in 1998. A warmly humorous but touching drama, essentially a memory play, it
is set in Buenos Aires in the year that Eva Peron died. The family involved
are émigrés from war ravaged Europe finding some of the same terrors of
authoritarianism in their new land.
Even
musicals have made it to the Festival Theater where Cole
Porter's High Society is being
performed in a slightly
re-worked version of the stage adaptation which
featured Arthur Kopit's book and Susan Birkenhead's additional lyrics.
(Imagine writing lyrics to be added to a Cole Porter song. What chutzpa! She
did a great job of it.) The production probably disappoints a smaller
percentage of its audience here than it did during its brief four month run
on Broadway because of some judicious doctoring by director Kelly Robinson,
most notably the excision of the horribly inappropriate "Say It With Gin."
The set and costumes don't rival those of Broadway, but are colorful and
serviceable, and the new orchestrations prepared by musical director Paul Sportelli for a pit band of 13 are probably better suited to the production
than the Broadway charts were, for the Broadway version used dual electronic keyboards that
gave it too much of a 1990s sound for a musical set in the 1930s. Under
Robinson's hand, the show turns out to be a fun evening with a great score.
Also
playing this season are:
-
Design for Living by Noel Coward.
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Love Among the Russians, an evening of two of Anton Chekhov's short comedies,
The Bear and The Proposal.
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Rosmersholm, Henrik Ibsen's drama adapted and directed by Neil
Munro.
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The Heiress, Ruth and Augustus Goetz's stage version of Henry
James' novella
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The Invisible Man, a stage adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel by Michael
O'Brien.
Tickets aren't particularly inexpensive. The regular prices, in Canadian
currency, range from $45 to $86, but many special deals are available.
These include early purchase discounts, special rates for theater lovers under 30, special
performances (such as "Super Sundays" where evening performances are $45 or
even $35 if purchased along with tickets to matinees) and family packages of
youth tickets at half price when purchased with full price adult seats. |
