When I arrived at the Stratford Festival in Ontario this year, there was snow on the ground and wreaths on the doors.
In late September.
But it wasn’t because of premature Canadian frost and exuberant holiday cheer. No, a Christmas movie was being filmed in the lovely town that boasts exceptional Shakespeare stagings, modern plays and musicals about 90 minutes from Toronto.
“Merry Christmas!,” a restaurant server greeted me with. Oh, Canada.
During this unusually long season at the 72-year-old theatrical institution, though, audiences will likely witness some actual flurries eventually.
The venerable festival’s revival of “Annie” plays well into December — one of spring-and-summer Stratford’s longest runs ever. So the sun will come out tomorrow, albeit for fewer hours.
Directed by Donna Feore, Stratford’s queen of musicals, the jaunty production that runs till Dec. 14 finds a winning balance of nostalgia and novelty.
Today’s kids continue to have a hankering for go-get-em Annie (a guileless Harper Rae Asch) and her hard-knock life, but they have no clue it ever was a comic strip. Or, for that matter, what a comic strip even is. Every revival has to contend with the fact that the rags-to-riches plot, more outlandish by the year, is foundationally two-dimensional.
Feore’s likable version smartly straddles a comfortable middle ground.
The often cartoony costumes and wigs are more realistic and worn-out; less cherry Starburst.
Yet it’s importantly not as glum as some recent revivals of Charles Strouse, Thomas Meehan and Martin Charnin’s show have been. How can it be? With Macy’s Parade-balloon-sized characters like the evil Miss Hannigan — played with last-call bitterness by Laura Condlin — Daddy Warbucks (master of disguise, Dan Chameroy) and a deus ex machina in the form of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you can’t very well treat wholesome “Annie” like it’s “Anna Karenina.”
Feore, who showed in the festival’s “Billy Elliot” and “The Sound of Music” that she’s a wiz with kids, cranks up the spirit with a sensational ensemble of young actors as the orphans. It’s like you’ve stumbled into a gymnastics meet with singing — Backflips: The Musical! The girls are all budding comedians, too.
There is, of course, a risk in performing “Annie” on Stratford’s thrust Festival Theatre stage. Dog lovers, dangerously close to the action, will want to run up and steal the adorable, shaggy pups who play stray Sandy.
A fifteen-minute walk away, there are another couple of dogs in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” the deliriously funny musical comedy playing at the Avon Theatre through Nov. 23.
Only they’re human: Lawrence Jameson and Freddy Benson, the sleazy dueling con artists who were played in the movie by Michael Caine and Steve Martin.
Lawrence is a snaky Brit in a smart suit worn by the cracking actor Jonathan Goad, who’s a pro at being both dapper and shady. And Freddy is the boyish young upstart invading his turf. They’re trying to trick the same woman in the south of France.
Freddy is usually played by Liam Tobin, but I saw his understudy Henry Firmston. I’d watched the actor once before in the festival’s “Something Rotten” (returning next year) last season. His unique, puckish energy — more rerun of “Friends” than “step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch” — really punches up every show he’s a part of.
Hysterical toe-tappers from composer David Yazbek, such as “Great Big Stuff” and “Ruprect,” made my abs feel like they’d just been put through sit-ups.
The musicals presented in the proscenium Avon have visually gone a step down in recent years. That’s still true of “Dirty Rotten,” directed by Tracey Flye. The scenery is basic and a little flat. When it comes to belly laughs, however: great big stuff.
This season, the spectacle in that theater has instead been handed to power-hungry, stab-happy Mr. “Macbeth.”
In Robert Lepage’s gas-giant version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, on through Nov. 22, you’ll get eye of newt and toe of frog, Motel Six and gangs on hogs.
Yes, the director — whose work New York audiences will know from the Met’s “Ring Cycle” in 2010 — has turned Mackers, Lady M, Banquo and the rest into grungy bikers. Hells MacAngels.
Aesthetically, it’s as exciting as any play you’ll see on Broadway. Lately, quite a bit more so. A massive highway motel rotates with devious mischief — bloody murders, disrobing — happening in multiple rooms. Motorcycles roll across the stage. And two-way mirrors are used to spooky effect.
As far as the power structures and ground rules of the warring factions go, however, something baffling this way comes.
“Macbeth” is always a tricky tragedy. Ambition, witchcraft and defiance of the natural order (killing a king) are all fused into one very complicated dude. Leather jackets and doo-rags blur the situation more than contribute anything substantive. And the concept of the witches feels particularly unserious.
Lepage’s flair for reinvention worked far better when he moved the action of “Corilanus” to a recognizable Washington DC a few years back. The “House of Cards” political-thriller mood gave audiences a way into that play that “Macbeth” doesn’t especially shout out for.
That said: As far as Macbeths and Lady Macbeths go, you can’t do much better than Tom McCamus, with the voice of a midnight radio host and the scowl of a brutal killer, and Lucy Peacock, whose electrified Lady M takes particular delight in destruction.
Maybe even more ambitious than that climbing couple was one of the hotter tickets I saw — “Forgiveness,” an emotional and expansive new play at the Tom Patterson Theatre about the plight of Japanese-Canadians during World War II that covers four decades.
It begins in 1968, with Mitsue’s son bringing home his girlfriend’s mother Phyllis (Jacklyn Francis) and father, Ralph, for dinner. The usual concerns about sweethearts’ folks meeting for the first time — what to make, what to wear — are compounded by the ‘rents’ traumatic histories, which painfully unfold as we rewind to the 1930s.
Mitsue (Yoshie Bancroft, empathic and wonderful) and her family experience racism in Vancouver and eventually are put in an internment camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. At the same time, Ralph (Jeff Lillico, a flesh-and-blood time capsule) fights overseas for Canada and becomes one of Japan’s prisoners of war.
In the end comes an affirming and deeply moving mutual understanding that suggests that an opportunity to heal is always on the table.
Based on Mark Sakamoto’s memoir, playwright Hiro Kanagawa occasionally overloads the dialogue with cliches and lofty phrasing. But, on the whole, “Forgiveness” is an impressive feat. The huge number of locales and events are deftly woven together, and staged with sweep and intimacy by Stafford Arima.
Family drama and the long passage of time also power the festival’s best show of the 2025 roster, Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” directed by Antoni Cimolino.
The superb romance exemplifies why I don’t know how to quit Stratford, where I’ve been schlepping to for 18 years. The must-sees are often quirky — a “Winter’s Tale” or a “Cymbeline,” rather than a “Hamlet” or “Romeo and Juliet.” And the company routinely does the Bard better than any theater in New York so much as approaches, certainly including the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park so-so productions of late.
Graham Abbey’s King Leontes, a brilliant piece of casting, ranks with the finest Shakespearean performances I’ve enjoyed anywhere. As the jolly actor’s natural gregariousness peels away to reveal his character’s twisted and unfounded jealousy of his wife Hermione (Sara Topham) and best friend Polixenes (André Sills), the rapt audience stares on disgusted and devastated.
I suspect more than a few relate.
Leontes alone implodes the lives of himself, his pregnant wife and his poor young little son Mammillus over a hot-blooded hunch.
What’s strange and lovable — foul and fair, if you like — about “The Winter’s Tale” is that much of the second half, 16 years after those royal horrors, is a delightful romp.
There’s spritely dancing and a pair of fabulous clowns — feisty favorite Geraint Wyn Davies as Autolycus and zany Christo Graham as the Young Shepard. Graham, by the way, is Alfredo from Pixar’s “Ratatouille” come to life.
Don’t be totally fooled by the mirth. The final scene between Hermione, Leontes and Yanna McIntosh’s excellent Paulina is more heartbreaking and heartwarming than you have ever seen it before.
And then, just when we think Leontes has earned a second chance in old age, Abbey and Cimolino powerfully remind us that some choices cannot be undone.
This extraordinary “Winter’s Tale” is a combo of tragedy and euphoria in more ways than one.
How tragic that it’s already closed!
And how happy that it’s been professionally filmed for a theatrical release and eventual streaming.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of shows to catch before the season’s end — even if you might exit, pursued by a blizzard.
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