Shakespeare in Love is truly a love song to live theatre 

All the basic condition theatre requires is that fire last night & those costumes 

& the human voice & people gathered together.  

Sir Trevor Nunn, Director (Cats, 1981 \ Les Miserables, 1985)

The flik Shakespeare in Love won a fistful of Oscars back in '99 for writers Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman. But if you haven't already, don't watch the celluloid until you have first drunk Bard's smackulus cool-aid stage version by Lee Hall, no vodka required.

Its central gag-line launches when stumblefooted Rose Theatre owner Henslowe tries to explain live drama to his impresario Fennyman : "Let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster...but it always works out in the end." Fennyman balks : "How?"  "I don't know, it's a mystery..." Henslowe flips back.

What is no mystery about this Bard show is Daryl Cloran's fully requited love letter to the art of stage acting in his production. A total celebration of the line made famous by Buffy Ste. Marie oft-cited by BLR.  "God is alive / Magic is afoot!" Because Cloran utterly delivers on the many concepts of the script : Theatre is community. All artists need a muse. Love is an infection -- "like sickness and its cure together" as Will puts it.

Will shakespeare doesn't lack for moral support to urge him past his writer's block -- all the local townspeople are eager to digest any of his immortal sonnets or new plays and encourage him mightily. .

Photo credit : Tim Matheson

Pure fantasy -- all fake news -- the script has a local wannabe thespian Viola de Lesseps audition for a show-in-the-making with the risible working title "Romeo & Ethel, Daughter of the Pirate King".  She's dressed in drag, of course, because the Queen's moral guardian Tilney ensures no woman can be "on display" as an actor in public theatre. She masquerades as "Thomas Kent", replete with peel-off moustache. Young Shakespeare, meanwhile, suffers hugely from writer's block. He whines to Henslowe "My quill is broken, my well is dry, the proud tower of my imagination has collapsed!"

Ostensibly estranged from wife Anne Hathaway, he soon meets Viola wearing aristocratic gowns at a family party. They dance. He flat-out swoons. Viola's / Thomas's joint fakeries take awhile to consummate, but in time Bill and she are truly in love. She also gamely acts as muse to inspire in him the poetic soliloquies of his ultimate script Romeo & Juliet. His most deathless lines he pens for her to recite. "I write them to make you immortal," he romanticizes.

As Viola, Ghazal Azarbad is enchanting and coquettish and at the same time a delightful naif who doesn't fail to charm even for a second. 

Photo credit : Tim Matheson

As The Guardian's ever-clever critic Michael Billington reminded folks half-a-decade back, anyone who's ever been involved in a theatre production knows that pandemonium and mobocracy are always at play. Egos tumesce, the writer is 2nd-guessed with every re-written line and scene they spit out, the coin needed to fund the show is always scarce -- in short there is a crisis-mentality that threatens to Stop! any production at any second.

And so it is with this series of plays-within-a-play. Bits of Will's sonnets get quoted over and over, as do take-off lines that are offered up with a wink from his countless plays to come. And, as if conjuring Chilliwack rocker Bill Henderson, Cloran reminds the crowd repeatedly "If there ain't no audience, there ain't no show." He titillates us not only with the endless Billy Bard quotes but with the larger-than-life characters of that time and place : not just Marlowe, but Richard Burbage of the rival company cross-town, The Curtain, not to mention Queen Elizabeth herself "Oh for God's sake, I know my own name, don't wear it out!" she scolds the troupe.

Charlie Gallant's Will Shakespeare plays the gender cards cleverly : one doesn't know if Ghazal Azarbad here as cross-dressed Thomas Kent is to play the part of Romeo or the part of Juliet or none-at-all when the show finally launches. 

Photo credit : Tim Matheson

Can theatre with all its charades and pretence capture the true nature of love? Will bets his final version of R & J can do just that. That is the 50-quid wager from Lord Wessex the Queen must adjudicate. Can Will pull this off, with or without Viola who's about to emigrate with her new hubby -- the same Lord Wessex -- to the colonies to grow tobacco?

The staging of the final scenes are done in the manner of Michael Frayn's riotous 1982 Noises Off thanks to set designer Cory Sincennes' brilliant lazy-suzan centre stage. It rotates dizzyingly between the action front-of-house and all the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that threaten to kill the show dead in its tracks. 

Charlie Gallant as Will and Ghazal Azarbad as Viola are choice and sexily a just-right fit, Scott Bellis's Henslowe manages to steal the show altogether more than once, Anton Livopletsky's Lord Wessex is impuissance at its best, Susinn McFarlen's Nurse is duplicitously delicious, and, as always, Jennifer Lines brightens the entire room even when she frowns -- to name but a few favourites from this cast of 18 who play 26 roles, plus Spot the dog : "Next time write something funny!" Queen Liz commands Will as she hands him the bag of ducats he's won, adding "And don't forget the dogs, I love dogs!"

While not "true" Billy Bard, this knock-off of his life and times truly shows us how live theatre productions can and do, ultimately, work on a whole different level than film.  How? You got it by now : "It's a mystery!"

Particulars : Produced by Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, Artistic Director Christopher Gaze. At the BMO main stage, Vanier Park. Schedule & ticket information @ bardonthebeach.org. Run-time 145-ish minutes with intermission. 

Cast of Characters :

Ghazal Azarbad (Viola / "Thomas"). Scott Bellis (Henslowe).  Kate Besworth (John Webster). Andrew Cownden (Wabash; Valentine).  Victor Dolhai (Nol).  Austin Eckhert (Kit Marlowe).  Charlie Gallant (Will Shakespeare).  Ming Hudson (Mistress Quickly; Kate).  Warren Kimmel (Fennyman).  Jennifer Lines (Queen Elizabeth; Molly).  Anton Lipovetsky (Frees; Lord Wessex).  Susinn McFarlen (Nurse).  Andrew McNee (Richard Burbage).  Paul Moniz de Sa (Tilney; Sir Robert de Lesseps).  Chirag Naik (Adam; boatman).  Kamyar Pazendeh (Lambert; Ned Alleyn). Jason Sakaki (Sam).  Kingsley \ Porkchop (Spot-the-dog).  Joel Wirkkunen (Ralph; Catling).  

Creative Production Crew :

Costume Designer / Set Designer Cory Sincennes.  Lighting Designer Gerald King.  Sound Designer / Musical Director Michelle Cuttler.  Head Voice & Text Coach Alison Matthews. Choreographer Julie Tamaino. Fight Director Jonathan Hawley Purvis. Production Stage Manager Stephen Courtenay.  Assistant Stage Manager Rebecca Mulvihill.  Apprentice Stage Manager Heather Barr.  Directing Apprentice Kayvon Khosham.  Assistant Costume Designer Erica Sterry.  Assistant Lighting Designer Celeste English.  Assistant Set Desginer Kimira Bhikum. 

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Shrew! is satirical sauce on a spaghetti Western motif of fun   

All the basic condition theatre requires is that fire last night & those costumes 

& the human voice & people gathered together.  

Sir Trevor Nunn, Director (Cats, 1981 \ Les Miserables, 1985)

Bard on the Beach resurrects a 2007 Western Ye-hah! version of one of Shakespeare's most controversial scripts, The Taming of the Shrew. Its goofy mix of cowpokes and Elizabethan English is self-satire all on its own. Then Director Lois Anderson takes a magnifying glass to his characters in a show she happily riddles with slapstick pratfall silliness. 

Here is a redux Plot quicky just to remind readers what it's about : Younger sister Bianca Minola is a hottie and the lust in many suitors' eyes. But older sister Katherine (Kate) is not yet married. So la madre Baptista rules Bianca off-limits until older sis ties the knot first. Enter Petruchio. He has dowry in mind. So he marries the feisty Kate who is what rodeo folk might call "hard twist" : a strong, no-nonsense, shoot-from-the-lip kind of free agent. The rest of the play tracks their marriage. "Mad herself, she's madly mated!" is how one character puts it.

Going "nose-to-nose" is what Petruchio (Andrew McNee) and Kate (Jennifer Lines) are all about in this re-make of the 2007 Miles Potter slapstick spaghetti rendition of Shrew now on show at Bard.

Photo credit : Tim Matheson

Billy Bard’s piece has enjoyed no end of controversy and disparagement. Its title starts it : the very concept of a wife being one who needs “taming” because she is a “shrew” was offensive 125 years back to a wee talent named George Bernard Shaw who huffed : "No man with any decency of feeling can sit [the final act] in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed," he said, naming the show "altogether disgusting to modern sensibility". A 20-something actress friend said nearly 100% the same words to me just last week. 

Others see it more benignly. Less a paternalistic screed that champions the "rule of thumb" for a beating switch and the old "wife-as-chattel" nonsense. Many consider the Shrew script more like a tongue-in-cheek joust. The kind Earl of Leicester enjoyed with his sassy lover Elizabeth I. But still, while being the friend-with-privileges in HRM's boudoir was playful good fun for Leicester, maybe overall Petruchio had it more better and less worse...?

Director Lois Anderson played Kate in the 2012 Bard version. So she knew what she was about in snatching the ever-effervescent Jennifer Lines to wrassle with the subtle deadpan of a Petruchio as delivered by Andrew McNee. Together they make whoopee more like Dunaway & Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde than the stylized waspish stings of Taylor & Burton in dearly-departed Frederico Zeffirelli’s 1967 Shrew.

Anderson plays with words ironically and joyfully : the cast points at Kate and yells out “Shrew! Shrew! Shrew!” at her with each sighting. And the variant “shrewd” is thrown in repeatedly as a staccato alt-term for Kate, too. Which of course she is as well : Petruchio only lasso’s her with a slip-knot in his rope. It is she who finally tackles & calf-ropes him by rodeo’s end. Or, more charitably, the two find that love can ultimately grip each of them. By the halter. Even as they constantly hustle to outmuscle one another in both word and deed.

Plenty of good cheer from the ensemble when it's time to hoist the Jack Daniels #7 to celebrate the consummation of Kate's corralling Petruchio in what promises to be a mad, long marriage.
Photo credit : Tim Matheson

Too large a cast to fairly single out performances, suffice to say both the familiar and not-so-familiar names below all were selected for the discrete talents they bring to their roles. Sort of like the Raptors basketball team -- a variety of skills in a whole-team effort oh-so-capably blended and maximized by Ms. Anderson and each of her support crew. 

Costumes by veteran Maria Gottler were choice : even in the top row I could smell both the Pinaud Clubman drift from the townspeople's fancy dress -plus- the mud-&-cowdung in Petruchio and Kate's horsey plains-drifter get-ups. 

Cory Sincenne's set worked in its variants as saloon scene and snooty parlour sequences, but maybe best in the campsite canvas and clothesline sketchy earthiness of the post-nuptial suite -- all dirt-&-stink-&-funk. Take a reception completely bereft of food and party favours or riotous raucous drunken debauchery. Ya-hoo! ain't this a grand and delirious memory to write home to la madre about, y'all?

No question, Billy Bard aficionados will find much to amuse and delight in this kick-off 30th year BotB celebratory show that continues to mock sensibility. Pure entertainment ever-so ebulliently delivered, it makes one laugh despite all of today's tut-tut finger-wags against its core 16th Century story-line.  

Particulars : Produced by Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, Artistic Director Christopher Gaze. At the BMO main stage, Vanier Park. Schedule & ticket information @ bardonthebeach.org. Run-time 120-ish minutes with intermission. 

Cast of Characters :

Gazal Aarbad (Various one-down women). Scott Bellis (Gremio).  Kate Besworth (Bianca Minola). Andrew Cownden (Train conductor; pedant).  Victor Dolhai (Sheriff/Phillip).  Austin Eckhert (Cowboy; Pony Express rider).  Charlie Gallant (Cowboy; Bartender et al).  Ming Hudson (Biondella).  Jennifer Lines (Katherine [Kate] Minola).  Anton Lipovetsky (Hortensio; 'Lidio').  Susinn McFarlen (Le madre Baptista Minola).  Andrew McNee (Petruchio).  Paul Moniz de Sa (Mayor; Piano Player &c.).  Chirag Naik (Tranio; 'Vincentio').  Kamyar Pazendeh (Lucentio; 'Cambio'). Jason Sakaki (Priest; Cowboy etc.).  Joel Wirkkunen (Grumio).

Creative Production Crew :

Costume Designer Maria Gottler.  Set Designer Cory Sincennes.  Lighting Designer Gerald King.  Sound Designer Malcolm Dow.  Original Compositions (2007) Marc Desormeaux.  Head Voice & Text Coach Alison Matthews.  Fight Director / Choreographer Jonathan Hawley Purvis.  Production Stage Manager Stephen Courtenay.  Assistant Stage Manager Rebecca Mulvihill.  Apprentice Stage Manager Heather Barr.  Directing Apprentice Tai Amy Grauman.  Assistant Costume Designer Alaia Hamer.  Assistant Lighting Designer Celeste English.  Assistant Set Desginer Kimira Bhikum.  N.B. from the program : "This production is inspired by Miles Potter's 2007 Shrew."

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