Stratford and the Shaw Festival: New and Old

The company of Forgiveness. (Photo: David House.)

Stratford’s production of Forgiveness (at the Tom Patterson Theatre), Hiro Kanagawa’s adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s book Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, marks the Canadian play’s eastern premiere. (It has been staged in Vancouver and Calgary.) The play’s dual protagonists are Mitsue Sakamoto (played by Yoshie Bancroft), and Ralph MacLean (Jeff Lillico), whose lives were shaped irrevocably by their World War II experiences. Ralph grew up on the Magdalen Islands in Quebec and lied about his age to get away from his abusive alcoholic father and join the first Canadian unit stationed in Japan, before Canada and the U.S. declared war in the wake of Pearl Harbor. He was captured and spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. Mitsue and her Japanese family were deprived of their citizenship rights and forced to leave their home in British Columbia in 1942, first for an internment camp and then to harvest sugar beets on a farm in the Prairies, laboring long hours for a pittance; their initial “home” was a converted chicken coop. The ban wasn’t lifted until four years after the end of the war. What links these two stories together is the romance that flared up in Calgary, where the two main characters wound up, between Mitsue’s son Stan (Leon Quin at the performance I attended, standing in for Douglas Oyama) and Ralph’s daughter Diane (Allison Lynch). The author, Sakamoto, is their shared grandson.

Summer Musicals

Mary Antonini as Reno Sweeney and the cast of Anything Goes. (Photo: David Cooper.)

This article includes reviews of musicals at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as well as at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine.

Anything Goes opened on Broadway in 1934 and proved to be Cole Porter’s biggest hit until Kiss Me, Kate nearly a decade and a half later; it ran for 420 performances, hefty for the time. But it just escaped turning into a fiasco because the book Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, writing from different cities, cobbled together was so scattershot that the producer, Vinton Freedley, asked the director, Howard Lindsay, to rewrite it. With the collaboration of Russel Crouse he did so in three weeks, while the show was in tryouts out of town, and that’s the version audiences saw whenever it was produced over the next half-century. Lewis Milestone made a sweet movie of it in 1936 with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, (the leading lady of the Broadway production), though I suspect even many Porter devotees don’t know it. (The 1956 M-G-M movie with Crosby, Donald O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor, has nothing in common with the show except the title and, in the opening section, a shipboard setting.) There was only one major revival, off-Broadway in 1962, which cut a few of the songs and interpolated others from the Porter archive, like “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue (which has become a permanent addition) and “Take Me Back to Manhattan” from The New Yorkers. When it finally returned to Broadway in 1987, with Patti LuPone in the Merman role, Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman rewrote it, staying faithful to the spirit of the original but making their own emendations to the score. This is the Anything Goes that Kathleen Marshall directed triumphantly in a 2011 Broadway revival starring Sutton Foster and Joel Grey, and it’s the one graced by an ebullient production at the Shaw Festival this season (in their Festival Theatre) directed and choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad.

Reductio ad Absurdum—Omniscient Reader

Lee Min-ho (center) as Yoo Joonghyuk in Omniscient Reader: The Prophet. (All accompanying photos are stills from the movie's trailer.)

No film adaptation can replicate a story entirely, and some tradeoffs have to be made. Adaptation screenwriters need to seek out what they believe to be the core themes and plotline of the story and find a way to mesh them with cinematic grammar, maybe sprinkling in some Easter eggs if they can. But what if that story is really freaking long and has multiple core themes? What if it’s currently being serialized into another medium so successfully that the latter is considered equally as canonical as the original?

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (Jeonjijeong dokja sijeom / 2025, aka Omniscient Reader: The Prophet) is based on the best-selling Korean serialized webnovel of all time, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (2018–2020), by the married duo singNsong. The main story has 551 chapters (you read that right), with a handful of one-shot side stories and an ongoing sequel which, as of this writing, has added another 358 chapters. The main story was later revised and released on paper in 20 volumes. Charles Dickens could never. ORV is also currently being adapted into what’s called a webtoon, basically a manga that imitates the scroll of a website rather than the turning of pages.

Stratford and the Shaw Festival II: Shaw

Gabriella Sundar Singh as Barbara Undershaft in the Shaw Festival's current production of Major Barbara. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Is Major Barbara Shaw’s masterpiece? The main contenders would be Heartbreak House and Man and Superman, but when I saw Joseph Ziegler’s centennial revival of Major Barbara twenty years ago – with Diana Donnelly as Barbara, the young Salvation Army major, and Benedict Campbell as her estranged father, Andrew Undershaft, co-head of an armaments empire given the complexly ironic name of Lazarus and Undershaft – I was staggered. Ziegler’s gorgeous, immense production – it unfolded in three hours and twenty minutes and was riveting throughout – was a luminous rendering of Shaw’s brilliant, endlessly surprising dramatic argument that you can’t save the soul without feeding the stomach. (That sly thief Brecht rephrased it for the second-act finale of his Threepenny Opera: “First feed the face / And then talk right and wrong.”) In Major Barbara, Undershaft first proves to his daughter that her beloved Sally Ann is as dependent on the generosity of the warmongers and liquor salesmen as any other institution; then he seduces away her fiancé, the Greek scholar Adolphus Cusins, to become the heir to his business; and finally he sells Barbara herself on his factory, a model socialist community whose workers are beaming with health and pride. In Shaw’s witty and perverse social comedy, Lazarus and Undershaft, purveyors of death and destruction, are the heroes. No wonder Cusins calls his father-in-law-to-be Machiavelli and the Prince of Darkness.

Stratford and the Shaw Festival I: Shakespeare

From left: André Sills as Polixenes, Sara Topham as Hermione, and Graham Abbey as Leontes with members of the company of The Winter's Tale. (Photo: David House.)

Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale is one of the three or four plays I cherish most, and the Canada’s Stratford Festival hits a high mark with Antoni Cimolino’s production at the Tom Patterson Theatre. Cimolino has announced that he will step down from the artistic directorship of the company after one more season, and his Winter’s Tale is so beautiful from start to finish that you can’t help thinking this is the show he would like to be remembered for. He’s staged it on a simple set that the designer, Douglas Paraschuk, has enriched, scene to scene, with lyrical details and Michael Walton has lit exquisitely. One of the most poignant examples is the famous final scene. Paulina (Yanna McIntosh) leads the King of Sicilia, Leontes (Graham Abbey), who has been reunited with his childhood friend Polixenes (André Sills), his former ambassador Camillo (Tom Rooney) and his long-lost daughter Perdita (Marissa Orjalo) into a secret room. There, she tells them all, she has had a sculptor create an astonishingly lifelike statue of Leontes’s queen Hermione (Sara Topham), supposedly dead these sixteen years while Leontes, under Paulina’s guidance, has done penance for the grievous wrongs he committed against her, Polixenes and Perdita (then just an infant). The stage is unilluminated except for three handheld lanterns, so the statue is revealed suddenly, the lantern light painting the darkness. When Paulina works her magic and Hermione moves, the effect is so subtle that at first you wonder if you really saw what you think you saw.

Soluble Thoughts: Late André Breton

André Breton claimed with these glasses he could see the future. He was right. (Photo: InLibris.)

“How very hard to run a movement and be oneself. Tristan Tzara somehow managed it with Dada, as long as he did, but then Dada died. As for Surrealism’s André Breton, something about his personality and everything about his style permits the singular endurance of his self and his strong selving.”

--Mary Ann Caws, Dalkey Archive

Neglected Gem: Mike’s Murder (1984)

Debra Winger in James Brooks' Mike's Murder. (Ladd Company/Warner Bros.)

James Bridges directed Debra Winger’s breakthrough performance in Urban Cowboy (1980), but almost no one saw her in Mike’s Murder, which he wrote for her subsequently. It got mostly terrible reviews and no support from Warner Brothers, the studio that released it, even after Bridges had made the changes they’d asked for. But it’s a tense, compelling little movie on a subject other filmmakers hadn’t ventured toward, at least not in quite the same way. And Winger’s unheralded performance is one of the best she’s ever given. She plays Betty Parrish, a Los Angeles bank teller who has a casual sexual relationship with the title character (Mark Keyloun), her tennis instructor. She has no expectations that it will turn serious, and he doesn’t lead her on, but she falls hard for him. He approaches their fling the same way he seems to approach everything else – impulsively and without a great deal of afterthought. He doesn’t make much money (and he doesn’t hold onto the tennis pro job) so he sells a little dope and sometimes makes himself available to gay men when he needs some cash. He has an appealing youthful, athletic look, no more striking than that of many other kids in their twenties wandering through L.A., but there’s something sincere about him; the fact that he doesn’t lead her on is part of what makes him likable, and his aimlessness is sexy. (He has one friend, a photographer played by Robert Crosson, who used to shoot him on the tennis court from his balcony, like a voyeur.) Mike is naïve and careless, and his buddy Pete (Darrell Larson) is an idiot who keeps getting them both in trouble. They manage to get away with peddling drugs on someone else’s territory (though just barely), but when Pete gets them hired as coke couriers and then persuades Mike they should steal a small baggie, they become targets for the dangerous people they’re working for, who have Mike killed. When Betty finds out she becomes almost obsessed with finding out what happened to him; she questions some of his friends and even shows up at the crime scene, unseen by the forensics cops. She had no idea how perilous a life he was leading; she can hardly recognize him in the stories she hears about him, and when she sees the quantity of blood in the apartment where he was murdered she’s horrified. It’s as if she’d stepped into a nightmare.