James Strecker Reviews the Arts

COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA
Ric Reid as Doc and Corrine Koslo as Lola are two superbly realized and devastating performances in Inge’s Come Back Little Sheba, directed by Jackie Maxwell. Lola is edgy, nosy, nervously chatty, hungry to know or inhabit other lives by peeping, prying, and not letting them leave her presence. She is weighted down by her plumpish body, but more so by her past which deprived her of having children and took her beloved dog Sheba. She’s a woman of starved sensuality and ignored sexuality, one given to writhing exotically and staring at the bodies of young men who happen to come to her home.

“Are you sorry you had to marry me?” she asks Doc, and acknowledges she has got “old, fat, and sloppy.” And Lola continues to retrieve the past, linger in it, trying to bring it back to life like her dead dog. She loves an alcoholic and she holds within her a number of intense sorrows and fears. When she phones her mother, after the violently drunk Doc has been dragged to hospital, she confesses, “I’m very unhappy” and her speaking of these lines is truly heartbreaking to witness. She has chattered away endlessly to keep things together and now they have fallen apart.

Doc is efficient, perhaps overly considerate, sensitive, calmly outgoing but worn, a man who has almost given up but goes on, a man who like his wife is wound tight. Schubert’s Ave Maria visibly touches his heart but his wife switches the radio to “peppy music” and as always he complies. He is repeatedly referred to as a “real gentleman” and “nice” and we know he will crack soon.

Doc resents Turk who easily beds the young boarder Maria who torments him, perhaps because he wants to do the same or because he needs her as a female ideal or because, since reality has done him in, he needs an illusion that no one else can touch. When Turk does more than just touching the willing Maria, Doc goes back to the bottle. Doc knows he has wasted his life and wants something in his life that doesn’t disappoint, so he urgently advises, “you gotta keep on going.”

The acting of Ric Reid and Corrine Koslo never suggests calculation for effect and thus it hits deep. It is acting that finds the humane poetry of ordinariness in these people of unspectacular lives and deep loss who struggle hard to hold themselves together. In these stunning performances, Doc and Lola are played inwardly as much as though their connection with others, so their unspoken and wounded lives are potently present as much as their words.

When Lola breaks from Doc’s hurtful verbal assault, we break with her, and when she quietly waits for the drunk Doc’s return, the tension, for her and for us, is unbearable. When Doc and Lola awkwardly and desperately cling to each other, this production achieves the subtly realized level of compassion it has suggested all along. Reid’s and Koslo’s acting, under Maxwell’s astute guidance, achieves an ultimate aspiration of theatrical folk in that it doesn’t seem like acting. Perhaps that’s why watching this very honest production hurts so much.

Jackie Maxwell’s production is carefully understated and nuance-attuned. Christina Poddubiuk’s setting features a cramped living room in which every space is used and also a small kitchen whose surfaces are off white or modulated yellow, the kinds of aged surfaces that will never be really clean again of the unhappy lives that have used them. In this crowded setting, lives don’t merely collide, but they also overlap and penetrate one another. Each life inhabits the others and changes them. Zachary Florence’s syncopated trumpet-led small group jazz score doesn’t suggest a mid-western city but provides an atmospheric envelope of sound that reflects and comments as an outsider might on these disappointed lives.

As well, we have Maria and Turk as the younger generation and they seem inexperienced in life, oblivious to it, which they are. As Maria Julia Course is fresh and almost ripe, innocently suggestive and patronizing with her body, while Kevin McGarry as Turk is sexual and looking for sex, and certainly not “the marrying kind”. Both seem optimistic and unaware of a world beyond themselves, but we wonder if in time they might become their individual versions of Lola and Doc, when life gradually happens to them. They are secure in untested innocence now. Will they be strong when life makes them fragile?

HIS GIRL FRIDAY
The original version of The Front Page was first produced in 1928, so His Girl Friday, a combo of the former and the Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday of 1940, is a hybrid concocted and set in 1939 by John Guare for Britain’s National Theatre in 2003. Ergo references to FDR, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, The Wizard of Oz, communist pamphlets, Hitler, the pro Nazi vote in Chicago, isolationist factions in the US, the slimy side of Joseph Kennedy. Also, lines like, “They’re hanging the guy so nobody will notice how many are unemployed” or “We write what our bosses tell us to write” give insight into the times.

In director Jim Mezon’s fresh and involving production, actors move at a frantic pace like balls in heated games of squash, as dialogue zaps around the press room. We have cigarettes, fedoras, suspenders, gobbled sandwiches, guy talk, collective horniness for Kiera Sangster’s ‘Her’ and close quarters newspaper men, slightly grumpy and deprived of sleep, who are loud, gruff, opportunistic, cynical and bullying. A hanging is imminent and all these restless writers want is a story. The dialogue zigzags, the blocking is crisp and the characters are clearly inscribed with eccentricities that make each one stand out from the ensemble. The cluttered setting is believably the den of headline hungry scribes.

As Walter Burns, Benedict Campbell is bullish, hyper confident, animated as a story teller, a man consumed by the urge to report. He is “a cheap reporter who would sell his soul for a story” and “a double crossing swine,” but he gets to declare the socially conscious following: “Do you realize what might be happening? We’ve lived in the Depression so long, our hearts have turned to stone. And our elected officials like it that way! They talk jobs. They talk hope. But what they’re really running on is Fear. Fear of the Future. Fear of the little guy. Don’t let the Government help the downtrodden! Erase them. They’re weak. Fear of weakness! Worship Big Business!

As Hildy, Nicole Underhay is a pleasing 40s broad with a confident small step strut, one who is quick, savvy, reachable, and aggressively physical when she sits on Peter Millard’s Woodenshoes. Hers is a self-sufficient will to write at a breathtaking pace, and she can deceive without losing a beat. Underhay plays her with an endless supply of quickly changing devices, be they facial, bodily or vocal. She declares “I’m a newspaper man” and there is no doubt about it.

Hildy’s fiancé, Kevin Bundy’s Bruce, is exciting as porridge, instantly boring, not in the least worldly, with a brain that never exceeds low gear. He heeds his pro capitalist mom to the letter and, if that doesn’t turn you off, he also declares to his fiancée “if you love me, you will obey me”. But, no, he’s not a Republican candidate.

In minor roles, Thom Marriot makes an imposing and unprincipled bigwig Mayor, while Lorne Kennedy as Pincus compactly blends principles and drunkenness in a scene stealing vignette. Likewise does the entertainingly hateful Mrs. Baldwin of Wendy Thatcher who, in an unflattering exit, declares “I blame the decline of the west on Jane Austen”. Peter Krantz, as the opportunistic Sherriff, is appropriately sucky but, no, he’s not a Republican candidate either.

Whether you accept the play’s updating by a decade or not, this is splendid high gear entertainment which, alas, rings repeated relevance in today’s ultra-conservative political milieu.

CYMBELINE
A fluid, dynamic, and unobtrusive energy courses through director Antoni Cimolino’s highly rewarding production of Cymbeline. An insightfully selected group of actors shapes the play’s narrative line into a compelling tale and sculpts the dramatic potential of each scene, often each line, into resonating richness. Pauses and gestures ring with implication while, otherwise, the weight and value of each word are given their due. Yet the play thus unfolds with seeming spontaneity from its myriad inner ingredients. Each scene is naturally interesting and involving, and even minor roles suggest complex histories that might merit a play of their own.

The production shows much to recommend it: textured characterizations, lively momentum, a grand sweep that includes the pulsation of individual lives, and a diligence concerning desired effect that allows no misstep into facile exaggeration. With only a black out, a spot on the eagle standard, and an intensely loud and beating sound track, legions of Romans come into being. A back and forth of groupings and then animated individual encounters all compactly suggest the fury of battle. The sudden appearance of a very pissed off Jupiter, his eagle red-eyed and glaring, is concisely potent and scary. Meanwhile, the duet of “Hark hark the lark” is charming. While many lines throughout and especially near the end achieve a relieved laughter from the audience, they simply enhance the tension in the events, even as we howl with delight.

In this tale, so well told, each character is realized as essential. Cara Ricketts’ Imogen is made of a frisky innocence and feistiness that bring charm to her resourceful will. Her Posthumus, played by Graham Abbey, is vulnerable, hot headed, worldly gullible, and a young man of conviction. Geraint Wyn Davies’ Cymbeline is a mercurial ruler whose seethes, speaks with clipped authority and, like his Queen of Yanna McIntosh, is constantly volatile. This scheming Queen is also driven by a complex manipulative mind.

Peter Hutt as Cornelius impresses with immaculately right pacing and a delivery ripe with innuendo that achieve numerous effects both comic and dramatic. Tom McCamus as the cynical Iachimo is a self-contained schemer with an icy and menacing undercurrent in all he does. With his self-satisfied slowness of mind, Mike Shara’s Cloten is disturbingly malignant, arrogant, malicious, and something of an idiot. To the dignified and humane Belarius, John Vickery brings ringing tones and finely shaded resonances that evoke the man’s worth. Brian Tree’s Pisanio seems a sea-weathered everyman of implicit nobility, while Nigel Bennett’s Caius Lucius is pragmatic and poised with dignity in his destiny. Even a much smaller roll like Chick Reid’s Dorothy, through simple presence, implies much character in the few lines given to her.

With solid acting, precisely imaginative direction, compelling use of few resources, an obvious intention that no word go to waste, and intelligent achievement of effects through meticulous attention to the meaning in Shakespeare’s text, this is an enriching and satisfying production. It is no wonder that Cimolino’s Cymbeline is recommended repeatedly by many in Stratford as a must see. In fact, I am eagerly going to see it a second time.

THE MATCHMAKER
The “miserly old merchant” HoraceVandergelder, played by Tom McCamus, is very wealthy and believes that “the only way to get happiness is to have enough money to buy it”. He is erratic, gruff at high volume, lordly in a boorish way, and, in a military uniform of a loud green coat and louder orange pants, is a roar of a man who looks as uncontrollably ridiculous as he sounds. His ultimate match is Seana McKenna’s Dolly Levi, also a big though not as broad performance, who is a woman of animated voice and body and who speaks in scheming jabs and crescendos. She’s a self-propelling fabricator of truths who once “retired into herself,” then “decided to rejoin the human race,” and now, being worldly-wise, can opine “every man has a right to his own mistakes”. She also concludes that “money is like manure, it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.” Horace and Dolly each do a dance of manipulation and converse as if to have their oratory conquer the world, but in the end she conquers him.

Thornton Wilder’s play, the springboard of the musical Hello Dolly, is Americana writ large and folksy and farcical, especially in this comic perfection of a production of director Chris Abraham, one that, as we watch, is fun and laughter throughout. There is as much humour in verbal gymnastics as in physical chaos of bodies here, with constant eruptions of high-gear and non-stop comedy. All the scene changes, from the Vanderberger store in Yonkers to Irene’s hat shop in New York to the Harmonia Gardens restaurant to the widow’s residence, are grandly executed. Santo Loquasto’s multi-leveled set of stairs and furniture is commanding and seems made of rich wood or elegant lights and naturally accommodates and facilitates the chaos and upstairs-downstairs action with ease. The the physical absurdities of the hat store scene can seem frenzied but also balletic, for this is farce with the rightness of music. The sound of Thomas Ryder Payne and lighting of Michael Walton each make dynamic and characterful contribution to this grand production.

One couldn’t ask for a better cast. Vandergelder via McCamus is loud but gullible and easily duped, a high-amped Art Carney as Norton or a man with Zeus envy perhaps. Dolly via McKenna loves complication, prolonging solution, and “arranging things”. She’s a woman with eyes like jewel spotlights and confident physical presence, whose body is made of various hyper-active parts, each with a mind of its own, it seems. Mike Shara is chief clerk Cornelius, gently oafish and with worried visage, innocent of girls at thirty-three, mentally not too quick and clumsily hyper-active, but also heart-winning when he declares, “I’ll be a ditch-digger who once had a wonderful day”. His endearing apprentice, the Barnaby of Josh Epstein, is an adorably intense young fellow, one at times reminiscent of Gene Wilder of Bonnie and Clyde vintage. He is cute, but genuinely so.

She whom Cornelius loves is Irene Molloy, played by Laura Condlin as a self-delighting, erratic, feisty, take-charge, and exuberant fun gal who, even with a smiling sunshine of a face, is tired of being a milliner and declares, “I hate hats”. Andrea Runge presents her assistant Minnie Fay as hollow-eyed with innocence, low key in her tightly contained shyness, and adorable when she gets to play. Ermengrade aka Cara Ricketts is wide-eyed, slightly whiney, and girlishly enthusiastic, while her fellow, Skye Brandon’s Ambrose, is youthfully principled and eager. Geraint Wyn Davies’ Malachi is red-cheeked and impish, something of a leprechaun who can commandingly orate on “one vice at a time,” while multitasking Brian Tree as a barber, a squinty-eyed cabman, and a waiter provides a commanding low-key presence as each one with his raspy undercurrent of a voice. Nora McLellan, as the Callas-infused wealthy spinster Miss Flora, is diva-ish and self-dramatizing, “friend” of all young lovers, one who dwells in a “crazy house”. Chick Reid as maid Gertrude is obliviously deaf and as the widow’s cook is precise and compact in movements and, like everything else in this splendid production, fun and funny.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
The inspired and anticipated pairing of Ben Carlson as Benedick and Deborah Hay as Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing gives memorable results under Christopher Newton’s focused and subtle direction. In Carlson we have a Benedick who is seasoned in life but perplexed by women, quick of mind but slightly weary of body, and likable. In Hay we have a Beatrice who is juicy and wide-eyed in concise amazement, bemused with a raised eyebrow as she fetchingly tosses her lines into the stratosphere, quick in retort, and likable. Together in their dueling distain, each for the other, they reveal a touchingly human insecurity and a need for approval, for validation. We take to this pairing because they entertain us with their wit as they expose their caution and their fear of being known for their hearts.

Newton sets this Much Ado in the Brazil of the late nineteenth century. It is a pleasant setting with a marble and swirling staircase, centrally placed but denying some sight lines, by Santo Loqasto, a piano, parasols, flowery pastel dresses and also pastel suits. We have dancing and clapping to Brazilian syncopations, with even a threesome of servants in a ménage a trios. Movement is crisply defined and fluid throughout and groupings appear spontaneously. The atmosphere is pleasing, elegant, and softly domestic. The characters, thanks to Newton, are not personification of types, but individuals of apparently deeply felt lives that make them what they are. Subtlety reigns.

Juan Chioran’s Don Pedro is a man of noble bearing, straight backed dignity, paternal kindness, and stately humour. Bethany Jillard’s Hero is girlish, innocent, gutsy, and perky, albeit with a bird-like fragility. Her Claudio, played by Tyrone Savage, is insecure, ready to doubt, and vulnerable to suggestion. James Blendick as Leonato sounds studied and deliberate as an older father might be. Claire Lautier as Margaret is bright, mysteriously female, and strongly present with enticingly playful eyes.

As Don John, Gareth Potter gives a performance of insinuating expression, rigid spine, and underplayed iciness in manner. He is obviously frustrated, a self- proclaimed villain who wants to “ build mischief “ where he can. He is also an immediate downer because he is eager and willing to set up lovable Hero as “a contaminated whore”. He is especially unsettling because he is indifferent about his evil while at the same time he is calm as the guy next door. Richard Binsley plays Dogberry from the inside as a man in need of respect and authority, but whose mind makes no sense to the rest of the world.

The most passionate, touching and beautiful moment in the production is Beatrice’s outburst about the containment of women. It’s a scene some will probably never forget. We have just been witnessing the workings of a society that can unfairly and brutally destroy the lives of women and, in Hay’s impassioned, deeply frustrated, and painfully indignant speech to Benedick, we of our present society are also implicated. We hear raw human pain in these lines and the passion in Hay’s delivery demands that we not only hear but also, for once, understand.

A WORD OR TWO
Although Christopher Plummer ends his one man show, A Word or Two, with several touching references to death, the theme of this ninety minute performance is best summarized in the words of his New York drinking buddy, Dylan Thomas, who famously urged “Do not go gentle into that good night”. The Welsh poet briefly held court at the White Horse pub on Manhattan’s west side, with Richard Burton egging him on, and died soon after. But Plummer who played Hamlet at Stratford in 1957- that is fifty-five years ago folks- still seems made youthful fire and undeniable passion for both life and his theatrical art.

The production is an autobiographical account by a man who long ago discovered “the marvels of language” and in retrospect declares “words were to be my one master and I their humble slave”. His references to his life include “my passion for animals,” “teenaged awkwardness,” and drink as in “it was woman who drove me to drink and I never had the decency to thank her” or “booze used to be our national sport”. He grew up in Montreal, heard Oscar Peterson way back when, and easily segues into singing the traditional French song En Roulant Ma Boule with a number of asides in Quebecois sprinkled here and there.

His references to writers and their words are as many as the myriad artistic devises Plummer pulls out of his hat to make these same words live. The list includes Larkin (“ they fuck you up your mom and dad”) , Milne, Nash, Nabokov, Kipling, Auden with “ a southern accent,” Shaw on “the redemption of all things by beauty,” McLuhan, Service, Leacock whom he once recorded on a Caedmon label LP which still makes me laugh heartily. There’s a poignant reading of Frost’s Birches, Archibald McLeish who said “ A poem should be motionless in time,” Oscar Wilde, Oscar Levant, Shakespeare of course, Byron, Sam Goldwyn, and D.H Lawrence who said “ Let mating finish”.

Yes, death is an acknowledged presence to Plummer who, after doing Rostand’s fatally injured Cyrano as he awaits his end, declares of his own death, “ I’m scared shitless”. But it seems that Plummer intends to go laughing into that good night and his endless quips and asides are delightful, as in “Donald Trump is the kind of man who will end up dying in his own arms”. On ageing he remarks, “Middle age is when you stop combing your hair and start arranging it” and, before he impishly and elegantly departs, he informs us “I’m late for my Botox”.

A Word or Two is a celebration of reading the written word, inhabiting it, speaking it, acting it, being it. It is a riveting show of pinpoint timing, musical handling of language, and masterfully delivered speech in which even pauses carry their own gravity and humour. Each selection is given an engaging characterization and laughs arise by the minute. Plummer loves words and his script and performance invite us, compel us, to love words too. If you do not understand why, to writers and actors, life and words are one and the same, there is no better proof than this ninety minute show at the Avon.

HENRY V
In Des McAnuff’s Henry V, Aaron Krohn in the title role provides an intelligently thought out and meticulously spoken center to this big production, but he proves no match for either the director’s grand take on the play nor the historical significance of events depicted in Shakespeare’s tale. This Henry speaks to his immediate surroundings but not to history and often seems more a vehicle for the text than a characterization of it. In the Saint Crispin’s speech, he doesn’t seem driven to inspire and lacks a projected authority that would rally his troops. Thus, we do not hear him as “a king of so much worth” nor even “a lad of life” and inner passion. He speaks his lines with unfailing clarity, but enunciation alone just doesn’t make history. When more youth centered, say in his anger about the Dauphin’s balls, he is believably so. Elsewhere, he shows his knowledge of what must be done to play a king and, for one, he implies deviousness.

On the other hand, a number of the lesser roles are delivered with distinctly etched colourings that enrich the human textures within this Henry V. Randy Hughson’s Bardolf seems both spirited and heavy with his own life, while his voice perhaps suggests unwashed underarms. His few lines as the “good old Knight” suggest a lifetime within them. A sneery, somewhat reptilian and seedy Pistol of Tom Rooney is indeed a “knave” while Ben Carlson as the reasoning Scot Fluellen is appealingly wise with experience and not easily ruffled or unsettled. While the Dauphin of Gareth Potter is youthfully self-centered with an asinine laugh, subject to childish ways, and a bit of a snot. Lucy Peacock’s is a feisty Hostess, with a wild and ragged look in her eyes as she spits out her words with authority. Bethany Jillard offers a giggling and beguiling Catherine, while Deborah Hay’s Alice is warmly cute, a woman of active body parts.

Director McAnuff ensures that a clearly and precisely emphasized reading of the text will guide our understanding of the play’s unfolding events. Robert Brill’s massive wood beamed set stresses verticals that dominate the players metaphorically as history might, while Michael Walton’s lighting shapes them with old master contours. McAnuff likes bold theatrical effects and we have banner waving, a crown of archers terrifying stage hands back stage, prisoners burned alive with much screaming in a partially seen dungeon, and a procession and piling of corpses that is chilling. Paul Tazewell’s costumes offer a sometimes dazzling and always detailed and enticing blend of colours and textures, both of fabric and of metal.

McAnuff stresses solid placement of actors on the stage and dynamic movement of groupings, especially in exciting battle scenes. At times actors and drummers are placed throughout the theatre. Having the chorus spoken by individual actors doing single lines gives the sense of history experienced by individuals and, finally, an almond shaped guitar is used on a Stratford stage to approximate instruments used at the time. The Beatles Revolution blaring and the Canadian flag waving at the end suggest – oh no! – contemporary relevance. There is much ado in this production, but with a miscast center it doesn’t always hold together.

WANDERLUST
In Wanderlust, the poet Robert Service inhabits the “land of the imagination” and from his own imagination Morris Panych has produced a mostly fictional account of Service creating his famous and lesser known poems. Several ongoing tensions drive this delightfully easygoing musical forward. Will the poet keep his day job in the bank or will he chuck it all and go north? Will Louise, engaged to Dan McGrew and declaring her love for Service, chuck the engagement and join her Robert on his northward trek? Will Robert’s imagination generate new poems as he toils away at numbers in the bank, in a soul-killing existence of tedium? Or can Robert work in this bank and still keep on good terms with “a land of beyond” in his creative spirit?

Panych’s text is perky and propelled, witty and fresh, clever with engaging repartee and dramatic human interaction. Marek Norman’s musical score can be invigorating and fun as in the dynamically staged numbers based on The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGrew, or sometimes pleasantly functional, and sometimes generic bordering on the easily sentimental. Overall, the music does an effective job in carrying the tale and the poems along in this spirited, amusing, and sometimes touching production that offers much to entertain.

We begin with Service contemplating a blank page as he sings the tentative lines of his new poem. He’s unsure about “skirts of the sky” as Mr. McGee the bank manager enters, suggests some disapproval of Service “working on another poem” and sings of wanderlust. One quickly comes to feel the tedium of working in this uninspiring milieu through both Panych’s instinct for movement on a stage and his effectively used nod to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. There is much engaging activity here, say, the transformation of a bank to a saloon or a row of desks that becomes a sled and a team of huskies, plus some dreamlike sequences, all of which, with Diana Coatsworth’s robust and celebratory choreography, make for a very active production.

Wanderlust is full of juicy performances that give much texture to a rather simple narrative line. Tom Rooney’s Service is a flippant and engaging smartass of a young man who, understandably, doesn’t fit into this bureaucratic “wasteland”. No wonder he declares, “I am dying here” and we believe his realization that “a person of your own making is better than someone else’s”. His true love is victim to a fact of life that the only saving course to follow “if you’re a woman” is to marry well. As Louise, Robin Hutton offers a warm and slightly heated performance expressed in a dramatic voice of definite impact. Her fiancé, played by Dan Chameroy, presents an ever-threatening presence that lurks in his every move and he constantly seems on the verge of doing our good poet in.

As bank manager Mr. Mcgee, Randy Hughson is folksy and gruff but somehow sympathetic with Service’s dreamy obsessions. “The bank is all there is,” he declares, yet he is the one male character who conveys street smarts for a world beyond the bank’s vaults. He reminds one of a thin Burl Ives (was Burl Ives ever thin?). Lucy Peacock’s Mrs. Munsch is broadly played as, well, a broad, one who is deliciously lusty and naturally seductive. After all, Services’s landlady was once a “femme de la nuit” in Dawson City. Funniest line is McGee’s, “Can’t you make a point without composing it?” Best theme line? Service’s “Poetry is the only thing that is real.”

PIRATES OF PENZANCE
Stratford’s anything goes and untraditional production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance opens with a Victorian back stage setting. A caretaker sweeps the floor, dancers do their ballet exercises, an actress has her corset tightened while another scans her script, and then, neatly done in a minute, we are front of house with a multi level set to behold and robust manly singing to hear. Director Ethan McSweeny gives us a Pirates of Penzance that uses every opportunity for physical gags and routines, one that revels in silent film melodramatics with their exaggerated gestures and posturing, and a big screen feel that is constantly active from corner to corner.

We even have a deep sea diver, a touch of keystone cops aka Bobbies, and an atmosphere of easy going non-stop tongue in cheek. The female ensemble is cheery and perky, full of proper smiles, ready for fun, and each one is hungry for a hubby. The pirates are garbed in a chaos of colour, including one who seems a clone of Leon Russell, and often throughout, with all the characters, voice and persona are mirrors one to the other.

The leading characters are enjoyable and Kyle Blair’s Frederic is a special gem. This Frederic is a lad with school boyish looks and charm, assertive but delicate and flexible pipes, and one whose motto is “duty is before all”. The Pirate King of Sean Arbuckle presents a high buzz in facial expression and bodily stance, and an appealing confidence in manner. Amy Wallis’s Maybelle, poorly miked at upper levels, is an enjoyable self-spoofing coloratura with playful and sometimes devious eyes and a chirping ring in her voice.
Ruth, played by Gabrielle Jones, is endearingly forty-seven, charmingly determined, and a pleasing blend of the human and the comic. As the very model of a modern major General, C. David Johnson, when not driven beyond our comprehension by the orchestra’s brisk tempo, is a pleasing fatherly presence with a not too stiff an upper lip.

Final curtain inspires immediate cheers and a standing ovation. With all complications resolved in “Queen Victoria’s name” – the queen herself makes an appearance – and with the outlaw pirates discovered to be “noble men who have gone wrong” and a leggy wedding dance, at least from knee to ankle, this production has certainly been geared for entertainment. To what extent it violates one’s limits of flexibility in Gilbert and Sullivan interpretation, you must decide. This Pirates of Penzance is definitely not D’Oyly Carte, to be sure, and it often sacrifices the quaint charm and polite wit of the original conception. But it does achieve its intention to try anything and entertain in a big way.

42ND STREET
“You’re every girl who ever kicked up a heel in the chorus” and “Our lives are in your hands” and the well-known “You’re going out there a youngster but you’ve got to come back a star.” Of course these familiar lines from 42nd Street are classic showbiz stuff from the star-is-injured-and-understudy-gloriously-saves-the day genre. It’s a plot line that always inspires, always feels good, and that’s what director Gary Griffin’s production achieves. I tapped my toes and smiled throughout.

I remember the opening night of 42nd Street on Broadway in 1980, the curtain partially going up to reveal what seemed an infinite number of legs tapping madly, the audience going nuts in reaction, and producer David Merrick’s announcement at the end that the show’s director Gower Champion had died that afternoon. Stratford’s version is more intimate than this predecessor but feels big, partly because the inner energy of this production is hard to resist.

Who can deny a swinging band extended over the playing stage and thus integrated into the dances and punching out the tempo? Or the rows of brightly blazing marquee light bulbs that frame the show? Or the chirping and dreamy chorus girls in their surreal and cutely suggestive Busby Berkley formations. Yes, lots of lights, high kicks, smiles as bright as any marquee, zippy get-to-the-point dialogue, and an air of hopeful enthusiasm throughout all do the trick.

The cast here are appealing and several are distinct pleasures. As Billy, Kyle Blair owns a firm and creamy tenor, a light of foot agility that conjures up shades of the great Fred, an unwavering youthfulness, a natural demeanor, and a sense of unforced presence in his movements. Cynthia Dale’s Dorothy is a snippy, bitchy, abusive, self-indulgent, and demanding creature. She’s a woman of haughtiness who seems to look up at the stars while she looks down on everyone else. Of course, Dorothy comes to her senses, gives her anxious replacement an inspiring pep talk, and realizes that “the only thing that ever mattered’ is her guy Pat.

Pat, played by C. David Johnson, has a warm and past-his-prime quality and consistently proves a straight ahead nice guy. Sean Arbuckle plays Julian Marsh like an introverted low-key hood, probably since he uses hoods to do his dirty work, seems always peeved, and is less of a frantic mess than Warner Baxter in the 1933 film and more an introverted brooder. Gabrielle Jones is a solid, forward and pleasantly brassy Maggie who claims the stage whenever she appears.

Jennifer Rider-Shaw’s Peggy, of bright eyes and smile, is indeed “pretty hot stuff in the steps department” as she glides with a stylish airiness to her dancing steps. Although, unlike everyone else on the planet, it appears, I’m not a fan of the tonally tightened and throbbing upper range that seems the current idiom of female singers, Ms. Rider-Shaw takes this route only rarely and otherwise sings with pleasing timbre. In all, she is a dynamic and enjoyable performer, especially in pairing with Kyle Blair. At times she seems to dance like a soft breeze.

When Moya O’Connell’s Hedda Gabler shakes hands with Judge Brack, she does so deliberately and ambiguously at arm’s length. Is this to show her assumed superiority, her distaste, or her fear? When, with Hedda and Brack sitting side by side, he places his hand upon hers, she withdraws it immediately and buries it decisively under her thigh. With any intimate gesture from her husband, she goes beyond physical expression of revulsion into a palpable and more condemning indifference. When she does reach out physically to the world, she embraces Thea with an artificial and hypocritical concern that seems more like a predatory hunger for a prey. Or she constantly pulls Thea’s hair, as she did when they were at school together, as if to make contact with others by giving them pain. Her physical aggression seems almost physically insane, as if, when out of control, she is made of pure menace. And twice Hedda sticks out her tongue in delight, once when declaring Brack as middle class and once when sensing an opportunity for drama in the works.

Yet for all this controlling choreography to outmaneuver others, this Hedda does not have physical control over her fate. For a woman who declares, “I loathe illness and death, it’s so ugly,” she now finds that her body has a way of its own as, pregnant, she hides herself and throws up. For a woman who moves in close, face to face and almost mouth to mouth, she does so not for intimacy but as an act of defiance and almost repugnance of her own physical self in a world of other physical beings. No, we can’t imagine Hedda with “the same person night after night” and, in her state of building inner tension, she can only hurl pillows in every direction and let out a not always stifled scream. But she cannot escape her inner world, she cannot get back at her outer world in which she is reduced to bullying an elderly maid. Hedda is made of pure frustration that does not, cannot, know what it wants. Meanwhile she is full of inbred snobbery about social class and she fears scandal of any kind that, for one, would compromise her independence.

One observes a great deal about Ibsen’s famous creation and still one cannot claim knowledge of her. Like the arbitrariness of nature, she is because she is. She expects to get her own way, she wants curtains drawn to block out any sunlight, she condescendingly dismisses her husband’s sentimentality about his slippers, she hates flowers, she eschews human contact and artificial niceties of social intercourse. She is inherently dismissive, judgmental, and disapproving in manner. Her smile seems a weapon of attack, her expressions of concern seem a tactic of delay before regrouping her forces to do damage again. She has needed for nothing in her life, except for meaning and purpose, and in Moya O’Connell’s riveting performance, Hedda creates inescapable tension for all who witness her presence, and that includes the audience of this production.

With Richard Eyre’s sharp and revealing new version, O’Connell’s -and director Martha Henry’s- Hedda is a study in human breaking points, delayed but intensifying moment by moment. “I get these feelings and I can’t stop” she declares. “You’ve never been engaged by anything,” observes Judge Brack. So she cannot help but deliberately demonstrate how she despises her husband’s esoteric field of study, perhaps to verify she exists. When George condemns her burning of Lovborg’s manuscript, we see her vulnerability and, in one of O’Connell’s haunting expressions, her dread of losing control of any outcome. “I did it for you,” she counters, and when her husband is moved by such definitive proof of her apparent love, she laughs at the absurdity of the ease by which her deception has convinced the love-starved George. Hedda does not understand kindness at all, even if it might be self-serving, when Aunt Juliana declares, “I need someone to look after.” If this Hedda is seeking meaning, she has no idea of what meaning might be and so she seeks distraction, although distraction always lets her down.

But all the insightfully directed and concisely-realized performances in this unrelentingly gripping production stand out. Patrick McManus’s annoying but touching Tesman is fussy in manner, a one track academic mind that that revels in the obscure. He is constantly driven to please his treasured wife, a catch in the opinion of some, but since he’s a man who knows life through books, one wonders who it is he cares for. Hedda is difficult to understand, but Tesman doesn’t even know he might try to do so, so he fawns on her and his tormented wife remains unknown to him. He is an unimaginative and uninspired man, one unable to see the world as more than he thinks it should be. Still, he seems always busy, always in a hurry, albeit a man of sincere passion in his studies. “You were concerned about me?” he asks Hedda. “No, it would never have occurred to me,” she responds, and there’s nothing in the man that will comprehend the woman revealed in her answer. Or is there? In Henry’s bravely ambiguous study of human reality, do we really comprehend him?

Gray Powell’s compellingly unpredictable Lovborg, on the other hand, is intriguing because, while aware of human values, he also knows he must play the social games of his society and is thus realistic. He wrote his first book, he explains, “to make himself accepted”. He seems volatile with intensity and suggests deeply cut pain and hard realizations in his past, but he remains impulsive and drawn to Hedda who, he says, “wanted to really be alive.” He seems somewhat naïve, maybe decent, yet open to Hedda’s will. Does he know that Hedda’s being really alive might mean own his destruction. Or hers? Under Henry’s guidance this is an interpretation of Ibsen with no black and white answers, only pulsating areas of grey.

Meanwhile, Jim Mezon’s Judge Brack is a man of dominating presence in his every word and gesture. On the prowl for Hedda, he plays polite predatory games and like Hedda is a master of sexual innuendo. As they verbally duel, she reveals her weak points of defense as he meticulously sizes her up as one to conquer. One senses his increasing, perhaps obsessive, hots for Hedda, the blend of his lust and his need to conquer for no reason, both of which are nicely put in his declaration that, unlike her ineffective husband, he is “without an atom of the academic about him”. Brack conquers slowly, discreetly and patiently, and his declaration about Lovborg that “He didn’t shoot himself deliberately” is both bemused and triumphant for he knows, by cracking her last resort of fantasy, that he has her in his grip. Hedda, shortly after, declares, I’m in your power then forever….I won’t be free….you’ll own me.” Thus she sets up one of the most famous of endings in theatre, one that we already know and expect, but for which we are unready.

The other women in the play are conceived and realized with an equally sharp razor’s edge of insight. Claire Julien’s Thea is a deeply sad woman of worn out eyes and nervous erratic movements that suggest increasing inner confusion and pain. She seems a woman of pummeled decency, one whose value has never been acknowledged, and she appears naïve about the motives of others. Or perhaps she acknowledges these motives, as with Hedda’s hair-pulling, but opts for another route. Through Julien’s performance, we see that Thea needs to believe in something or someone like Lovborg with whom she finds her own value and purpose as they work together. But she inspires tension with her desperate concern and, as with Hedda, one thinks she might snap at any moment.

As Aunt Juliana, Mary Haney demonstrates how one might spill blood through polite conversation, even with the manipulative Hedda. Gowned brownish, neck to foot, Juliana speaks with a mature and informed concern to Tesman and retorts to Hedda’s nasty power games with self-contained authority, poise, and a critical edge to her manner. She proves an equally nasty match for the always self-reverential Hedda and goes feisty and cruel as she stresses the younger woman’s unwanted and dreaded pregnancy. Haney implies many dimensions of character in Juliana. Finally, as servant Berthe, Jennifer Phipps has the old lady struggling for breath, perhaps for life, as she is abused by Hedda and seems a metaphor for all the others who can hardly breathe to save themselves in a world Ibsen has observed and created.

This production is unmerciful and outstanding, and several scenes especially come to mind. When Tesman announces to his wife that his coveted and anticipated academic position will now be open to competition, she is now without assurance of her security, one that includes “a certain style” with a butler and a horse. She quietly says, “I see” and it seems that she will quietly go mad with these two words. One senses a quiet frenzy at play in her mind and when she remarks, “At least I have my guns” one wonders what extent her destructive nature will take in its frustration. Later, having again made her reference to “vine leaves in his hair,” she declares “I don’t believe any more” and her expression seems one of a desperate wound that will never find healing. It seems now that nothing matters and, worse perhaps, that nothing ever did.

After all this unrelenting tension and after Hedda has taken the ultimate route of freedom and after Brack has declared that “People don’t do things like that,” the Judge now exits gingerly on tiptoe, as if to escape the anticipated scandal which will now, through his presence at this scene, implicate him. He seems a naughty schoolboy, no longer a systematic tormentor but an imminent victim of a society in which he found position and power and security of mind. The judge who judged others like Lovborg is now trapped in his own once protective society and, in trying to escape the deeds that have made him, is absurd. In ending her own life, Hedda has effectively ended Brack’s and what he was no longer matters. Only great playwrights like Ibsen can negotiate such of life’s supreme ironies in their creations and only uncompromising productions like this one can make a play’s issues an undeniable truth of those of us who watch.

THE MILLIONAIRESS
“Money for Nothing”,” Money Money Money” “Pennies from Heaven” – all perky, hook-rich tunes from the speakers, as we enter the Court House theatre for Shaw’s The Millionairess, music that celebrates the root of all evil to a compelling beat.

Then, in the program, a quote from GBS: “What is to be done with that section of the possessors of specific talents whose talent is for money making. History and daily experience teach us that if the world does not devise some plan of ruling them, they will rule the world. Now it is not desirable that they should rule the world; for … the supremacy of the money maker is the destruction of the State. A society which depends on the incentive of private profit is doomed.”

And for those who feel that Shaw is no longer relevant, the following is from The Observer’s front page just last Sunday: “A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.”

Director Blair Williams’ production of The Millionairess certainly hits home as a warning about the human madness inherent in capitalism, to be sure, especially with the profit motive so embedded in Epifania, in an inspired performance by Nicole Underhay. But if you saw Williams’ rapidly-paced production and remount of The President a few years ago, which I did three times, you’ll know he has an unwavering gift for comic rightness, a gift he brings to the current mounting of The Millionairess. Albeit the production’s spine-chilling message about uncontrolled greed, this is an exquisitely funny show.

Williams is a meticulous director, one whose every move has theatrical value, and yet his results seem spontaneous. Characters seem to speak as an extension of the momentum Williams has created and the movement of all these characters shows the fluidity of dance. When not acting, these characters react, always in tune with a precisely created and prevailing comic spirit. Thus, even without sound, this production could be a silent film of engaging animated gestures and expressions.

And I’ve never quite experienced a set like this creation by Cameron Porteous. It’s a completely blood red office in which a lawyer plays a blood red ukulele beside a blood red table on which sits a blood red phone. The raging capitalist, Nicole Underhay’s Epifania Ognisanti Di Parerga, enters in a blood red suit and blood red hat. This is primal stuff, an atmosphere of blood and, in Epifania, personification of the bloodthirsty. Epifania is summarized in this exchange: you’re “the meanest woman on earth”…..“that’s why I’m the richest”.

Epifania is cruelly clueless to the damage she does. She embodies the self-perpetuation of greed, and is truly scary as a monster of capitalism, one who will accept no autonomy that does not feed her coffers. Yet one becomes entranced by this comedic wonder of a performance, with its multi dimensional glances and the multitudinous shapes of Ms Underhay’s enunciating lips. Underhay doesn’t merely chew up the text with determined teeth but, instead, it seems, her upper and lower fangs meet as she bites down hard on everything in her way. “There is nothing one can want more than money,” she rhapsodizes, because money is the air she needs to breathe.

The whole cast in this gem of a production is perfectly tuned to Shaw’s mix of entertainment and message, and one might easily find analogy in a perfectly-formed Mozart symphony to describe it. Martin Happer, as endearing husband Alastair, is strong jawed, rigidly posed in masculinity, with guy gestures that are firm and starched. Ideas are beyond him, but he finds a “mind mate” in the Patricia of Robin Evan Willis whose facial contortions tell their own tales, as she knits and makes her points through pleasant innuendo, while her long legs do leggy duty. Steven Sutcliffe’s Adrian is a good old young chap with a mustache and cane and with moneyed affectation in his laughter. He’s a smiling airhead and hilarious in self-pity. Kevin Bundy plays lawyer Julius with a noteworthy lightness of touch and physicality, while the Doctor played by Kevin Hanchard is subtly but firmly present with life smarts and earthy serenity.

Shaw also includes a pivotal scene involving the poor, poignantly and effortlessly realized by Michael Ball and Wendy Thatcher as Joe and Joe’s wife. These are the poor who know their place and want to keep it that way, the poor who say “we know our ways,” the poor who “do not trust a bank” because “no good comes out of banks.” These are the poor who work in “slavery for next to nothing” while their employer, “an exploiter of misery” maintains that “business is business,” even as lives are thrown out on the street.

Yes, this production is analogous to Mozart. I didn’t witness one false note as each character, each delivery, each movement, seemed perfectly and vibrantly placed, and with delightful results. All ingredients seemed at one with the momentum of the play’s development. The playwright’s message about greed and need is delivered with a firm but light touch by an exceptionally tuned cast. This is terrific theatre here, one that demands a repeat visit.

MISALLIANCE
Misalliance is an often engaging production that sometimes gets in its own way and almost undermines some well-realized performances with distracting and exaggerated physical business. The Festival company is long and widely known as more than able to negotiate lengthy Shavian texts with style and ease and personality, so the decision to feature overplayed physicality is ill-judged. Ben Sanders’ Bentley, for one, with his cane and posturing attitude, is certainly pointedly created as a dislikable little shit who loves to annoy, but his tendency to fall into excessive screaming fits shows a director going too far.

Likewise, the encounter of Jeff Meadows Johnny with a bee, including animated facial and body gestures as he pursues it with a cricket bat, seems artificial and imposed. Craig Pike as Gunner, on pinching his finger on the gun, goes the big gesture route to make sure we get the point. On the other hand, a discussion about parents and children between Thom Marriot as John and Peter Krantz as Lord Summerhays is entertaining, mind-provoking, and listenable, because these are thought out characters who blend personality, ideas and humour implicit in the text.

Setting the play, first produced in 1910, in 1962 gives occasion to some awkwardness. A few grinding guitars in 4/4 do not an era make and all the straining to be current doesn’t work in this production. Talk of a hi-fi doesn’t jive with talk of free libraries, but it’s especially in dialogue reflecting Shaw’s time that the play is so not the sixties. Try “I can’t tell you in the presence of ladies” or “the lie that this lady behaved improperly in my presence” or “a ripping fine woman” or much chatter about “the correct thing.”

If this be the sixties, the oh-so-long-ago “You chased me through the heather and kissed me!” makes one wonder how the female speaker and her pursuing male did not trip over the love generation screwing among the flowers. On the other hand, Johnny’s remark that “Independence for women is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed.” doesn’t fit into the mythology of the 60’s, at least as portrayed by the media, though it might be seem spoken today in 2012 by Republicans and Conservatives of North America -and French politicians. In any case, the updating is not sufficiently comfortable with the original text.

Another problem appears in, say, Hypatia’s remark about Summerhays’s age, since there is no way that Peter Krantz, makeup and all, could be her grandfather. In cadence and inflection and colouring, he sounds perhaps elderly, but he still looks young playing old. Catherine McGregor as Mrs Tarlton is seemingly too young a parent for these offspring we see on stage, so are we left to assume that there was perhaps copulation in the nursery at one time to produce parents and offspring so obviously close in age?

Thom Marriot as Tarlton, has a brain full of references -“read your Darwin”… “read Ibsen”… “read Chesterton”…. “read what’s his name”- and is funny. Self-assured and solidly dynamic, impending oratorical in speech as if spoken from a mountain top that he of course owns, this Tarlton has no doubt sold much underwear, and we keep watching him. Catherine McGregor clearly shows his wife to be appealing and aloof at one go and, when her irritation gets picky, the goings on here heat up.

Krista Colosimo’s restless Hypatia is a solid declarative presence, one with inner energy that wants out. She reveals a lusty delight and lusty gusto, does not want to “whither into a lady” and declares “I can be wicked and I am quite prepared to be.” She stocks Wade Bogert-O’Brien’s Joey in bare feet and with raised skirt and obviously she wants to raise it higher. Meanwhile, Joey punctuates his lines with bends in his joints and with mechanically vibrant movements, and proves a young man of complexity in this somewhat brief but interesting performance.

And there’s Tara Rosling’s –and I’ll say this just once- Lina Szczepanowska. This delightfully realized creation is bluntly level headed about danger and everything else, since she comes from “a tradition of risk takers,” is used to “offers” from men, and likes to read psalms from a music stand as she juggles six balls in the air. She maintains, “You can see through a man at a glance” and asks, “ Have you learned everything from books?” while others declare “Let the family be rooted out of civilization” and “Prospero didn’t tempt providence, Prospero was providence” and “Democracy reads well but it doesn’t act well, like some people’s plays.” Actually, this play does act well, even in this production for the most part, when it trusts the playwright and plays for wit -and not so much to the pit.

PRESENT LAUGHTER
Having created himself as a masterpiece of persona, the much-talented Noel Coward was the quintessential man of theatre, a man, as it were, for whom life and performance overlapped often as one. His near-perfectly constructed comedy, Present Laughter, concerns matinee idol Garry Essendine and says much about the oh so theatrical theatricality of the theatrical. It’s a penetrating and hilarious look at life off the stage, one that shows how Essendine as Coward’s acknowledged representative is always acting, playing a role, performing the essentials of life as unmastered ambiguities, proving all the world’s a stage.

Director David Schurmann’s unobtrusively detailed production allows no throwaways and always informs in, say, the response to a gift in a box or the response to an off taste in the coffee. As well, motivic business helps to sew threads of plot together, say, with Garry repeatedly touching up his hair in the nearest mirror or with running gag complications involving a guest room. In time all confidences are revealed to much believable indignation by the many deceivers here and brief orations of life wisdom -“ there is far too much nonsense talked about sex… the whole business is vastly overrated…I will be happy to go to bed with an apple and a good book”-seem natural to these characters.

Steven Sutcliffe’s Garry is driven by an all directions urgency, often implying a self-indulgent crisis in the works. He delivers his lines as if oozing his words like thick, condescending jam. While embracing the hapless Daphne and turned to the balcony, he is patient in waiting for adoration; he speaks to Daphne up close like an Edwardian actor nobly delivering his cruel fate. At one point he observes, “I’m always acting, watching myself go by” and it’s true that each sentence he speaks seems a melodrama. Garry is very “me” and as he sees himself a victim of the world’s assumed demands; he is indignant about everything. Over the top is his regular gear and Sutcliffe, with briefest exception, rings true and is hilarious.

Clare Julian as former wife Liz displays a kindly lush womanhood and speaks with the patient authority of intimate understanding, especially of Garry. She is girlishly chiding of her ex and she counters his broad presence, game by game, with a sense of knowing and a sense of fun. One believes they were married. Delightful Mary Haney’s Monica is a figure of quiet authority and she speaks politely and incisively, with a crisp, low key, and twisting enunciation that owns each of her encounters with the others. Jonathan Tan’s Mr. Maule amuses with his youthfully driven dislike for “the commercial theatre.” He is likeably adolescent, all wide eyed and frenzied with his ideas, a master of quick changes of position and perfect landings, and very funny.

Daphne, played by Julia Course is quite believable in innocence, gullibility, and star struck availability. Her emotional delivery of Shelly inspires much laughter. Moya O’Connell’s Joanna is sexy in enticing shadings of feline, as she explores how to get her way in each situation. Her seductive claws always seem to rest on the flesh of others, and she is one who withdraws her signals until she can better read those of the other. She is predatory in coyness, or “as predatory as hell,” always alert to conquer.

The rest of the cast provide distinct characterizations as well, including Jennifer Phipps with a deliciously shaped delivery of her few lines. On William Schmuck’s lushly brown inlay set, robustly brown with many details under Kevin Lamotte’s warm lighting, the Essendine studio is a rich, relaxing, cozy place, although, when things get hectic, Joanna comments that she feels she’s in a “French farce.” And we believe her.

TROUBLE IN TAHITI
Trouble In Tahiti opens with a young man and young woman dancing to keyboard, bass, drums, and woodwind, dancing a barefoot slow dance in silence and suggestive of elegance. Then an alarm clock breaks the dream and an eight person chorus, all in 50’s semi-formal black, move about stylishly in toe tapping tempo and sing of “a little white house” before they form a human backdrop to the couple’s domestic unhappiness. Example one: “This coffee is burnt”…“ Make it yourself,” and what of hubby’s relationship with his secretary Miss Brown? “You live your life and I’ll live mine” shows a marriage in decline. Money is an issue and she is seeing an analyst.

Throughout we sense a painful aloofness in intimate marital space. Dinah and Sam convey the individual pain in a marital standoff, each one full of regret, suspicion, sadness, longing and loss. Their conversations are full of futile suggestions about getting together and broken hearted solutions. At one point Dinah finds herself at “a terrible awful movie” of escapist drivel. Sam at one point stands in a locker room full of “men who can make it and men who cannot” for in his cut throat world of achievement, “men are created unequal.”

With Linda Garneau’s close quarter chorography and its compact gestures that seem broad and big, the crowd scenes in Trouble in Tahiti do indeed feel commuter crowded. The office is all business smiles, and the analyst’s couch opens the door for dreams and memories. In turn, Elodie Gillet as Dinah sings her lyrics with aching purity up high, with a suggestion of weeping within all her range. Hers is a voice of piercing brightness, sophisticated sparkle, and very human vulnerability. Mark Uhre’s subtly encapsulates Sam, a victim of the career jungle and inwardly emotional, with the complexity of many emotions written all over his face. He bitterly sings “the winner must pay through his nose” because his good life isn’t good anymore.

Bernstein’s score provides a sense of musical and lyrical progression that feels like a heart making wistful commentary on itself. The music tends to inhabit the higher range, with a dramatically compelling juxtaposition of up tempo lifestyle commentary and gentler and more personal duets and solos. Bernstein effectively uses a blending of vocal lines that echo or respond to one another, lines that also give in to his undeniable musical momentum, one that is both rhythmic and stylish. His characterizes both the psychological makeup of individuals and the atmosphere of scenes precisely and shows a mastery of the musical as an idiom. Add director Jay Turvey’s instinct for theatrical effect, and an impressive cast that wins and breaks hearts, and this noon hour offering is special.

One of my favourite books of the seventies was The Tuning of the World of 1977 (re-published as The Soundscape in 1994). In this rewarding groundbreaker, the Canadian composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer explores soundscape as a comprehensive phenomenon we experience, for whatever good or ill effects upon our psyches, within our natural and urban environments. Not many weeks after reading The Tuning of the World, I ran into Schafer leading a group along water’s edge behind our Stratford Shakespearean Festival Theatre, since, although he is a man who brings music into the world, he also listens to the world and helps others to hear the world’s sounds.

My Life in Widening Circles, on the Canadian Music Centre label, is a collection of three instrumental chamber compositions and two song cycles, all by Schafer, the latter including nine songs set to the writings of Brecht, with two adaptations by the composer of traditional pieces, and six song settings of works by Rilke. Throughout, this is exciting, challenging, refreshingly assertive and engaging music created by an acutely imaginative mind, one that appreciates the evocative power of tonal and rhythmic variety and is master of both atmosphere and narrative energy.

One noteworthy aspect of Schafer’s writing here is his ability to abruptly change solo instruments or groupings in realizing narrative progression. Thus his sequential development is unpredictable while always driven ahead by what seems a frenzied urgency, as if, in spirit at least, he is deeply feels a Schubertian torment from which he cannot escape. Another mastery in Schafer’s method is how he maintains simultaneous lines that are psychological, narrative, and metaphysical in effect. He pushes the right buttons and thus his works are each expressed and received as a complex wholeness of being. He doesn’t merely engage the listener; he embeds the listener in demanding existential conditions.

To begin, the Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello is constantly gripping and richly satisfying in exploring the tonal resources of the three instruments. Schafer’s economy of instrumental means achieves -though the committed, precise and incisive playing of the Land’s End Chamber Ensemble- a maximum effect at every turn. This 2006 composition remains inherently urgent, at times with unrelenting propulsion through shifting moods, and the result is haunting and unsettling. In these shifts from intensity to lyricism and back, one feels hurled into one’s existence in a Heideggerian sense.

The two other instrumental works, Wild Bird of 1997 and Duo for Violin and Piano of 2008, feature similar characteristics, for one the constantly present or impending undercurrents that either support or seem to threaten the dominant linear phrases. Schafer, through this invigorating group of musicians, negotiates involving shifts from combinations and solos to new instrumental configurations that make their statement and simply end or continue to imply other dynamic extensions. Thus, one is never let free into passivity, one hangs on every new entrance, one is repeatedly surprised at every brief passage that the composer presents within this demanding continuum.

Wild Bird, for violin and piano (originally harp) was dedicated to violinist and former concertmaster of the TSO Jacques Israelievitch, at the time a man of bright orange hair -and weren’t we all taken aback by this new shift in coloration? Whatever the degree of the composer’s intent to create a musical world suggestive of multiple avian personalities, and given the title, one easily imagines some vigorously expressive birds increasing in intensity of cooing and fluttering and agitation. Or one hears these suggestive passages receding into bird-like delicacy through the lightness of bowing and ethereal slurs on the violin and with the piano in single note progressions. Indeed, in each of the three instrumental works on this CD, Schafer is admirably smart and flexible at maintaining inner tension between instrumental voices through a variety of musical devices. As a result, we are always involved and off guard for what comes next.

In the Duo for Violin and Piano, the 2011 Juno winner for the “Classical Composition of the Year” with, according to the composer some quotes in the second movement from Brahms 4th Symphony, we have an opening of gradually accumulative effect with the conversational interplay of the piano’s chordal rumblings and the violin’s desperate searchings through the octaves. Schafer’s bowings can quickly shift from the long and lyrical to the curt and seemingly troubled, and in such case one feels placed in a drama whose import relies on psychological shadings implied by the players. The call and response last movement, in which piano and violin each take over the momentum of the other, progresses in a demonic surge to its conclusion.

Widely valued as a new music specialist -one who has indeed commissioned new works by Harry Freedman, Juhan Puhm, Clark Ross, Scott Godin, Tawnie Olson, and, on this CD, R. Murray Schafer- Canadian soprano Stacie Dunlop owns a variety of compelling qualities that make her a significant presence in the new music repertoire. Dunlop possesses an instinct for storytelling and for precise creation of both mood and irony. She suggests a variety of concise characterizations in these songs and in each character we discover delightful shifts of mood, even from word to word, even from childlike innocence to barebones dread of being.

Dunlop also displays versatility in shaping words into meaning and a secure ease in her ability to negotiate the composer’s angular leaps. She brings forth a variety of vocal resources to translate the many emotional intensities, suggested by the composer, into distinctly human expression. Dunlop is enjoyably adept at pointed, accusatory, ironic and leering implications; the edges of her tone and inflection suggest mini dramas. As well, a quality of beneficence often imbues her expression with palpable warmth.

In Kinderlieder, we find in The Plum Tree a haunting undercurrent moves to surround a voice that simultaneously conveys existential bruises and deep-rooted heart-fuelled hopefulness. A roller coaster spoken delivery leads in to Die Maske des Bosen which then culminates with a not too polite but quick and subtle growl on “mask of evil demons” -and we are scared. Each word in Hollywood is given proportioned inflection, sometimes ripe with irony, sometimes with painterly savvy that suggests a situation and moves on. In Birds in Winter there’s an inherent sense of one’s being existentially burdened and reluctantly alive, both alternating with clearly expressive life-sustaining hope. Dunlop skillfully mines these dramatic threads presented by the composer. In Wiegenlied, she not only conveys the emotional shadings of each word but, as well, gives body to the narrative history implicit in each same word.

I especially appreciate the softly ringing poignancy in the upper expansiveness of Dunlop’s voice. It’s an open-hearted and succulent voice that can also be unaffectedly intimate, wound-wrapped, and flavoured with close-quarters human sincerity. As such it is dramatically ideal for the one to one tentative relationship of the speaker and his or her God in the six selections from Rilke. The texts of Six Songs include lines like, in II, “I love the dark hours of my being” and Dunlop conveys both the vulnerable fate of one’s existence and at the same time a loving acceptance of it. In III she can be bubble light with just a tad of leering accusation, and deeply touching with much understated longing. In the deliberately measured IV that begins “What will you do God when I die?” and ends “I’m worried” Dunlop shows a contained urgency. In the frantically urgent V, Dunlop walks the border between the personal and the cosmic.

There is much intense beauty in these six songs based on Rilke, in part because of the courage inherent in the poetry, in part because Schafer’s settings are strikingly and brilliantly appropriate, in part because Dunlop is a committed and accomplished singer who intuitively comprehends her vital place as a creative vehicle in expression of human depth. One outstanding feature of this CD is the search for truth one senses in both the compositions and their respective performances; another outstanding feature is the top-notch quality of music-making here. We have much intelligence and passion implicit in these five performances and much occasion for discovery. No doubt, it is the composer’s intention that we listen and are repeatedly challenged and moved by his works. But also, I suspect, it is his intention that we begin to truly hear -within his musical world and everywhere we go.

A MAN AND SOME WOMEN
A Man and Some Women, in a challenging intimate gem of a production, is an intense and gripping exploration of human relations that pulsates with restrained vindictiveness in some of the characters. It’s not a comfortable play and, because A Man and Some Women addresses the ugly side of human nature, it requires adult honesty and insight from the audience. Director Alisa Palmer and her exceptional cast negotiate the many shades of grey in personal psychology and societal suppression of women and Githa Sowerby’s play, first produced in 1914, is certainly proves relevant today.

Three ladies garbed in black sit in a dimly lit library. One reads, one plays solitaire, one sews, and it’s a very oppressive place. Then Hilda the wife joins the two sisters Rose and Elizabeth and friend Jessica and Rose and Hilda repeatedly reveal themselves as petty, mean spirited, limited in human qualities, uninteresting and spiteful. We are compelled to experience the oppressive atmosphere in which these people lived their lives a hundred years ago, and one achievement of this production is how it explains, in demonstration, how the more undesirable side of human nature is unleashed in a society made of denial and oppression.

So, we have an unhappy marriage, two unhappy sisters dependent on their brother, a lady friend whose decency inspires some meanness of spirit, a young boy whose dependency is abused, and much sibling snippiness from Rose. Rose happily senses the worst in the relationship between brother Richard and Jessica, saying “she knows the difference between right and wrong,” while the more kindly yet attuned sister Elizabeth observes “you haven’t enjoyed yourself so much in a long time.” Richard knows Rose as a “meddler” and accusation is constantly in the air.

Richard summarizes his marriage to Hilda thus: “the whole of our life together has been planned to please you” and they then keep trying to get at one another. Richard is worn out, his sister Rose is disease posing as duty, and Hilda is his money leaching wife though, of course, in this airless society wives were expected to be dependent and kept in the home. Still, Richard is accurate in saying that he lives with ”a pack of idle shallow women” who are “bullies” and although Jessica loves Richard, she does not want to destroy him more by being a “continuation of all the others”.

Sowerby’s writing contains some challenging lines like “We forgive you, you can’t refuse to be forgiven” and “Married people can’t part simply because they are unhappy,” and many times in this compact play the characters -and we- are forced to deal with life of no easy answers. I’ve heard much praise for both this play and this production and heard of only one dissenting view that deemed it as boring. The only thing that is boring, I would think, is a lack of maturity that compels one to run from life’s difficult issues, presented in such a riveting fashion as we have at the Courthouse. Is it not a kind of personal cowardice to hide such evasion in condemnation of the production? The cast features Graeme Somerville, Marla McLean, Sharry Flett, Kate Hennig and Jenny L. Wright and each one is outstanding.

Which leads me to the positive feelings I’ve had about this year’s Shaw Festival, at least after seeing three of its offerings – A Man and Some Women, French Without Tears, and Ragtime- a week ago. A Man and Some Woman is a revival of an unknown but incisive play of much value from a historical, feminist, societal perspective, to be sure, but also of relevance to men and women who need to look in the mirror some time and consider what they are. It’s a gutsy decision by artistic director Jackie Maxwell to program and creatively interpret plays that will challenge complacency and ask that people pay their money to be disturbed, but without such purpose theatre, simply put, does not live.

FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS
Another gutsy choice by Maxwell is Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears, a chatty period comedy from a society of long ago, 1936, a play that unfolds easy and unrushed. Certainly the audience of nowadays is accustomed to quicker pacing, snappy laughs and grabby lines –they want the punch line and they want to get going. But the gentle humour in French Without Tears evolves from the prevailing leisurely energy of characters who, throughout the play, take their time because they have time. That’s the point about these somewhat pointless people.

French Without Tears has a leisurely pace because this world it depicts has room for leisure. Thus, both the playwright and director allow us to experience the rhythm and pacing of a way of life as they are experienced by the characters before us. Gradually these characters grow on each other and they grow on us and we live with them, at least temporally, in their world. In the one other production I’ve seen of this play, some of the characters had silver spoons deeper in their mouths than in this Shaw Festival version and I despised their ingrained snobbery of privileged birth. They didn’t do much except take life slow and snobby and weren’t as likable as the characters in the Shaw production. But note that in a recent copy of The Observer, the paper’s Washington correspondent, returning to Britain, finds the country still “beset by class and inequality.” And that is relevance for you, isn’t it?

The original mounting of French Without Tears ran for 1039 performances in 1936, transferred to Broadway, and was made into a film. Perhaps folks at the time of Depression needed such light stuff, I don’t know, but it is the first major play of a man who later wrote some devastating works like The Browning Version. In any case, this production doesn’t quite probe Rattigan’s depiction of an inbred class system, but there were many laughs I heard and it does entertain. Ably directed by Kate Lynch to give the text a physical dimension, the words and movement in this production play echo to each other. The characters speak sentences in their facial expressions and gestures and do suggest meanings implicit or implied in their words.

French Without Tears reflects the manners and attitudes of a time when people acknowledged rules of social behavior, even in breaking them, so a tension exists between social form and the substrata of instincts. It’s fun, and perhaps instructive, to watch characters expressing love through awkward shyness in a time when people didn’t know everything there was to know about life, and, yes, I am being sarcastic about today’s pseudo sophisticates. Each diversion from propriety is cause for laughter but people look silly either way, either rigid in conformity or awkward and as bad as naughty, while life issues are a matter of course and resolved by a system that tolerates no laps from civilized behavior. A quaint bunch they are, but real.

We have four young men and one naval fellow, some being diplomats in training, and all required to speak French under the strict tutelage of Michael Ball’s Monsieur Maingot. The naval bloke, subtly presented by Martin Happer, is tall blazered and proper with his sense of manners and propriety. He is gullible, naïve about women and dupable, while his navy lingo is mocked by the others. The lads are casual, conceited and young, with one, Ben Sanders’ Alan, who is savvy in French and one, Craig Pike’s Brian, knows just a dozen words and seems satisfied at that. Alan, a crucial player in the play’s development, is intelligent, smart about women, authoritative, rich with insight and concern, mischievous, and appealingly vulnerable when matters of the heart arise. Meanwhile, elsewhere, we have Wade Bogert-O’Brien’s Kit, adorable in befuddlement, who loves the blonde tease Diana while Jacqueline loves Kit.

Diana is self centered, manipulative of men, greedy to have all in her power, and unkind to men whom she treats as toys. Played not too nasty by Robin Evan Willis, she is tall with sexy tomboyish limbs she likes to put on tantalizing display, and not too calculatingly cold in her manipulations, although it is said of her that “She likes to tear him up to pieces and trample on him”. Jacqueline via Julie Martel has a tactile sexuality and makes a very believable Francaise one might find in one’s imagination or on Parisian streets. She has an expansive physicality, with a touch of earthiness in her, and offers delightful inflexions in her delivery.

French, in this pleasantly charming production, means opening with a lively French duet over French travel posters, and then deliberate misguided translations like “au dessus de sa gare” and then some hilarious pronunciation “ s’il vous plate” (intentional) and “la cham-pain est tres mauvaise” (not intended). There are quick precise exchanges like “I don’t think he likes me. Who does” and word turns like “A peer in one hand” that delight. There’s also the wisdom and profundity of young drunks who can ask, “tell us why we disliked you so much” and guys just goofing around. Most intriguing are the way of life and attitudes the play implies about its characters and, most of all, its audience that gave the play’s first production a three year run in London. French Without Tears may be very understated, but beneath its surface it does suggest so much.

RAGTIME
In director Jackie Maxwell’s hands, Ragtime becomes a production of cumulative effect, both on grand musical scale and, more to the point, in plain dramatic terms. One responds from the gut at unpredictable moments and perhaps her main achievement is that a show of blockbuster dimension breathes naturally and believably through individual lives. Credit must go to Maxwell’s insightful and proportioned direction and to her casting of key actors who create through subtle shadings in their characters a natural humanity. Once one adjusts to being overwhelmed by solid narrative content and by compelling musical numbers, one discovers that the show vibrates from a potent emotional core. It becomes a drama that is sung, a drama with dramatic impetus, not so much a depiction of concisely etched musical types but a drama sung to imply depths of life in a variety of characters. We believe them as people.

Ragtime depicts an era of immense wealth, appalling poverty, suffering and survival of immigrants, and ubiquitous racism against the blacks. It’s an era of Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, Houdini, Commander Perry, Carnegie and other rich industrialists, and Booker T. Washington. It’s a time when “nothing will change in a year. Everything will be the same,” when lower east side tenements have “thousands of stories to tell, a time of “the night Goldman spoke in Union Square” and a time when racists might say, “that nigger doesn’t know he’s a nigger”. It’s a big show and sometimes feels crowded and too comprehensive in depicting an era, with individual lives too simplified, the grime and violence too stylized and clean. But such is the nature of the musical beast and fortunately Maxwell has found its believably human scale. Meanwhile, the ragtime-infused music is always listenable, sometimes catchy, and the duets and group numbers are rich with appealing harmonies. There is much variety in singing voices which gives the production a compelling texture in sound. Choreographer Valerie Moore’s loose limbed ensemble dance numbers are stylish and smooth.

The opening of Ragtime declares that this is the era, this is the music, these are the characters, and a tale is about to be told. Sue LePage’s seductively cold metal-beamed set, with mind enhancing and informative rear projections, and Alan Brodie’s dark lighting reveal the era’s inhuman underbelly. Meanwhile, LePage’s costumes are rich and precisely detailed, clothes that some in an opulent era would wear. If the book, lyrics, and music of the show guide us to emotions we are intended to feel, Maxwell’s directorial precision, meanwhile, seeks the inner lives of her characters and shows restraint form sentimentality. Yes, with a less insightful director, these whites would be tight assed and these blacks would have style, and these Jewish immigrants would be wise survivors. But they are not stereotypes at all in Maxwell’s hands and she saves us from cliché. And Terrence McNally’s book is concise and often ripe in poetical writing as in descriptions of ragtime music.

This production of Ragtime features much variety in characterization and many theatrically thrilling moments even when the complexity of individual lives is implied through presence and inflection alone. Patty Jamieson’s Mother is a woman of centered femininity, subtle in revealing her human depth, and, in her totally engaging solos of vulnerable compassion, has a voice that supports emotional variety in singing through tonal shifts. Thom Allison’s Coalhouse Walker is a very compelling man of inherent style, the most dynamic of the three anchors in the show, who sings full-bodied in all registers with resonance of deep beauty. I thought of Leon Bibb’s similar tones and when Allison sang I certainly wanted to listen, I wanted more.

As Tateh, Jay Turvey easily gets below stereotype and cliché with a vulnerable urgency in his words and manner that makes one understand the plight of immigrants. He is not as much an archetype, he’s a human being. With clean depiction, Benedict Campbell does Father as dominating and frustratingly unreachable with a glint of humanity in him. To him “destruction of property” is the ultimate sin because he owns a lot of it and there is no surprise that his idealist brother in law says “I despise you”. The latter is portrayed by Evan Alexander Smith as passionate and sincere, with believably personal values as the basis of his ideals. There are many other special performances here, including Neil Barclay’s Fire Chief Willie Conklin who, when we’re escaping into the music of this unforgettable production, brings us back to earth as a very chilling and cruel racist.

During rehearsals for a 1937 performance, Ralph Vaughan Williams remarked about his Symphony Number 4, not two years old, in these words: “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I mean.” And, certainly, this is not a work whose sometimes aggressively loud and military manner one would consider right off the bat as likable. Albeit the intervals of lyrical, even mystical, passages, one is assaulted, sometimes unrelentingly, by cosmically boorish and brass-edged chords and their unpredictable eruptions. One does not sit back and listen; one waits with increasing nervousness, even as one eases into a serene dimension evoked by string and woodwind led passages, a dimension that might also might erupt at any time.

One prime quality in conductor Peter Oundjian’s seductively engaging interpretation here is his ability to create tension through a combination of elements: a subtle sense of restraint, control of the orchestra as one voice of many clearly articulated shadings, and, whatever the broad variety in the composer’s juxtaposed effects, a clarity in execution. As well, he reveals a sophisticated polish in sound and a sense of unwavering and unified purpose, both typical of his conducting. The composer maintained of this work written between two world wars that it was “not a definite picture of anything external like the state of Europe, but simply because it occurred to me like this. . .it is what I wanted to do at the time.” The Toronto Symphony impresses with both a secure precision in playing that is lyrical and explosive and as well evocative powers that suggest extra-musical interpretations, whatever one chooses these to be.

The shimmering descent in the strings, both lush and poignant, that opens the Fifth Symphony reminds us that few composers are capable of pastoral effects as Vaughan Williams. Indeed, his are one of the distinct sounds in the orchestral canon. Again Oundjian maintains an air of measured freedom that keeps complete abandon just ever so slightly contained in passages of unfolding beauty that suggest human longing and quiet resolution. This is a beautiful recording for reflection and imagination. Symphony No. 4 was recorded live in March 2011 at Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, while Symphony No. 5 was recorded live in November 2008 at Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, and appear on tsoLive, the Toronto Symphony’s own label.

Likewise the just released Shostakovich Symphony No. 11 “The Year 1905″ in which the composer’s systematic achievement of uncluttered orchestral effects finds a very attuned conductor in Oundjian who sustains an ominous and brooding atmosphere throughout and shapes the unfoldment of musical subplots with keen awareness as to their part in the whole. The music of Shostakovich is sometimes a window and sometimes an insinuating mirror to the Stalinist society of Russia that long tormented him, and the TSO prove passionate yet refined, emphatic yet suggestive, able to negotiate with ironic finesse the dynamics of a musical statement that is implicitly political and personal. They are exact and secure in rhythm, pinpoint and dynamic in those surprising trademark passages of the composer that elbow and unsettle the listener, and perfectly in synch with the dramatic developments within the work- This very compelling recording was made at Roy Thomson Hall in 2008.

Handel Sing-Along, a new release by Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra on their own label named –what else?- Tafelmusik Media, is a filmed record of an eagerly anticipated annual event at Toronto’s Massey Hall, one that has offered many thousands since 1986 a chance to join in and belt out Handel’s beloved masterwork. First presented on Bravo in December of 2010, this DVD, here filmed at Koerner Hall, is a gem of celebratory and open-hearted music-making and –how else to say it?- a hell of a lot of fun. Soprano Suzie LeBlanc with poignant voice and charming presence, countertenor Daniel Taylor with tones of aching purity, tenor Rufus Mueller and bass-baritone Locky Chung make up an outstanding quartet of soloists who front the invariably memorable Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir of about two dozen members per group.

During the overture we have clips of musicians in preparation backstage while in the lobby members of the audience enthusiastically declare the number of times they have come to sing along at this annual ritual, the number for some being over two dozen. Since its debut in 1742 in Dublin, Messiah has over time been given the bigger is better treatment in many symphonic performances and here the intention is to return to standards that, on a smaller scale, are “more intimate and more approachable.” And how is this accomplished? Why, of course, through taking one of the world’s great baroque orchestras with none other than Herr Handel himself to conduct.

You see, it seems that the corpulent Handel’s higher power once maneuvered the composer into conducting these sing alongs for all eternity and, happily, we have a post-Pilates Handel embodied here by a thinner choir director Ivars Taurins who both tells the tale and conducts. He is indeed a very funny guy in powdered wig and eighteenth century garb, a man who exudes warmth, wit, joy in the music, and certainly something of the heartbeat of a man who could compose Messiah in about three weeks. On my last two visits to London I dropped in again to the Handel House Museum at 25 Brook Street, and felt a slight shiver as I stood in the room alleged to be the one where Handel did the deed. Such sensation returned on watching this film of music-making at its most joyfully human.

The second DVD release from Tafelmusik is a much celebrated multimedia creation, The Galileo Project, which, in 2009, had its premiere at The Banff Centre in Alberta in celebration of Galileo’s first public demonstration of his telescope. In a nutshell, this production explores “the fusion of arts, science and culture in the 17th and 18th centuries” with Tafelmusik performing “the music by memory to a backdrop of high-definition images from the Hubble telescope and Canadian astronomers.” We hear music by Monteverdi, Bach, Lully, Rameau, Handel, Telemann, Zelenka, Purcell Vivaldi, and Weiss, along with the lesser known Merula, Galilei, Marini, and, yes, the accompanying CD is a baroque treasure as one would expect of Tafelmusik.

The whole project was “programmed and scripted” by double bassist Allison Mackay with actor Shaun Smyth handling performance of intriguing texts that include Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses, a letter written by Galileo in 1629 concerning his appearance before the Venetian Senate, even the Inquisition’s sentence of Galileo, and much else that places the era’s scientific zeitgeist, its human dimension, and its cultural life into the listener’s consciousness. The texts are informative, touching or, as in the tale of Phaeton, quite thrilling, especially when juxtaposed with musical selections that enhance their dramatic content. Indeed, this is a multi-media production that is based, in concept, on a sensitive intelligence and in turn is realized to dazzling and awe-inspiring effect.

There are so many things that please in this ninety minute performance and the interaction of the musicians is one. Right at the outset, we have an assertive downbeat from violinist Jeanne Lamon, the entry by second violinist Julia Wedman who in quick order turns –with an expression of impish sunrise in her eyes- toward the actively benign presence of cellist Christina Mahler whose ensuing gaze at Ms. Lamon sets the latter into a breathtaking frenzy of violin playing in Vivaldi. The interaction of musicians, especially when they are choreographed as celestial bodies by Marshall Pynkoski against radiant or haunting images of the sky, and especially with camera work that plants the viewer among them, is magical.

With the Tafelmusik sound that is perfect as crystal, shining, and majestic, one might be taken aback by the contemporary and youthful voice of actor Shaun Smyth. The readings are intelligently shaped for meaning and echo the emotional variety of the orchestra’s selections certainly, but the voice is not stately or classically resonant as that of a traditional stage actor might be. Very soon, however, one shares through Smyth’s readings a sense of everyday human wonder that is very moving, since we are thus made contemporaries of those who spoke these lines long ago. After all, we are so lucky as a species that when we look skyward at infinity, we find millions of luminous heavenly bodies blocking our view.

The combination of conductor Bruno Weil and the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra is a longstanding and inspired musical union with many performances and recordings of distinction to its credit. This pairing proves that the scale and quality of musical performance are achieved not in the number of musicians but in the skillfully articulated intensity of individual passions put in service of collective expression. So it was last season with a memorable Beethoven’s Ninth symphony and so it was last week with a program of Beethoven’s Eroica and Mendelssohn’s “Italian” symphonies at Koerner Hall in Toronto.

Weil on the podium seemed, as usual, centred and relaxed in authority, unshowy in manner, and economical in gesture. The Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony was in turn both earthy and brisk, propelled with form-bursting joie de vivre, not dainty but full-bodied with a belly full of local ale rather than a Chianti or Barolo. The performance was celebratory overall and the pretty or impish passages felt muscular as well, like raindrops echoing a thundercloud. At times this Mendelssohn seemed quite like Beethoven’s kin taking on all comers with a breathtaking blast of poetry. Between Allegro and Andante, concertmistress Jeanne Lamon scanned the audience here and there with a piercing eye to silence all intrusive noise makers, for these performances are destined for a future recording on Tafelmusik’s new label.

The Andante revealed here a robust finesse as Weil explored the composer’s magical atmosphere, his implied unknowns, and perhaps the secrets that a natural world almost told the composer. Weil evoked a substantial orchestral presence, especially in the strings, by creating linear progression through a blending of forward moving textures. One’s imagination again felt enveloped and consumed. No lightness of being in the Saltarello either, but more a sense of great struggle, or eruption, and one imagined both conductor and composer holding earth and stormy sky in one hand. Tafelmusik, as we happily expect, was again a band of stylistic fibre, agility, and integrated purpose, of delicious variety in individual contributions, of unwavering presence, and as a result one felt very human in their world.

With the Beethoven Third, sounds and passages that still seem oddly eccentric and still jar one with compositional freshness evolved as perfectly placed under Weil’s direction. There was always an inherent sense of adventure, even in smallest details, and a genuine sense of discovery for both orchestra and audience. Tafelmusik are certainly masters in making precision seem like abandon, through attack that is at once fierce and fine among other things, and the result was an immediacy of pulsating textures that in turn created a compelling atmospheric world of sound overall.

Bruno Weil sustained the first movement’s unfoldment with attention to solo and collective detail. A sense of integrated momentum of a complex whole thus resulted, one interwoven with rhythms and syncopations and barely containing Beethoven’s explosive chordal punctuations. Weil repeatedly demonstrated he knew where emphasis would best enhance the overall performance and the result was certainly not an abstraction of cerebral shadings but more a sense of body in the world and world as body in the cosmos. It was a demonstration of visceral existence, a blending of individual statement and overall propulsion, of singular will and massive common will in eruptive musical assertions.

There was so much to relish in this performance -a variety of textured sounds, the breathtaking fluidity in rapidly executed scales, the assertive emphasis by each voice in solo or group passages- and yet it never seemed intended for blatant emotional or metaphysical meaning, or any effect whatsoever. It seemed more a process of realization in very human terms that negotiates its existence in the world. We were very much aware that this was a declaration, through musical means, in which the potential sounds of each instrument would add existential sub-clauses and footnotes to the overall statement. Bruno Weill gave the impression of wanting each voice to be heard, thus creating an inner cumulative tension of individual voices and the overall orchestral thrust to breathtaking effect. This performance seemed metaphysical without the intrusion of philosophy.

In this most involving of symphonies, the variety boldness of Beethoven’s musical innovations allowed for no complacency and manipulated one’s anticipation and expectations, pushing the comfort zone of each listener’s habits. Weil and his band tended to push aside the familiarity acquired through many previous hearings of the Eroica. One tended to appreciate the effect of subtle compositional touches that sometimes ceded to more overt methods and all the while the meatier sound of period instruments revealed new riches in sound everywhere. At one point, the second violinists seemed to be dancing as they sat, almost frenzied it seemed to the point of popping from their seats into collision with the microphones overhead.

As trumpeter Norman Engel remarked during a brief chat after the concert, “Bruno Weil always finds details in the orchestral textures that make the symphony into a new piece of music.” Amen to that, for this was a spirited and subtly demanding performance that led to deeper appreciation of Beethoven’s innovative and aesthetic genius and to much profound pleasure of spirit and mind. Now when do we get the CD?