STRATFORD, ONTARIO — The star-crossed lovers typically pull focus in “Romeo and Juliet.” But in director Sam White’s simple if atypically violent new production this summer at the Stratford Festival of Canada, it’s the traumatizing parenting that haunts.
“My fingers itch,” says Graham Abbey’s especially nasty Capulet, threatening his teenage daughter as he wallows in self-pity. “Wife, we scarce thought us blessed that God had lent us but this only child; But now I see this one is one too much. And that we have a curse in having her.”
Great. Curse your kid. You trying have a good time cavorting on the balcony after hearing that from your dad.
Even working in Stratford’s flagship Festival Theatre, one of the greatest thrust theaters on the planet, the Detroit-based director doesn’t use flashy concepts or conceits. He just shows us, vividly and with total clarity, the impossible familial environment in which the two young lovers, played with palpable honesty by Jonathan Mason and Vanessa Sears, find themselves — not so much because of the now-cliched rivalry between the Montagues and the Capulets but due to their mutual lack of any kind of familial support system. Fathers, in particular, are rendered absent and cold; the kids have to make it up as they go along and they’re ill-equipped, of course, even with the help of well-meaning surrogates like Scott Wentworth’s Friar Laurence or Glynis Ranney’s Nurse. Their love is not so much transcendent as all they can manage under the circumstances; Romeo might love Juliet, and vice versa, but neither stands a chance in this production, a very striking, true-to-period take on William Shakespeare’s most mauled tragedy.
Maybe it was because I was in Stratford with my younger son, but the perils of parenting also is what hit me watching director Dean Gabourie’s production of Edward Albee’s “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?,” a searing, 24-year-old play that’s one of my favorite Albee works but one I’d not seen since Remy Bumppo Theatre Company’s excellent Chicago revival some 13 years ago, following an earlier production by Robert Falls at the Goodman Theatre.
If you have never had the pleasure, “The Goat” is about a successful man, a 50-year-old architect, who announces one day to his wife that he is having sex — heck, he’s also profoundly in love with — a cloven piece of livestock.
The play, staged in the most intimate of the Stratford venues, still demonstrates its continued capacity to shock. The audience likely was attracted by the presence of the superb Stratford star Lucy Peacock playing the Medea-like howling wife who receives all of this bad news, and she does disappoint. On a metaphoric level, “The Goat” is perhaps about our invasive plundering of the natural world. One might also see the hubristic man’s sexual predilection as a metaphor for the sudden shifts that can upend any mature marriage, even a great one: a vanilla affair, say, or a scandal (or “cancellation”) afflicting one partner, or even the drastic mental decline of one party or the other. In Stratford, the fine actor Rick Roberts visibly sets his jaw and grits his teeth, trying to see this absurdity from the point of view of the chaos agent who was its cause. Albee gives him some arguments to make. Are not we all now supposed to express our true selves?
But Albee’s fictional couple have a high school teenager dependent on his parents for his own mental well-being and, although I thought the actor in that role miscast, those scenes in the play remain the most devastating. On one level, the man’s humiliation makes him more vulnerable and thus better able to understand youthful sexual complexity. On another, he is failing in the sacred parental mission of keeping a child safe. Admirers of Albee well know, of course, that no one ends up unscathed in his plays. Least of all in this one.
As a balm for all this, Stratford is offering two musicals. One, “La Cage aux Folles,” also is about parenting. As fans of this masterful Harvey Fierstein/Jerry Herman tuner well know, the plot (based on the movie “The Birdcage”) is derived from the decision by a callow son to deny the role of his true second father, the Riviera drag queen Albin, all in the hope of impressing the puritan family of the young woman he hopes to marry.
The Stratford production, directed by Thom Allison, is of modest physical proportion and is generally a traditional and unremarkable staging with one exception: the star, Steve Ross. The emotional intensity of his Albin (I think the best I’ve ever seen) is something to see and hear, especially when combined with so rich a baritone. But what makes this performance truly remarkable is its generosity of spirit — it’s a loving display of great, selfless parenting and the personal cost that it so often extracts.
It stands in sharp contrast to Shakespeare and Albee. And this being a musical, the errant kid finally admits he has been wrong and corrects his mistake. Frankly, seeing “La Cage,” even for the umpteenth time, after this “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Goat” felt intensely cathartic.
What a glorious composition is this show with its insistence that the best of times has to be now, whatever the world is doing.
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None of the above, though, can claim to be Stratford’s biggest hit of the 2024 season. That distinction goes to “Something Rotten!,” which not only is the hit of the summer but, in the words of one insider, “maybe even the decade.” The silly spoof of Shakespearean exceptionalism has been packing the 1,800 seat Festival Theatre. At the sold-out Friday night performance I attended, the actors were interrupted by several standing ovations (the kind with actual integrity). For anyone who saw this show, with book by John O’Farrell and Karey Kirkpatrick, score by Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick, on Broadway, this comes as something of a surprise. In New York, “Something Rotten” felt like an ersatz son of “Spamalot,” only themed around Shakespeare. It had its moments, and two fabulously songs in “Welcome to the Renaissance” and “A Musical,” but it wore out its welcome with a dumb plot centered on the Bottom brothers trying to outdo the arrogant Shakespeare by consulting Nostradamus to find out the names of his biggest hit and the future of the theater. (The predictive dude does not anticipate the pandemic, being as this show got in under the wire.) Everything hinges on a musical game of telephone: Nostradamus thinks “Hamlet” is “Omelette” and things go downhill from there with the dancing eggs and spoons.
But hand this show to director Donna Feore, Canada’s premiere interpreter of musicals, roll out the big Stratford budget and, perhaps most importantly, set it in front of a mostly nerdy Canadian audience that gets all of its jokes and it’s a whole different beast. Feore has forged a very funny entertainment, anchored not always by the greatest singing but by four knockout comedic performances: Jeff Lillico as Shakespeare, Henry Firmstrom as Nigel Bottom, Juan Chiroan as Brother Jeremiah and, above all, Mark Uhre as Nick Bottom, a vulnerable bundle of ambition and pique and the formidable force that drives this production. The bespoke props and sight gags arrive in dizzying procession, each topping the one proceeding, and the whole frenetic shebang is packed with Easter eggs for fans of the genre. It’s a good time. But even here, there’s a lousy dad on the stage.
One final programing note: if you’re planing a trip you might want to wait for the opening of the festival’s marquee 2024 project, “Salesman in China,” a commissioned drama from Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy based on Arthur Miller’s real-life direction of his masterpiece “Death of a Salesman” in the China of 1983. It’s based on the memoirs of both Miller and the Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng and preview performances begin Sunday, while all else continues in repertory. The flowers in town are especially beautiful this year, too.
“Romeo and Juliet” runs through Oct. 26 in the Festival Theatre; “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?” runs through Sept. 29 in the Studio Theatre; “La Cage aux Folles” runs through Nov. 16 in the Avon Theatre; “Something Rotten!” runs through Nov. 17 in the Festival Theatre. Stratford Festival takes in five venues in and around Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Tickets and more information at www.stratfordfestival.ca
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
