- “Tons of Money” Shaw Festival 2025
I usually return from performances at the Shaw Festival – with its invigorating standards in acting, direction, design and production – as a somewhat changed individual. I have been inwardly moved, delighted, and eased into deeper self-reflection in some intense or light-hearted way. In so doing, I’ve enjoyed myself.
Don’t let the comparatively smaller scale of Niagara-on-the-Lake fool you in comparison with, say, Stratford and the latter’s sleek and almost overwhelming self-promotion. The Shaw Festival maintains the highest of theatrical standards with ingratiating poise, by presenting the honed imagination of its casts and production teams through consummate skill, on or behind the stage.
The Shaw Festival’s underlying modus operandi combines aesthetic and human values with a refreshing knack for entertainment, and for some reason I always feel closer here to the art of theatre and the art of being human at one go. After all, these people on stage are the same ones who will soon peddle past my car on their inevitable bikes as we each, respectively, wend our way homeward.
Of course, my initial reaction to a performance of the farce Tons of Money last week was not quite so enthusiastic. Try these thoughts that filled my brain: “What the hell is this? This makes no sense! I think I might leave if all this chaotic and pointless business on stage doesn’t click in. What are they doing?”
And then I was suddenly and totally seduced by the undeniable zaniness on stage, the physical unpredictability of every body movement, the speeding ticket delivery of every line which still felt, without any flaw, like finely cut diamonds. And the inner magic of the cast, one that seems to take the actor and we who watch into a new dimension of being where logic seems to function like the flip of a coin.
Do you remember the performance of Lorne Kennedy in The President in this same Royal George maybe twenty years ago? As he spoke ninety miles an hour in our thirty miles an hour existential speed zone, I sat in awe of his enunciation, certainly, but also in profound delight of sharing madness with an unbelievably perfect guide. Bless you, perfect Lorne Kennedy!
And so, it was at the performance of Tons of Money. I felt amazed to share the existential space of these delightfully entertaining and magically precise characters on stage, I felt completely in the hands of a reality I couldn’t, as a mere everyday human, even try to master.
My purpose was to give in, learn to exist in this new dimension, and accept surprises as the going rate of being there. My purpose was to discover myself in the mirror of farce on stage as I, like everyone else nowadays, must do in our everyday, but cruel, increasingly deadly and hopeless world outside.
- Happy Discoveries
I went to the Shaw Festival this year as a different, temporarily handicapped person, one in a new situation, one with needs alien to me. In May I had fallen several times and ended up with a fracture in my back and several stretched muscles, all of which made movement quite painful, awkward, and very limiting.
So, thank you, usher staff of the Shaw’s Royal George who understood my difficulties and anticipated my needs in getting me to and from my seat. And thank you to the Festival for installing an outdoor washroom outside the theatre’s side door for folks like me.
I always enjoy chatting with the staff at the Shaw and when I told the usher that I’d first come to the Festival in the early sixties, she said that she was a student then who worked at the Festival in the summers.
- DVD: Takacs String Quartet
I just can’t get enough, it seems, of the Takacs String Quartet’s DVD that features Beethoven’s first Razumovsky Quartet Op 59 no.1, Schubert’s D810 “Death and the Maiden”, and Haydn‘s op 33 no, 3 “The Bird.”
Originally a group of four Hungarians and at the time of filming now one of two Hungarians and two Brits, we are fortunate to hear performances potent with a blend of collective individuality and consummate, dedicated artistry.
We hear totally involving and unforgettable performances from the group that strongly influence one’s future experience of a given composition. As well, each musician actually gets to speak at sufficient length from inside his own creative life, so we get to hear what they do and what they feel about it.
We observe the personalities and passions of these musicians whose performances we are about to hear, and we have a warm and very informative encounter with them. The additional documentary, Introducing the Takacs Quartet. is rich with insights into music and how a string quartet functions – it includes selections of Bartok which are acutely idiomatic and very, very thrilling to hear.
Books: Timeless Favorites and Hidden Gems of World Cinema by Alicia Malone
One of my current ongoing reads is TCM Imports: Timeless Favorites and Hidden Gems of World Cinema by Turner Classic Movies host Alicia Malone, and it has a number of reasons to recommend it. The author offers a 4-6-page consideration of 52 films from around the world and each these chapters features 4-6 boldly present photographs.
The text, although not that extensive, is quite informative and sufficiently compelling with background and contextual information to briefly bring each film tantalizingly to life in the reader’s mind. A book of this size and format can’t avoid omissions, like of all directors Luis Bunuel, but it could avoid rather empty devices like having a line at the beginning of each chapter that begins with “To watch when……”
When I first saw Larisa Shepitko’s film The Ascent, for example, I was profoundly disturbed at being incisively and subtly reminded how humans can be deliberately cruel as they savour their mastery over helpless others. Malone, however, writes this rather distanced observation, “to watch when you…..want to be awed by a powerful and thoughtful war film.”
On the other hand, Malone’s book will, through its informed and perky manner, tempt many readers into checking out the films she discusses and to which she, in passing, refers. I had already seen 36 of the 52 she discusses, and will, no doubt, in time give in to the temptation to view many of the rest.