Final Verdict

I am pleased we attended this year’s Shaw Festival, primarily because my parents had such a wonderful time.

The Shaw Festival provided a perfect short vacation for my parents: no stressful planning, no complicated execution, no extended travel, leisurely days, stimulating theater performances—and an interesting historic attraction and one of the most beautiful natural wonders on earth nearby.

Of greatest importance, after almost four decades of talk, my parents at last attended one of the Canadian summer theater festivals, something my parents had wanted to do ever since they got married. My parents need never again wonder what they have been missing.

However, I doubt any of us will want to return to The Shaw Festival anytime soon.

Other than the standard of stage design, much higher in North America than Britain, the quality of what we experienced at Niagara-On-The-Lake was significantly lower than top-quality theater in London. Performances were uneven, and never once reached the level of what may be seen on a regular basis on the London stage if one selects with care, judgment and experience.

If ever we decide to take another theater excursion, London shall have to rank above The Shaw Festival.

While we were in Niagara-On-The-Lake, we learned that The Stratford Shakespeare Festival has been raiding Shaw Festival actors the last few years, offering Shaw actors more money to appear in Stratford. This stratagem has had an effect on the quality of Shaw Festival performance—or so we were told—and Shaw Festival officials have shown increasing concern about the situation.

My recommended solution to the problem: The Shaw Festival should stop using Canadian actors exclusively, and should inaugurate casting offices in London and New York.

Niagara-On-The-Lake is a town that exists for tourism—and everything was expensive. Theater tickets cost more or less twice what they should have—they were much, much closer to New York prices than Minneapolis prices—and restaurant fares were outrageous. We had to shell out $100 per person for dinner each night, and $50 per person each day for lunch—without ordering wine.

A trip of comparable length to London, including airfare, would have cost us less.

Nevertheless, for my parents’ sake, I am glad we went.

Perhaps next year we can look at the summer opera festivals in Des Moines, Saint Louis and Santa Fe.

The Royal George Theatre

The third theater in use at The Shaw Festival is The Royal George Theatre, an old vaudeville house seating 328 persons.

It was at The Royal George Theatre that we attended performances of “French Without Tears”, “Misalliance” and “Come Back, Little Sheba”.

The auditorium of The Royal George Theatre is very fine, in stark contrast to its unimposing façade.

The Shaw Festival also uses a fourth theater, the Studio Theatre, which we did not visit. The Studio Theatre is the venue for experimental/contemporary work—and its lone 2012 presentation had closed for the season the week before we arrived in Niagara-On-The-Lake.

The Shaw Festival—Final Day

On our final day of theatergoing at The Shaw Festival, George Bernard Shaw’s “Misalliance” was the matinee play we attended.

“Misalliance”, an examination of marriage, is one of my favorite Shaw plays. Set at a country estate on a single afternoon in 1909, the play is both serious and amusing as it presents the tale of eight different marriage proposals, all extended within the frame of a few hours, involving only nine characters.

A play with an inherently-preposterous plot foundation, “Misalliance” is in fact one of Shaw’s most satisfying works. The dialogue is often inspired, the range of personality types wide, the situations ever-shifting, complicated—yet convincing. “Misalliance” has a great Act I conclusion—a biplane crashes through the conservatory roof, depositing into the assemblage a Polish pilot and a colorful Polish aviatrix—and a great Act II conclusion, when an unsettled male character flies off with the enchanting aviatrix, an act signifying freedom and release.

The Shaw Festival production of “Misalliance” was not good.

Simply put, the cast was not up to the play’s demands—which had also been true of our first night’s “French Without Tears”—and one had to ask, throughout the play, why such-and-such actor had been cast in such-and-such role.

Further, the setting had been changed from 1909 to 1962, which rendered much of the plot and dialogue senseless. Breaking free of the conventions of The Victorian Age was not an issue that carried much relevance in 1962—nor were biplanes particularly prevalent in the 1960s (or conservatories, for that matter).

Oddly, “Misalliance” was the one Shaw Festival production in which the stage design was not at the very highest level. The costumes were wrong, the settings were wrong, the lighting was wrong. Everything had been misjudged.

“Misalliance” was, fundamentally, one of those productions in which nothing came together—an occurrence that sometimes happens in theater. It is one of the hazards of the stage.

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Our final evening performance was William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba”, a marital tale of suffering and grievance.

As a general rule, I am uninterested in “kitchen sink” drama—which, happily, long ago died out, at least in North America. Kitchen sink drama thrived, in cinema and theater, for a decade and a half after the conclusion of World War II, after which it mercifully passed from view (in the U.S., if not in Britain, where it continues to hold on).

Moreover, I am not keen on Inge plays. Inge plays have many failings, among which is that they are insufferably maudlin—and “Come Back, Little Sheba” is nothing if not maudlin.

In a good production, the play can nonetheless be made to work—and the Shaw Festival production was a very fine production indeed. The actor and actress portraying the unhappy, unfulfilled, middle-aged married couple gave excellent performances, performances fully worthy of Broadway or London’s National Theatre. The actor and actress were so fine, they alone made the performance worthwhile. I was riveted to the onstage proceedings every minute—and, to judge by how quiet was the crowd, so was the rest of the audience.

“Come Back, Little Sheba” is discomfiting. It is discomfiting both because the two lead characters are so profoundly unhappy—and because the audience is invited to feel sorry for them.

It is the latter quality, alas, that constitutes a severe strike against the playwright. There is no nobility or redemption to be gained merely by inviting an audience to feel sorry for two unhappy human beings. Such is the natural realm of daytime drama, a field with limited objectives.

True drama must strive for more exalted aims than the soaps—and, even in a high-quality production such as that presented at The Shaw Festival, “Come Back, Little Sheba” was revealed as a work of little merit.

Fine as were the leading performances, I would much rather have been sitting through an obscure play by Eugene O’Neill.

Fort George

Fort George, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

Fort George was the scene of several battles during The War Of 1812. It was once captured by American forces, and twice burned by American forces.

We spent a pleasant morning touring Fort George, which Joshua and I had also visited in 2009.

Niagara Falls

Horseshoe Falls from the Canadian side.

While visiting Niagara-On-The-Lake, we spent one morning at Niagara Falls.

Niagara Falls is magnificent. We were in awe.

We remained on the Canadian side—we did not want to go through the hassle of crossing the border—and we simply walked around the park and stared at the transcendent beauty on display.

The views were breathtaking—although the views are supposed to be even better from the American side.

The Festival Theatre

The Festival Theatre at The Shaw Festival, the only modern and purpose-built theater in use at the festival.

The Festival Theatre accommodates 856 patrons and serves as venue for the festival’s offerings expected to be most appealing at the box office.

It was at the Festival Theatre that we saw “Present Laughter”, “Ragtime” and “His Girl Friday”.

By American standards, the Festival Theatre is not large. It is slightly smaller than the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center, the best-scaled and most successful modern theater built for the presentation of legitimate plays I have ever visited.

The Shaw Festival—Fourth Day

Our fourth day at The Shaw Festival featured a matinee performance of this year’s musical.

Each season, The Shaw Festival mounts one musical production. In 2009, Joshua and I had attended a performance of that year’s musical, “Sunday In The Park With George”. A year ago, the festival had presented “My Fair Lady”. A couple of days ago, the festival announced that the 2013 musical production will be “The Light In The Piazza”.

This year, “Ragtime” was the musical.

None of us had seen “Ragtime” before.

Last season, Park Square Theatre in Saint Paul had presented a lavish production of “Ragtime”—it had been the most expensive production in the history of the company—and we had contemplated attending one of the Saint Paul performances. Local reviews for the Saint Paul “Ragtime” had been encouraging.

We nonetheless decided to skip the production. For some reason, “Ragtime” has never appealed to us—and we did not bother to head over to Saint Paul.

We never considered skipping The Shaw Festival production of “Ragtime”. The reason we had decided to attend The Shaw Festival in the first place was in order to see all ten main-stage productions.

Based upon one exposure to the show in Niagara-On-The-Lake, my belief is that “Ragtime” is neither a distinguished nor a particularly effective musical.

Stephen Flaherty’s score was professional. It was not original or imaginative. It was not the work of a composer with a distinctive voice. The music was impersonal and featureless; it might have been written by committee—or by machine.

Lynn Ahrens’s lyrics were professional only insofar as she had been paid for her work. Had I been a producer of the show, I would have called in another lyricist—or else called off the project. I cannot recall the last time I heard such an unbroken, mindless string of clichés. Nonetheless, I should state for the record that one of our chief pleasures in sitting through the show was listening to the inanity of Ahrens’s words—and giggling.

Of Terrence McNally’s book, of which there was very little (“Ragtime” is mostly sung-through), I have nothing to say—except that it would not surprise me if Ahrens had written the book, with McNally merely lending his name to the project in order that a “bankable” author be connected to the show.

My mind wandered throughout the duration of the afternoon. I spent as much time reading the program booklet as paying attention to whatever was happening onstage. The production came in under three hours, yet it seemed like a four-and-a-half hour presentation.

All through the first act, we constantly exchanged glances with each other, which signified that not one of us was enjoying the show.

At intermission, we talked about leaving. We remained for the second half only because we assumed things were likely to improve (they did not).

It is possible that the production was at fault, and that the material might have been revealed in a better light in a better production. However, my instinct tells me that the problem was not the production but the material itself, a mixture of the second- and third-and fourth-rate. I doubt the show will ever become a mainstay of the musical stage.

Despite unprecedented marketing, the original 1998 Broadway production of “Ragtime” ran only for two years, and lost all of its backing money. A 2009 Broadway revival ran only for two months, and—again—lost all of its backing money. New York audiences twice gave “Ragtime” the cold shoulder—and I believe they were right to do so. “Ragtime” is an empty musical.

At dinner that evening, we talked among ourselves about “Ragtime”, attempting to diagnose the fundamental flaws in what we had just seen and heard.

My father said that “Ragtime” was a pageant, and not a genuine theatrical work. He likened “Ragtime” to an opera of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: more series of pageant-like tableaux than true drama. Rimsky-Korsakov operas, of course, are enthralling—but only because of the enthralling music. The pageant that was “Ragtime”, unlike Rimsky-Korsakov pageants, lacked enthralling music. As a consequence, “Ragtime”, like any pageant, was a chore to endure.

My mother said that Doctorow was the problem. The creators, she believed, had remained too faithful to Doctorow when they should have thrown the novel out the window and recreated the essence of the novel from scratch. She invoked Stravinsky’s maxim that artists must “eliminate, eliminate, eliminate”. The writers of “Ragtime”, my mother noted, had been too timid to trim—or remove completely—plot elements of the novel. The result: the creators had produced a well-meaning but by-the-book stage representation of a novel that had been little more than artificial conceit to begin with.

My brother said, simply, that “Ragtime” was “too Canadian”. His wry assessment, in minimal words, summed up the musical in terms everyone could instantly understand: no wit, no color, no depth, no personality—but buckets of blandness.

We all laughed at what my brother had to say—and Josh said he could not improve on my brother’s analysis: “Definitely, definitely: too Canadian. I have to go with that, too.”

Myself, I believe, in the case of musicals, that it always boils down to the score—and the score of “Ragtime” is simply not good enough to keep the musical before the public.

The Shaw Festival production had been directed by Jackie Maxwell, Artistic Director of The Shaw Festival. Maxwell’s efforts were not incompetent, but I thought she had directed “Ragtime” not as musical but as history play. Everything was a little too serious, a little too earnest, a little too preachy. That Maxwell had a supremely uneven cast did not help matters. Only one character registered: Coalhouse Walker.

At the performance we attended, the audience gave “Ragtime” a prolonged standing ovation.

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Our fourth-day evening performance was John Guare’s “His Girl Friday”, adapted from the 1928 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play, “The Front Page”, and the Hecht-MacArthur-Charles Lederer screenplay for the 1940 Howard Hawks film, “His Girl Friday”.

Guare’s was not a successful adaptation of the material.

The setting had been moved forward from the bustling, carefree 1920s to August 31, 1939, the day before Germany invaded Poland. The convicted killer became an anti-Nazi crusader who had struck down a pro-Nazi policeman. Most characters in the play were assigned anti-German political speeches, speeches in which they were required to warn each other—and the audience—that Hitler was a dangerous man, threatening to dominate the entire European continent.

Guare’s changes were bizarre. He had managed to meld—badly—a failsafe comedy with large chunks of the insufferable and hopelessly-out-of-date Lillian Hellman wartime melodrama, “Watch On The Rhine”.

What was the point of such a ridiculous exercise?

The production worked better than, by rights, it should have—assuming that one was able to filter out the elementary-school political speeches and wait for the comedy to resume.

If the evening was redeemable, it was because of the presence of Nicole Underhay in the role of Hildy.

Underhay had been sensational earlier in the week in Shaw’s “The Millionairess”—and she was almost as fine as Hildy, a reporter asked by her conniving boss (and former husband) to cover one last story, an execution, before retiring from journalism and marrying a wealthy stuffed-shirt.

Underhay was the best thing on stage all night. She gave a star’s performance.

I wonder whether we might have been able to endure the play without Underhay’s presence.

The Court House Theatre

The Court House Theatre, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

One of four theaters now in use by The Shaw Festival, The Court House Theatre was the original Shaw Festival venue. The Court House Theatre seats 327 persons.

It was in The Court House Theatre that we saw “The Millionairess” on the evening of Thursday, September 6.

We spent the entire day of Friday, September 7, in The Court House Theatre, seeing, in turn, “Trouble In Tahiti”, “A Man And Some Women” and “Hedda Gabler”.

To us, it appeared that The Court House Theatre had been assigned the productions expected to fare least well at the box office—and, indeed, we saw the smallest crowds of The Shaw Festival at The Court House Theatre.

The Shaw Festival—Third Day

Our third day in Niagara-On-The-Lake was our busiest day:  an opera performance at 11:30 a.m. (Leonard Bernstein’s “Trouble In Tahiti”); a matinee performance at 2:00 p.m. (Githa Sowerby’s “A Man And Some Women”); and an evening performance at 8:00 p.m. (Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”).

It was on this day, talking to a few people associated with The Shaw Festival, that we learned some intriguing facts about the operation of the enterprise, most remarkable of which was that the plays that fare most poorly at the Shaw Festival box office are the plays of . . . George Bernard Shaw.

A festival founded solely in order to present the plays of Shaw, and Shaw alone, but whose repertory and remit have been much-expanded over the last fifty years, now finds itself in the ironic position of seeing its namesake serve as the least-popular playwright on the annual schedule year after year.

We also learned that many persons associated with The Shaw Festival look askance at the dumbing-down of Canada’s other summer theater festival, The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, which this season offered such incomparable treasures as a production of “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” and a Homer Simpson version of “Macbeth”.  The more I hear about the deterioration of The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the less inclined I am ever to want to visit that festival.

Everywhere, we heard nothing but good things about Jackie Maxwell, Artistic Director of The Shaw Festival.  She is said to be a tireless exhumer of long-forgotten works—witness this season’s “French Without Tears” and “A Man And Some Women”—as well as a superb administrator and excellent manager of talent.

Later this week, Irishman Joe Dowling, Artistic Director of The Guthrie Theater, will celebrate his 64th birthday.  Surely The Guthrie is in the midst of succession planning—and I hope that Maxwell, born in Northern Ireland but long a resident of Canada, is high on the list of persons deemed potential replacements for Dowling.

If Maxwell’s name is not on the Guthrie’s list, it should be.

If I were on the Guthrie board, I would interview Maxwell tomorrow.

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Sowerby’s is a name unknown to all but the most assiduous playgoer.

Sowerby had one modest success during her lifetime—“Rutherford And Son”, her first play, which premiered in London in 1912—and otherwise enjoyed no commercial or critical success.

“Rutherford And Son” is the only Sowerby play that has ever been published.  It first appeared in print in 1912, and remained in print for many years (copies of the 1912 edition may be obtained via the worldwide web).  “Rutherford And Son” appeared in print anew in a 1991 anthology.  According to the program booklet of The Shaw Festival, “Rutherford And Son” is Sowerby’s finest drama.

It is believed that Sowerby wrote seven plays, but that number may be inaccurate:  Sowerby burned her personal papers shortly before her death, and it has become next to impossible to reconstruct her life and work.

Sowerby was forgotten decades before her passing—there was not a single obituary in London’s many newspapers when Sowerby died in 1970 at the age of 93—and a modest attempt to resurrect her work in recent years has enjoyed limited success.

The Shaw Festival has been at the forefront of the Sowerby revival.  Sowerby’s “Rutherford And Son” received a Shaw Festival production in 2004, with Sowerby’s “The Stepmother” revived four years later.  Now, after another four-year interval, “A Man And Some Women” has received its first North American staging.

“A Man And Some Women” premiered in Manchester in 1914, but the onset of war prevented a planned London production.  The play was not to be performed again until the 1990s, when it received two separate productions by British repertory companies in Bristol and London.

I found “A Man And Some Women” to be exceedingly influenced by the plays of Ibsen, hardly a surprise, since the works of Ibsen were at the zenith of their London popularity and influence in the years immediately preceding World War I.

Like characters in Ibsen plays, characters in “A Man And Some Women” live stifled lives, imprisoned by the conventions of social propriety.  Complicated family histories are revealed, bit-by-bit, during exceedingly-intricate plotting, another Ibsen trait.  As in Ibsen, onstage smoldering goes on for hours until a series of powerful conflicts erupts.  At the conclusion of the eruptions, a signal event occurs that shifts the ground on which the characters stand—in Ibsen, Nora walks out of her marriage, Hedda kills herself, and child Hedvig ends her own life when she discovers that she has lost her father’s love—and the play ends.

I found “A Man And Some Women” to be a very unsatisfying play.  The play was unoriginal and unimaginative, a formulaic family drama filled with bitterness, resentment and regret.  The humanity of Ibsen and Chekhov was not present.

The play was slow-moving, the dialogue was dull if not tedious, and the Ibsen-like eruptions occurred at the end of Act I, leaving Act II to serve as nothing more than a prolonged—and not very fulfilling—resolution of the outbursts of Act I.

The Act II resolution was, I believe, implicit at the conclusion of Act I—and might as well have been eliminated.  The result:  either “A Man And Some Women” was a one-act play needlessly expanded, or a two-act play poorly-constructed, with the ending in the wrong place.

Most of the characters in “A Man And Some Women” were profoundly unpleasant.  Even the characters that were supposed to gain a measure of the audience’s sympathy were, in my view, completely unappealing.  I suspect Sowerby must have disliked human beings, and lived an unhappy life.

The production was uneven.  A few of the cast members were quite good, and a few of the cast members were quite weak.  It became impossible to enjoy the play because the level of accomplishment of the actors onstage varied so greatly—a disparity that inhibited one’s immersion in the proceedings as well as forward-movement of the play itself.

I doubt that “A Man And Some Women” will receive a meaningful number of additional productions.  The play is an historic curiosity, not an important work of art.  There was little evidence that it was the work of a talented or important playwright.

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Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” was the only outright masterpiece on the Shaw Festival menu this year.  All other offerings—even Shaw’s “Misalliance”, an excellent play in its own right—were more than one notch below “Hedda Gabler”, one of the greatest of all 19th-Century dramas.

The Shaw production of “Hedda Gabler” was excellent in all respects—but it was not moving.  A great production of “Hedda Gabler” will leave the viewer shaken; an excellent production will leave the viewer merely full of admiration and respect.  (A bad production of “Hedda Gabler” will leave the viewer laughing.)

The Shaw “Hedda Gabler” was unmoving because the production focused on the heroine’s malicious and destructive qualities, with the heroine’s idealism sharply de-emphasized.  The play certainly worked as pure drama (despite an occasional touch of melodrama), but it became difficult to view the characters as tragic—and sympathetic—figures in a multi-layered tragedy.

Conflict was everywhere—and the characters at all times seemed to thrive on it a little too much.

Conflict will certainly hold an audience’s interest, but conflict is not what “Hedda Gabler” is all about.  The complexities of the play, and the complexities of the characters, did not fully register because of the out-and-out zest with which the cast members leaped into the play’s built-in conflicts.  My mother referred to the production as “two-and-a-half hours of hair-pulling”—and my mother was not far wrong.

The Shaw Festival had used a new English-language adaptation by British stage director Richard Eyre.  The adaptation, on a single hearing, struck me as undistinguished, and very much of its time.

It was a not-quite-great and not-quite-memorable production of “Hedda Gabler” that we experienced.

We left the theater unshaken.

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The plays of Ibsen are not often staged today in North America.

The Shaw Festival’s “Hedda Gabler” was the first Ibsen staging I had seen in quite some time.  In fact, the Shaw “Hedda Gabler” was the first Ibsen production Joshua and I have attended together (as Josh was quick to point out)—which signifies that Josh and I have not seen an Ibsen staging in the last six years and seven months.

By and large, The Guthrie Theater has ignored Ibsen in recent years, as have other repertory theater companies in the Twin Cities.

I cannot understand why Ibsen is ignored.  In my view, Ibsen is a mainstay of the world stage.  His mature works should be performed constantly.

Josh and I may not have to wait another six years and seven months before we again catch an Ibsen play.

Josh and I may attend a yet-to-open Broadway production of Ibsen’s “An Enemy Of The People” next month while we are in New York.  On paper, the cast is unimpressive—but “An Enemy Of The People” is about the only thing on Broadway Josh and I will be able to sit through.

The Shaw Festival—Opera Interlude

On our third day in Niagara-On-The-Lake, we caught a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s one-act chamber opera, “Trouble In Tahiti”.

Each year, The Shaw Festival offers a short theater piece as a “lunchtime” presentation. The Bernstein chamber opera was this year’s lunchtime presentation. “Trouble In Tahiti” was the first opera presented in the history of The Shaw Festival.

The staging and music presentation of “Trouble In Tahiti” were more musical comedy than opera.

The Shaw Festival had dispensed with Bernstein’s orchestra—even the publisher-sanctioned reduced orchestration was not in use—and instead had utilized an onstage four-man jazz combo for orchestral support. This, alone, rendered the musical presentation of the score nonsense.

The two singers portraying the only characters in the opera had music-theater voices, not opera voices—and such is perfectly acceptable if not ideal.

However, the composer’s three-voice Greek chorus had been expanded into nine singers and dancers—a Broadway chorus in all but name—and this expanded ensemble virtually took over the stage, turning every number into a song-and-dance routine.

The elimination of the orchestra and the use of a Broadway chorus amounted to a rewriting of the show—and not to the show’s benefit.

There is not much to “Trouble In Tahiti” to begin with—but what little appeal the work possesses is its portrayal of isolation and loneliness on the part of the young married couple unsuited as lifetime mates. If the young couple’s travails become lost amid a sequence of pizzazz- and charm-free Broadway routines, the essence of the opera disappears. What remains is a jumbled sequence of unimaginative excerpts from an old television variety show.

And that is precisely what The Shaw Festival presentation of “Trouble In Tahiti” resembled: an old-fashioned—and unwatchable—television variety show.

If the work itself were any good, we might have been able to summon a modicum of outrage over the mistreatment of Bernstein’s score. However, “Trouble In Tahiti” is so fundamentally weak that we endured the presentation with indifference—while marveling over the fact that The Shaw Festival had proven itself able to peddle such a gruesome show at $40.00 per seat.

The score of “Trouble In Tahiti” is not good, even by Bernstein standards. The melodic material is feeble, and Bernstein showed himself unable to fashion the material into anything approaching genuine operatic development. Written in the composer’s thirty-third year, the score is that of a talented college sophomore with much yet to learn.

“Trouble In Tahiti” lives on, to the extent it lives on at all, in stagings by music conservatories. It is an ideal student vehicle, what with its minimal stage requirements, unchallenging diatonic score and vocal parts demanding no virtuosity.

For audiences, however, “Trouble In Tahiti” does not provide much satisfaction, musical or theatrical. Outside conservatory walls, “Trouble In Tahiti” has—quite rightly—been largely ignored. A major conductor has never touched the opera; a major stage director has never gone anywhere near the piece.

Even the composer was unable to do anything with “Trouble In Tahiti” in the studio recording he made in the 1970s. In Bernstein’s own hands, the score resolutely fails to come to life; it is limp, dishrag music.

The Shaw Festival—Second Day

On our second day in Niagara-On-The-Lake, we attended a matinee performance of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter” and an evening performance of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Millionairess”.

Although the playwrights were separated by two generations, the plays themselves were written almost contemporaneously.

“Present Laughter” was completed in 1939 (owing to war, its first production had to wait until 1942); “The Millionairess” was both completed and unveiled in 1936.

“Present Laughter” has always been one of Coward’s most popular plays; “The Millionairess” has always puzzled critics and audiences, and been among the least-produced of Shaw’s major works.

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One may endure “Present Laughter” even in a bad performance because so many of the lines are witty (all of the characters speak as if they were Coward himself).

The Shaw Festival production was not bad, but it was in no way distinguished.

What was good about the production was the stage design—all productions of “Present Laughter” seem to revel in glorious Art Deco settings and costumes—and much of the character acting.

About half of the character acting was exceptionally fine; about half was not good at all. The half not good overplayed far beyond the bounds of acceptable exaggeration or underplayed to the point of disappearance. The general rule of thumb onstage: the more mature the actor, the better the playing.

At the center of the performance was a void. The actor playing the central role—that of a matinee idol—was not up to the role’s demands. He should never have been cast in such an important role.

In January 2010, Joshua and I had attended the recent Broadway production of “Present Laughter”. That production had starred Victor Garber. Garber, too, had been unsatisfactory—as well as twenty years too old for the part—but Garber had been a full-fledged success compared to the actor we saw stumble through the same part in Niagara-On-The-Lake.

The entire performance, every member of the audience must have wondered why all the subsidiary characters onstage were so fascinated by, and allowed their lives to revolve around, the central character. The actor at the center of the play was more vacuum cleaner salesman than matinee idol over whose every utterance a dozen persons were supposed to drool.

In the late 1970s, my parents saw a production of “Present Laughter” starring Peter O’Toole. My parents recall O’Toole as having been incandescent in a near-perfect staging of the play. They recall that production with great fondness after the passage of more than thirty years—and they insist that O’Toole was an unequivocally-great stage actor. (At the time, O’Toole was playing “Present Laughter” in repertory with “Uncle Vanya”, which my parents also saw and greatly admired.)

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The Shaw Festival’s “The Millionairess” was my first encounter with the play.

“The Millionairess” provided us with what may have been our best experience at The Shaw Festival. We loved every minute of the play. We were riveted by the proceedings for all four acts.

Like most Shaw plays, there is no plot to “The Millionairess”. The play, in essence, is an extended discussion of capitalism, in one sitting.

At its center is the absurdly-named Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga, “the richest woman in England”. The play begins in the solicitor’s office of the heroine, where the heroine is amending her last will and testament prior to her planned suicide, a suicide designed to cause her as little discomfort as possible—but as much distress as possible to the persons in her life.

During the course of the play, the irresponsible and irrepressible—and irresistible—heroine engages in nonstop maddening behavior.  She does everything from treating her husband and workers with utmost contempt to kicking a friend down a flight of stairs for making a remark critical of the heroine’s late father (the friend must spend the rest of the play on crutches).

Numerous challenges are thrown at the heroine, and she surmounts them all with ease—and with great flair. Perhaps most amusing is the heroine’s purchase of two failing businesses, a maneuver forced upon her in an effort to teach her some humility. In both cases, she begins making improvements to the businesses within thirty seconds of walking through the entryways—and, to the dismay of everyone, turns both enterprises into thriving commercial successes virtually overnight.

I have no idea what thesis Shaw intended when he sat down to write “The Millionairess”—Shaw had zero sophistication when it came to political or economic matters—but he clearly fell in love with his heroine, and in the process created his single greatest female role. Any message in the play gets lost as the audience breathlessly follows the adventures of the heroine as she proceeds from triumph to triumph, always turning dross into gold.

The actress portraying Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga was magnificent. Viewers in the theater were unable to take their eyes from her for the duration of the performance. She was magnetic while engaged in the most atrocious misdeeds, captivating while plotting the most brutal of business stratagems—no matter how many persons she had to step over.

The actress’s name was Nicole Underhay.

Underhay gave a genuine star performance. She was so superb, everyone else onstage had to raise the level of his or her performance in order to match Underhay—and did so. Underhay played off and played against the other cast members beautifully. None of the actors failed to register—including the cipher of an actor who had starred that very same afternoon in “Present Laughter”.

The designers had assisted Underhay in her compelling sweep through the role of the heroine. Each of the four acts had been designed in a single striking color scheme—red, blue, green, gold—with Underhay dressed in a sensational creation in a vivid shade of the prevailing color for each act. In that sense, Underhay was presented, jewel-like, in the manner of the glass of absinthe situated at the center of Edgar Degas’s masterpiece, “The Absinthe Drinker”.

I applaud The Shaw Festival production of “The Millionairess” as a genuine and rare achievement. There is, fundamentally, not much of a play at the center of “The Millionairess”—and, in my judgment, 99 of 100 productions surely would descend into camp. Yet The Shaw Festival gave the play a sparkling—yet straight—presentation.

To present “The Millionairess” in 2012 as a serious play—and to present it SUCCESSFULLY as a serious play (and not as some sort of ridiculous joke)—is a major accomplishment.

Opening-night reviews for this production of “The Millionairess” were mixed. I suspect the production must have improved considerably during the course of the run.

Had conditions allowed, we would have attended The Shaw Festival production of “The Millionairess” a second time. I never again expect to see as fine a production of the play.

If the production were to transfer to The Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis-Saint Paul audiences would go wild.

The Shaw Festival—First Day

Joshua and I had been to The Shaw Festival once before.

Three years ago, when Josh and I had been living in Boston, we traveled to Niagara-On-The-Lake for a long Labor Day Weekend. During that short visit, we caught five Shaw Festival productions. Josh and I had not been particularly impressed with what we saw at The Shaw Festival in 2009.

Last week was the first visit by my parents and my middle brother to Niagara-On-The-Lake.

My parents had always promised themselves that they would attend one of the Canadian summer theater festivals in a year in which all the plays in repertory appealed to them. 2012 was the first such year in which all ten productions of one of the festivals happened to be of interest to my parents—and my parents kept their promise to themselves and took advantage of the situation (and encouraged my brother and Josh and me to join them).

The Shaw Festival, effectively, was this year’s summer vacation for all of us. The vacation was short—we arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, and we departed the following Monday morning—but it served its purpose: getting us away for a few days.

My parents enjoyed themselves immensely. A daily matinee and a daily evening performance, interrupted by a leisurely dinner, were perfect for them. It was both a carefree yet stimulating vacation, precisely the kind of vacation my parents most enjoy.

While we were in Niagara-On-The-Lake, we spent one morning visiting Niagara Falls and another morning exploring Fort George. Otherwise, we spent our mornings ambling about the town, peeking into shops and art galleries and such.

We had a luxurious breakfast at our hotel every morning, a light luncheon every midday, and an excellent dinner every night. Niagara-On-The-Lake bills itself as Canada’s finest dining destination. Whether or not such claim has merit, we had no complaints about our meals, all of which met the highest standard.

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On the day of our arrival, we had only one performance scheduled: an evening presentation of Terence Rattigan’s “French Without Tears”.

“French Without Tears” is NEVER performed in North America—this year’s Shaw Festival production is the first major staging of “French Without Tears” in North America since the play’s brief and unsuccessful Broadway debut production in 1937.

Rattigan’s first critical and commercial success, “French Without Tears” made Rattigan’s name in London when it debuted in the West End in 1936. (It also made the young Rex Harrison a star.) The production gained superlative reviews from London critics and enjoyed a long and profitable run. Its success was due to the fact that it was precisely the type of comedy designed to appeal to a middle-class British audience of the 1930s, an audience that wanted to see itself portrayed as fashionable and chic. The play, packed with pretensions of sophistication and wit, presents the story of Englishmen experiencing life on the continent, a theme that was a staple of the British stage from the mid-19th Century through the mid-20th Century.

The plot is simple. A group of young Englishmen move to the French countryside in order to learn the French language under the guidance of a kind but peculiar older gentleman. Their foreign adventure is interrupted with the appearance of a striking young English woman. Each of the young men finds the new visitor captivating. A series of innocent entanglements results, causing much confusion, and things are not sorted out until the end of the play.

I did not find “French Without Tears” to be amusing—or even worthy of revival. In fact, I thought it was a very, very bad play, poorly plotted, ineptly written, full of holes and characterized by endless longueurs.

The production, too, was poor. In fact, it was the poorest of the productions we experienced at The Shaw Festival.

The actors portraying the young men were insufficiently differentiated and had trouble portraying middle-class characters with conviction and ease. The actress playing the seductress was even worse at capturing the correct social milieu—she seemed to have wandered in from a particularly unpleasant episode of “East Enders”—and was completely upstaged by an actress appearing in a “Plain Jane” role, who quickly gained the audience’s sympathy. The miscasting seriously unbalanced the play, if not rendered it nonsense; “French Without Tears” cannot cohere if social caste is not meticulously observed in a production.

Aside from the mature actor portraying the older gentleman (who was superb, and walked away with the show), the production was totally misplayed and misdirected. It was impossible not to notice that audience laughter was forced as well as mistimed; the audience, clearly, had come to enjoy a comedy, and attempted to convince itself that it was having a good time by awkwardly inserting laughter where none had been earned.

Unaccountably, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal gave The Shaw Festival production of “French Without Tears” a rave review, even suggesting that the production be imported directly to Broadway as soon as The Shaw Festival concluded its season.

If transported to New York, this particular production of “French Without Tears” would be laughed off the Broadway stage. It would be sure to close on opening night—assuming it would even be able to make it through previews, most unlikely in my estimation.

I have concluded that The Wall Street Journal drama critic is totally unreliable. He seems to like—and reward—everything, including the most bone-weary piffle. I admire his ability to enjoy anything and everything, but I am not confident that such a characteristic serves a drama critic—or his audience—well.

Three years ago, my middle brother and Josh and I suffered through a startlingly-awful Boston production of the musical, “Kiss Me, Kate”—and our attendance had been based solely upon the same critic’s recommendation. That afternoon was one of the most gruesome afternoons of our lives.

“French Without Tears” at The Shaw was a total waste of our time. I cannot understand why any critic would praise either play or production.

Happily, nothing we were to see the following four days was anywhere near so bad.

Today's Matinee At 2:00

George Bernard Shaw's "Misalliance".

Photograph courtesy of The Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

Tonight At 8:00

William Inge's "Come Back, Little Sheba".

Photograph courtesy of The Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

Today's Matinee At 2:00

The Stephen Flaherty-Lynn Ahrens-Terrence McNally musical, "Ragtime".

Photograph courtesy of The Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

Tonight At 8:00

John Guare's "His Girl Friday", adapted from the play, "The Front Page", and the movie, "His Girl Friday".

Photograph courtesy of The Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

This Morning's Opera At 11:30

Leonard Bernstein's one-act chamber opera, "Trouble In Tahiti".

Photograph courtesy of The Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

Today's Matinee At 2:00

Githa Sowerby's "A Man And Some Women".

Photograph courtesy of The Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

Tonight At 8:00

Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler".

Photograph courtesy of The Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake.

Today's Matinee At 2:00

Noel Coward's "Present Laughter".

Photograph courtesy of The Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake.