The annual Shakespeare festival beckons, despite high gas prices

Hamlet

With the price of gas well over four dollars a gallon and apparently headed inexorably higher, and also considering the sometimes challenging process of crossing the border, is it still worth making the trip north to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival? Based on a recent two-day trip to Stratford, the answer is, most emphatically, yes.

The past

I first went to see a play at Stratford while a student at Bishop Turner High School, back in the late 1960s. We went from the school, now closed, in the Schiller Park area of the city, across the border—no big deal in those days—to Fort Erie, where we took a CN train to Stratford. It was a matinee performance of Romeo and Juliet for a largely, and looking back as an adult playgoer, I hope exclusively student audience. I dimly recall one of the actors stepping out of character to admonish the members of the audience—surely from some other school—to refrain from throwing objects (pennies?) at the actors. In any case, due to my early exposure to professionally acted performances of Shakespeare and, just as importantly, to the excellent teaching ability of my high school English teacher, the late Father Claude Bicheler, I have remained an avid playgoer, especially those of Shakespeare, as well as an avid reader of plays, again especially those of Shakespeare.

I have been going up to Stratford pretty much every year since, generally seeing a couple of plays a year. Some of the trips have been especially memorable. One summer, while a student at UB, I dated a girl from Buffalo State, and when that school offered a bus day trip to Stratford, I naturally jumped on the chance. The day was beautiful, and after a performance of A Midsummer’s Night Dream that was a pure delight, we all enjoyed a buffet at a popular, now mercifully defunct Stratford restaurant called the Victorian Inn. Did I mention that the place was now mercifully defunct? On the ride home, more than half the passengers on the full bus, including myself, developed severe food poisoning—bad potato salad.

More pleasant memories include a stellar performance in the early 1980s of Much Ado About Nothing that featured British film stars Brian Bedford and Maggie Smith as the battling lovers in what is perhaps Shakespeare’s wittiest comedy. Time marches on, and after her all-too-brief return to the stage at Stratford—where she was also superb in Chekhov—Maggie Smith returned to England and her international film career, while Bedford continued to grace the stage at Stratford. Just last year Bedford gave a powerful performance in the title role of King Lear. By chance, earlier on the day that we saw his performance, the actor William Hutt had died. Hutt was perhaps the Canadian actor most closely identified in the public eye with Stratford. He had given dozens of notable performances, particularly as Lear and as Prospero in The Tempest. Most members of the audience first learned about the death of Hutt at the play’s intermission. When Bedford returned to the stage after intermission, he called on the entire cast, including all the backstage production crew, to join him on stage. As he spoke movingly about Hutt and his legacy, Bedford asked the audience to join him, not in a minute of silence, but more fittingly, given Hutt’s larger-than-life stage presence, in a minute of applause for the late actor. No one who was there will ever forget Bedford’s tribute.

The present

Antoni Cimolino, in his first year as general director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, has assembled a particularly strong lineup of plays. At the flagship Festival Theatre, Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra with Christopher Plummer in the title role opens in August, joining the now running Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Hamlet. The Avon Theatre offers two long-running musicals, Cabaret and The Music Man, which have gotten very good reviews, as well as an internationally acclaimed German language production by the Deutsches Theater Berlin of Lessing’s classic Emilia Galotti for a very limited engagement in November. Love’s Labour’s Lost along with Euripides’ powerful The Trojan Women and Lope de Vega’s Spanish renaissance classic Fuente Ovejuna are now playing at the Tom Patterson Theatre, with There Reigns Love, based on Shakespeare’s sonnets opening in July.

The intimate Studio Theatre offers a double bill of Beckett’s enigmatic Krapp’s Last Tape, featuring Hollywood film star Brian Dennehy, who is joined by the Buffalo born off-Broadway actor Joe Grifasi in Eugene O’Neil’s Hughie, along with a new play, Palmer Park, by Joanna McClelland Glass, and an adaptation of Moby Dick by Morris Panych.

Director Adrian Noble, who served as artistic director of England’s Royal Shakespeare Company for a dozen years, makes his Stratford debut with Hamlet and he does not disappoint. The set designed by multiple Tony-award-winning designer Santo Loquasto makes very effective use of a pair of enormous doors at stage center. Lighting designer Michael Walton’s use of high-angled, coned lighting, and of on-stage spotlights for the cinematically presented play within a play sequence, aids the fast-paced action. Naturally, a successful performance of Hamlet depends on the actor who plays the part, and Ben Carlson, the ninth actor to perform the role at Stratford since 1953, is a superb Hamlet. Carlson, well known to Shaw Festival playgoers, projects a strong stage presence, less neurotic than understandably disturbed by the strange goings-on in Elsinore. As Claudius, Scott Wentworth, notable as Gloucester in last year’s King Lear, uses his stentorian voice to create a persona easily believable as the seducer of his brother’s wife. The lovely Maria Ricossa creates a Gertrude that helps explain Dr. Freud’s interest in Hamlet, while Adrienne Gould’s descent into madness as Ophelia is genuinely frightening. Geraint Wyn Davies’ toned-down Polonius is a refreshing change from the usual characterization.

Director Marti Maraden’s powerful production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, just over 90 minutes, may well be the must-see production at this year’s festival. Troy has been sacked by the Greeks, and the women of Troy are huddled together on the beach, waiting to find out to which of the Greeks they will now belong. After a brief prologue, the gods Poseidon and Athena (Nora McLellan, who gave a dynamite performance as Rose in Gypsy at the Shaw 2005 season) disappear, signifying that what happens next is no longer their concern. Now in her 34th season at Stratford, Martha Henry’s subtly restrained, emotionally charged portrayal of Hecuba, widow of Priam, the slain king of Troy and mother of Hector, the now also dead Trojan hero, may be the finest in her long and distinguished career. Seana McKenna as Andromache, the widow of Hector, conveys an intensity of anguish that is almost painful to watch when she learns what is to be the fate of her young son. Kelli Fox, who has often appeared at the Shaw, makes the madness of Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba a force of nature, while as Helen the exotic Yanna McIntosh uses her many skills, both verbal and physical, to convince the stony-faced Menelaus (Brad Rudy) to take her back, just as Hecuba predicted he would. The spare set, designed by John Pennoyer, uses just a very few items, such as a very low walkway for the gods and the impressively tall handcart decorated with the armor of Hector displayed on a crosspiece, on which Helen enters to great effect. The recorded score by Marc Desormeaux, who plays among other instruments the Celtic flute and the bodhran, helps create an ideal atmosphere for the ancient Greek tragedy.

When you go

Stratford Ontario is about 130 miles from Buffalo, with a minimum driving time of two and a half hours, without border delays. There is construction on the connector from the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge to the QEW that tends to slow things up, so the Peace Bridge has been a safer bet this year. Check this Web site for up-to-the-minute information: http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/general/times. There is also some construction on the QEW in St. Catharines and other highways, so allow enough time.

Having driven on a half dozen plus day trips to Stratford, I find the drive to be a bit of a grind, so I definitely prefer an overnight stay. Years past, there were very few hotels or motels to choose from, and most visitors stayed in simple bed and breakfasts. Nowadays, the bed and breakfasts have gotten a lot fancier and there are many new hotels and motels, and most places can be booked directly from the festival’s Web site: http://www.stratfordshakespearefestival.com.

The restaurant scene has also improved dramatically in the last decade or so. Years ago it was definitely not easy to find a nice place to eat, so my wife started making a cold picnic lunch and we have enjoyed having one ever since, with a nice bottle of wine, watching the swans in the beautifully maintained park along the Avon River. There are now a couple of dozen good restaurants serving a wide variety of cuisines in the Stratford area, ranging in price from the moderate to the very expensive, such as Rundles,which warns of an average cost “with a moderate amount of wine” of $110. Since I have never been able to figure out what “a moderate amount of wine” is, I will stick with our personal favorite, Fellini’s, where an excellent meal for two, with a nice bottle of wine and exceptionally fast, efficient service will cost you under $100 total.