This will be a somewhat short post that I will likely expand on later.
The good news is that the bus trip went very well. On the way in we were about 10 minutes early and almost 20 minutes ahead of schedule coming back, despite some extra traffic on the Gardiner due to the CNE. So that was terrific.
It was quite hot on Sat. Normally, I go for lunch at a Thai place just off the main square and eat outside, but it was too hot for that, so we ate inside. Then we wandered over to the B & B we were staying at and managed to drop off our bags, then returned to the Avon for Macbeth. I enjoyed LePage's Macbeth more than I thought I would. Serious critics and purists hate it for the various cuts that have been made, though the examples that Slotkin was citing seem forgivable to me. Also, they must have figured out how to move the set around faster than during previews. The whole production took just about 2.5 hours, which is almost break-neck speed and hardly "glacial," as two critics wrote. The set is pretty incredible, though I would agree that LePage is more in love with spectacle and the visual look of a play and a bit less focused on the play itself. Anyway, it does seem almost like watching a movie, and Macbeth seems to be a major hit of the season. It was extended along with Annie and Anne of Green Gables and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. And if I read correctly, a touring version of the play will be traveling around Canada next year.
However, in general Shakespeare productions are not doing that well any longer at the festival. There were lots of empty seats (at the Tom Patterson!) for Winter's Tale, and I heard As You Like It had lots of empty seats, despite getting quite good reviews. At some point, they may drop down to only 2 or 3 Shakespeare plays per season. I do wonder if they should try to add in more plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries or Restoration comedy, which would at least bring out the English lit. types. I think this year, Shaw Festival only put on Major Barbara (and nothing else by Shaw), which I did consider seeing, but their scheduling was so dopy, it wasn't possible to get out there on a day the Shaw bus was running! I might take one more look but probably won't change my plans at this point.
I didn't enjoy The Winter's Tale at all. I mean I wasn't expecting to, but I figured Stratford probably would put on the best possible production
of The Winter's Tale, and I could see what they did with it. The jealous rage that comes over the king comes completely out of nowhere (whereas in Othello and I think Cymbeline there is a villain spurring on the jealousy, which is far more believable). And then there is not even a hint that the Queen is being hidden away by her friend. And then 16 years pass, as if there would be no opportunity for the King to have second thoughts over that entire period! I think the plot is foolish, and indeed it's actually even less appealing than its source text "Patient Griselda" in the sense that the boy prince dies (of heartache?) and is not reunited with the King and revived Queen and recovered Princess at the end. Then the tonal shift in the second half of the play is pretty jarring. Personally, I found the rural clowning after the intermission just went on and on. Some of that definitely could have been cut. And of course, the badly behaved men (Autolycus as well as the King) get off scot-free. I absolutely hated The Winter's Tale as a play, so I will certainly never go again. I'd say it is now at the very top of my least favorite Shakespeare plays, displacing The Merchant of Venice. I'm not really a fan of Cymbeline either, but that one I can at least imagine seeing again.
Sunday was much cooler, and it did threaten to rain but didn't. We had a lot of time to kill (really probably too much time on our hands...). I had heard that the river had been low all summer but recently the water level had come up. It might have been too late to bring the swans out. We walked up and down the river a few times and saw ducks and geese and even seagulls, but no swans. Too bad.
We walked through Art in the Park, though one of the artists we liked the most wasn't there that weekend. Then we wanted up to the Festival Theatre. I looked around the bookstore but didn't actually buy anything.
We decided to get over to Gallery Stratford. While I think it is a decent art gallery, it is very small -- only 3 rooms of art. So I find the admission price ($12) is pretty steep for what you actually see. However, I do like the park it sits in and the art that is all around the gallery is cute.
I really liked Ransacking Troy, though once again Stratford really doesn't market this properly (much like Napoli Milionaria! from several years back). It has comic moments but is not a comedy. It is much more bittersweet and complex and far less (female) empowering than the revisionist take that was promised. I don't want to say more in case you are going but haven't seen it. It really is quite incredible in how Shields has woven her play around key bits of The Iliad and The Odyssey (revising but never quite contradicting those texts) and even sets up Aeschylus's Agamemnon. About the only piece that doesn't quite fit is Electra goes off to Circe's island rather than going home with Clytemnestra, but this could still be retconned into the rest of the Oresteia if needed. I'll be thinking about this for some time to come. If anyone brings it to Toronto, either transferring this production or a new cast & crew, I'd go again.
About the only downside is that I was very unimpressed with the vegetarian options at Tom Patterson (and we were a bit too tired by this point to march downtown for a burrito or something), so I didn't have lunch and then just had trail mix on the bus back and didn't actually eat dinner until 10 pm! So that wasn't ideal.
I read about 200 pages of St. Urbain's Horseman and 100 pages of Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, and I should wrap both of those up this week. Slouching Towards Kalamazoo riffs so heavily on Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter that I am considering reading this in the next month or so, as it is a text I skipped over* in high school!
I may add more thoughts on the trip and my thoughts on the plays if I have a chance.
I guess Stratford has "officially" announced the next season, a few days after it had completely leaked. I think I will probably only go see Di Filippo's Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Miller's Death of a Salesman, but perhaps I'll change my mind. (Actually The Tao of the World is an update of The Way of the World set in modern Singapore, and I'll likely see that.) My wife surprised me by saying she wanted to see Salesman as well. I mean I certainly like The Tempest and Importance of Being Earnest, but I've seen them so many times and just can't really justify the expense of Stratford for that... For that matter, I saw Godot not that long ago at Stratford (with Brian Dennehy!), and I'm currently on the fence on going again at Coal Mine. I'm definitely not going back to Stratford for that.
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