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    Canada’s Stratford and Shaw Festivals Revive Four Classic Works

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    At the Stratford and the Shaw theater festivals, four heated classics get cool new productions for summer.STRATFORD, Ontario — “All’s Well That Ends Well” is one of Shakespeare’s least-loved comedies. “Gaslight” is a hopeless old melodrama purveying woman-as-victim tropes. And “Chicago” is so covered with Bob Fosse’s fingerprints — or are they footprints? — that the musical can hardly be imagined without him.Yet on a recent trip to Canada — six days here at the home of the Stratford Festival and another day in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the Shaw Festival performs — I saw all three of those shows successfully remade. I also saw one classic, “Richard III,” successfully left alone.Is there something healthful to revivals in the air up here? The productions run through the end of October, so you have time to find out for yourself.Stratford’s “All’s Well,” at the brand-new Tom Patterson Theater, was perhaps the biggest surprise. As usually performed, it is the distasteful tale of a callow playboy named Bertram who treats the friend who loves him — Helen, a young “gentlewoman” of his mother’s household — as a discardable childhood toy. And though Helen eventually gets her revenge, employing a textbook “bed trick” to snare him, that too feels icky.Indeed, “All’s Well” often comes off as a Shakespearean supercut. Bertram’s mother, a recently widowed countess, retails Polonius-like pearls of wisdom; a fop soldier gets a Malvolio-like comeuppance; and the dying King of France is magically rescued from apparent death like 32 other characters in the canon.But with vibrantly detailed performances under the direction of Scott Wentworth, the Stratford production turns the problems into assets. Bertram (Jordin Hall) isn’t frivolous; on the brink of manhood, he’s terrified of being trapped by his past. Likewise, Helen (Jessica B. Hill) draws on the anguish, verging on rage, that is the other side of a crush. That you want the best for both of them — and even for the poor fop (Rylan Wilkie) — makes the conflicts more compelling.A subtler transformation has turned the countess (Seana McKenna, superb) and the king (Ben Carlson, likewise) from stock dotards into complex characters. This is achieved less by rethinking motivations than by burrowing into the language, far richer than I imagined. The updating of the period — which from Michelle Bohn’s Edwardian costumes appears to be World War I — is just enough to provide the actors with recognizable social situations (a funeral, a farewell) that make the verse feel purposeful instead of just pretty. For pretty, there are restless Satie-like piano études by Paul Shilton.“All’s Well” is thus revealed as less of a knockabout romp than a moving look at the stages of maturity: how it is at first avoided at all costs, then pursued uncertainly and, eventually, for the lucky, achieved with dignity if not a little rue.Jennifer Rider-Shaw as Velma Kelly in a revival of “Chicago,” directed by Donna Feore, who replaced Fosse’s choreography with her own.Cylla von TiedemannWalking a few blocks along the Avon River — yes, that’s its real name — brings you from the Tom Patterson to the Festival Theater, where “Chicago,” directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, is playing. Feore is the first person permitted by the show’s rights holders to replace Fosse’s choreography in a major production; as she has shown in previous Stratford musical revivals, including “Guys and Dolls” and “The Music Man,” she makes every new step count.But actually, she’s not very interested in steps, as Fosse so distinctively was. (His style is much the same no matter the material.) Rather, she builds on social dance of the period, the late 1920s, to tell the story she’s chosen to highlight. That story is less about the cynicism of the American justice system — how two “merry murderesses” (Jennifer Rider-Shaw and Chelsea Preston) get off the hook by turning their crimes into showbiz — than about women negotiating the tricky new landscape of independence and prohibition.So when six incarcerated women perform the “Cell Block Tango,” we see their men getting bumped off — and they look as if they deserved it. And when Hunyak, the immigrant who maintains her innocence to the end, is nevertheless executed, Feore stages the scene as an aerial act, having the doomed woman (Bonnie Jordan) descend from the top of the theater on a satiny ribbon that becomes her noose. I won’t reveal how Billy Flynn, the self-serving lawyer played by Dan Chameroy, departs.Still, this “Chicago” is a mostly joyful take, as is nearly inevitable with full sets and costumes instead of the bleak aesthetic of the long-running Broadway revival. (With everyone wearing black in that production, it can sometimes seem like a super-chic sorority wake.) Feore has apparently drawn inspiration instead from the great Kander and Ebb song “All That Jazz,” which starts the show on a note of liberation: “Oh, I’m no one’s wife/but, oh, I love my life.”That sentiment is nothing you’d expect to find in “Gaslight,” the 1938 Patrick Hamilton thriller about a woman driven nearly insane by her husband. In earlier versions of the story, including the 1944 George Cukor film, the wife, Bella, is a bewildered victim of psychological torture and a mostly passive participant in the escape from her husband, Jack. She’s rescued by a police detective, whom we understand she may marry next.André Morin as Jack and Julie Lumsden as Bella in a revamp of the classic thriller “Gaslight” at the Shaw Festival.David CooperBut in Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson’s complete revamp along feminist lines for the Shaw Festival, there’s little left of the original but the gaslit Victorian setting and the general theme of mind control. Even that is now a two-way street. Bella (Julie Lumsden) soon understands what Jack (André Morin) is doing, and fashions a plan to turn the tables. With no police detective in sight, she must rescue herself, with just a doughty maid (Kate Hennig) to help.Normally when producers find material broadly objectionable, I think they should simply not produce it. (There are plenty of new plays that need to be staged.) This “Gaslight,” though, makes a convincing case for the renovation, not because it is palatable to our tastes but because it is so satisfying as genre drama. It doesn’t hurt that the production, directed by Kelli Fox, is taut and luscious — the set and costumes are by Judith Bowden — with Lumsden particularly compelling as a woman waking up to her powers.Whether the revision can become a new classic is yet to be seen. It could certainly take a shot at Broadway, where the original, under the title “Angel Street,” ran for three years in the 1940s.But which works manage to last, and why, remains a great mystery. Though it certainly helps to have Shakespeare on the title page, even he is buckling under pressures of representation and fairness. “The Merchant of Venice” is antisemitic, “The Taming of the Shrew” is sexist, “Othello” is arguably both sexist and racist.This year seems to find “Richard III” on the block. When it opened the first Stratford festival in 1953, no one blinked at having Alec Guinness, who was not disabled, play a king who famously was. But when the play, in a nice touch of symmetry, opened the new Tom Patterson this summer, in a production starring Colm Feore — he’s Donna Feore’s husband — I felt torn. I had just seen the Public Theater’s garbled take in Central Park, in which Danai Gurira played the title role without any acknowledgment of Richard’s disability.Colm Feore in “Richard III” at Stratford. His performance, our critic writes, is “superb in a very cool and traditional reading.”David HouFeore more than acknowledges Richard’s body. In some ways that’s what this production, directed by Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director, is about. Cimolino frames the action with the discovery of what is most likely the king’s skeleton in 2013. Feore walks with one leg turned at almost a 90-degree angle, causing him to lurch wildly and, at some performances, fall over. If that weren’t enough to make plain the importance of disability in this production’s conception of the character, the scoliotic curvature of Richard’s spine is sewn into his costumes, designed by Francesca Callow.One ought not like it. Even if you believe, as I do, that someday everyone should be able to play anyone, there are too many disabled actors who rarely get work to give a plum role like Richard to somebody else.And yet, what can I say? Feore is superb in a very cool and traditional reading of the role. (He barely raises his voice, or needs to, thanks to the Patterson’s phenomenal acoustics.) His internalization of Richard’s disability seems complete, accurate and uncondescending. The supporting cast, most of whom appear in “All’s Well” at alternate performances, is unusually fine, especially the quartet of women whom Richard widows, taunts, haunts, marries or murders. Actually, in this production, it’s a quintet of women: The assassin he hires to do his worst deed — the killing of the boy princes who stand in his way — is no longer James Tyrell but Jane. Chillingly, she is the only person onstage you believe Richard actually loves.Despite that alteration, and the contemporary framing device, this remains a conventional revival in the best sense: It restores the power of the story by keeping faith with its words. That’s what makes all the Canadian revivals I saw so powerful. (Well, OK, there was a middling “Hamlet.”) If there’s something in the air here promoting that quality, it’s the repertory system: Stratford, still returning to full strength after the pandemic shutdown, has 10 productions running this season; Shaw has 11. Talk about maturity! Most things get better the more you do them.Stratford Festival“All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Chicago” and “Richard III” are in repertory through Oct. 30. Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca.Shaw Festival“Gaslight” is in repertory through Oct. 8. Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario; shawfest.com. More

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      In a New Take on ‘Gaslight,’ a Heroine Finds Her Own Way

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      NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario — Nobody is coming to rescue Bella Manningham. And that’s a good thing.Bella, the damsel in seemingly self-inflicted distress at the center of “Gaslight,” has been a source of pity among theater and film audiences for more than 80 years. But when Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson dusted off the 1938 Patrick Hamilton melodrama, set in 1880, for this year’s Shaw Festival, they envisioned a very different fate for their heroine.“We didn’t want to change the rules of Victorian society and how they affected women,” Wright said. “Our question was: Is there a way for her to play by these rules and win?”And so they embarked on an ambitious reboot of the play, keeping the spooky setting (a Victorian sitting room) and the basic premise (is Bella losing her mind?), but jettisoning one major character. Gone is Detective Rough, the canny inspector who sets everything straight and explains it all to poor, poor Bella. The result is a total overhaul, complete with a nifty Act I curtain that forces audiences to spill into the lobby, sputtering, “What should she do now?”Ingrid Bergman as a wife pushed to the verge of madness, with Joseph Cotten as the London detective who solves the case, in George Cukor’s 1944 film version of “Gaslight.”Warner Bros. Those smothering rules weren’t confined to the action onstage, said the “Gaslight” director Kelli Fox. “I think the play was originally written for an audience who still expected that demure version of womanhood,” she said. “They wanted a story about a male hero coming to the rescue.”To some degree, current events have made “Gaslight” more topical but also more predictable. Its very title gives an indication of just how much trust the audience should put in Jack, Bella’s ever-solicitous husband. In fact, the term “gaslighting” — psychologically manipulating people into questioning their own sanity — draws its origins from the play, in which the household’s gas lights flicker and dim on the evenings when Bella is alone, causing her to question her own sanity.The concept lived on in psychological circles for decades but only burbled into mainstream society in recent years, to the point where the American Dialect Society honored the word as “most useful/likely to succeed” in 2016.“The weird thing,” Wright said, “is that we started writing this before ‘gaslighting’ became a big thing in the news. Maybe we sensed it was coming.”In her review of the play for The Toronto Star, Karen Fricker called it “a very satisfying piece of theatrical reinvention,” suggesting that theatergoers “bring a smart friend to this show to share the fun afterwards of combing through what happened, picking up cues and evidence in retrospect.”“Gaslight” is one of a handful of plays at the Shaw Festival, held in this bucolic town 20 miles north of Niagara Falls in honor of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, to grapple with the idea of gender and femininity this year.Also at the Royal George Theater is Rabindranath Tagore’s one-act “Chitra,” based on a tale from the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, about a warrior princess who temporarily sheds her “manly” tendencies to attract a world-renowned archer. And the festival will expand to its full 11-show repertory next month to include one of August Wilson’s century cycle plays, “Gem of the Ocean,” which features the matriarch to end all matriarchs: the 285-year-old Aunt Ester Tyler. All three works will then run through early October.For Kimberley Rampersad, who both directed and choreographed “Chitra,” the 1892 play (translated into English from the original Sanskrit in 1913) was a natural fit for the festival: “Shaw and Tagore were both polymaths, and you can feel their politics coursing through their words,” she said. But it is also a reminder that such fits can be found outside the Western canon. “I picked this not to be disrespectful but to prove a point,” she said.Chitra’s gender fluidity had resonated with Rampersad since she was a young girl: “My parents call me their ‘boy child’ — I know, I know — and my father told me, ‘There is a play about you.’” (In the sort of dizzying cross-casting that is common at the Shaw Festival, Rampersad is also playing the decidedly and eternally feminine Lola in “Damn Yankees,” which also features Jamieson, the “Gaslight” co-writer, in its cast.)Gabriella Sundar Singh, center, as Chitra, with members of the corps in “Chitra.”David CooperFor “Gaslight,” Jamieson and Wright said they had originally planned to simply diverge from Hamilton’s play here and there, but soon realized that a gut renovation was needed to tell the story they wanted to tell. “I don’t know if there’s any original dialogue left in our version,” Wright said.Another modification involved adding some shadings of good and evil among the play’s female characters. One of the day-to-day stresses that Bella faces is a “new girl,” a housekeeper who is at the very least impertinent and lazy — and possibly a good bit worse.“It’s pretty boring to make this just a battle of the sexes,” Wright said.That battle was central to several works by Shaw, who is considered the first major playwright to depict what became known as the New Woman. (Rampersad said her initial exposure to his works came from reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which takes a sympathetic view toward sex work. She remembers thinking, “A man wrote this?”)Much has been made of the Shaw Festival’s evolving “mandate,” which originally confined its repertory to Shaw and works written during his (usefully long) lifetime. The mandate then expanded to newer works set during Shaw’s life, then grew again to include essentially any play that Shaw might have liked.As it happens, “Chitra” and “Gaslight” both qualified under the original parameters. (Shaw died in 1950.) But Fox, who spent many years in the Shaw Festival acting ensemble before shifting her focus to directing, remembers feeling hamstrung by many of the roles she was offered here and elsewhere. “There was a time in my mid-30s when I said, ‘I would like to stop playing a naïve child now. Can I be a woman?’”As it happens, one such part was out there. It just hadn’t been rewritten yet. More