Des McAnuff, artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival has extended his contract through the 2013 season.
He also announced the plays for the 2012 season, which will mark the Festival’s 60th anniversary.
At the Festival Theatre, Mr. McAnuff will direct Henry V, perhaps Shakespeare’s most penetrating study of kingship.
Also at the Festival Theatre will be one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Christopher Newton, former Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival and a member of the Stratford Festival acting company in the 1960s. Featuring the famously bickering duo of Beatrice and Benedick.
42nd Street, with music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin and book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, follows the journey of Peggy Sawyer, a chorus girl who becomes a star when she takes over a leading Broadway role on opening night. Regarded by many as the quintessential backstage musical, it will be directed by Gary Griffin, whose Stratford productions of West Side Story, Evita and Camelot have won widespread popular and critical acclaim.
Completing the line-up at the Festival Theatre is Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker.
The story of marriage broker Dolly Gallagher Levi, who sets her own sights on one of her clients, the irascible businessman Horace Vandergelder, The Matchmaker was later adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly! (presented at the Festival in 2005). It will be directed by Chris Abraham, who directed a memorable production of For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again for the 2010 season and is directing The Little Years, opening later this season.
Meanwhile at the Avon Theatre, the incomparable Christopher Plummer takes to the stage to present his one-man show A Word or Two, a deeply personal work that focuses on his love of literature and the way it has shaped his life. Including selections from Stephen Leacock, Bernard Shaw and, of course, William Shakespeare, A Word or Two will be supervised and directed by Mr. McAnuff.
Two musicals will be presented at the Avon Theatre: Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance and the family favourite You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Directed by Ethan McSweeny, whose acclaimed production of Dangerous Liaisons was a highlight of the Festival’s 2009 season, The Pirates of Penzance is the delightfully zany story of the love between Frederic, indentured to a pirate crew made up entirely of orphans, and the lovely Mabel Stanley, whose father is “the very model of a modern Major-General.”
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, inspired by the world-renowned comic strip Peanuts, brings to the stage all Charles M. Schultz’s beloved characters – including Charlie’s beagle, Snoopy, and his nemesis, Lucy – in a musical guaranteed to delight the whole family. With book, music and lyrics by Clark M. Gesner, the show will be directed by Donna Feore, whose most recent Festival credit was her 2009 production of Cyrano de Bergerac.
The season’s third Shakespeare play, Cymbeline, will be presented at the Tom Patterson Theatre, where it will be directed by Mr. Cimolino. It tells of the trials of Imogen, separated from her husband Posthumus through the villainy of the would-be seducer Iachimo. Like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, Cymbeline belongs to a group of plays Shakespeare wrote late in his career in which he explored themes of loss, reunion and reconciliation.
Joining Cymbeline at the Tom Patterson Theatre is a classic from ancient Greece: Sophocles’ Elektra, in a translation by celebrated Canadian poet Anne Carson. A timeless tale of vengeful matricide and the price that must be paid for it, Elektra will be staged by Athenian director Thomas Moschopoulos, one of modern Greece’s most internationally acclaimed theatre artists.
Four Canadian works, including three world premières developed through the Festival’s New Play program, will round out the 2012 season.
Robert Service, who immortalized the Yukon in such beloved poems as “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam Magee,” is the subject of the new musical Wanderlust, to be presented at the Tom Patterson Theatre. Written and directed by Morris Panych, with music by Marek Norman, this Festival commission celebrates both the allure of the frontier and the power of the imagination with a wit that matches the best of Service’s poetry.
In The Hirsch Project (working title), developed through the Festival’s New Play program, Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson paint an intimate portrait of former Festival Artistic Director John Hirsch. Compiled from documents, letters and interviews, this play for a solo performer tells the story of Hirsch’s escape from the Holocaust, his arrival in Canada and his rise to national and international acclaim as a theatre director. Mr. Nashman will perform the piece, which will be directed by Mr. Thompson at the Studio Theatre.
In another world première developed with the New Play Department, Daniel MacIvor’s The Best Brothers, two brothers re-examine their lives and relationships – with their partners and with each other – after the death of their beloved mother. This brilliant and biting comedy will be staged at the Studio Theatre under the direction of Dean Gabourie, the Festival’s Assistant Artistic Director, who directed 2009’s hilarious production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Also at the Studio will be MacHomer, an ingenious and wildly entertaining multi-media production in which Shakespeare’s Macbeth meets the animated TV show The Simpsons. Created and performed by Canadian Rick Miller, who adopts more than 50 different Simpsons character voices while retaining most of Shakespeare’s text, this one-man saga of blind ambition, fate and doughnuts has become an international hit, earning delighted acclaim from audiences of all ages.
COMMENT
Next year’s playbill offers one less play by Shakespeare than this year (4 this year and 3 next year). That’s a bit troubling for a 60th anniversary season of a festival devoted to the plays of Shakespeare.
The number of musicals will increase next year to three. This year there are two.
(The Stratford Musical Festival, anyone?)
I can live with 42nd Street and The Pirates of Penzance. But You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown? Someone has got to be kidding.
Chris Abraham directing anything is always interesting. I look forward to see what he does with The Matchmaker.
Similarly, Alon Nashman is such a gifted actor, and lately a playwright. I look forward to The Hirsch Project.
And if Donna Feore is directing next year then that would mean her husband Colm Feore will be acting in the season. Package deals, don’t you know. Oh for those good old days when a person was hired on merit.
MacHomer is Rick Miller’s party piece. It has been kicking around for at least 5 years and is part of the the Factory Theatre season beginning in the Fall in Toronto. Mr. Miller is very talented, but this show is hardly ingenious.
The poems of Robert Service written into a musical by Morris Panych who will also direct. This I have to see and will look forward to it.