Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Stratford Festival, Day 3: THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR & THE CRUCIBLE

• By drediman
• August 20, 2019
• No Comments

Day Three of the Stratford Festival was a day of extremes – from the giddy comedic heights of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor to the depressing tragedy of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Below are my thoughts on these two divergent works, as staged by the Stratford forces …

Friday, 16 August 2019

Lucy Peacock and Geraint Wyn Davies in Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at the Festival Theatre.

Today’s matinee performance was Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED) at the Festival Theatre. The production has been directed by Stratford Festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino, who has cleverly set the play in 1950s America (or Canada), complete with a bevy of charming “Leave It to Beaver”-esque neighborhood children (whom I suspect were culled from Billy Elliot). If at the end of the day the staging exuded more style than substance, it might be because Shakespeare’s underlying play is little more than a series of insubstantive but entertaining high jinks, no matter how mirthfully staged. Additionally, Mr. Cimolino’s production was pitched at an exaggerated level, perhaps because of the size of Festival Theatre. This overly broad approach may be why the production seemed less effortless than other Merry Wives I’ve seen. While some of the actors were obviously pushing the comedy a little too hard (e.g., Gordon S. Miller’s tiring Dr. Caius), Stratford veteran Geraint Wyn Davies was able to calibrate his performance, delivering a delectably droll turn in the central role of Falstaff.

Katelyn McCulloch and the company of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” at the Avon Theatre.

After a satisfying farm-to-table pre-theater dining experience at the hopping Red Rabbit (no pun intended!), I ventured just down the block across Stratford’s town square to the Avon Theatre to attend the opening night performance of The Crucible (RECOMMENDED). Jonathan Goad’s production of the oft-performed Arthur Miller play was solid in pretty much all respects – direction, design, and acting all came together in a way that admirably served the narrative trajectory of Mr. Miller’s dramatic account of the Salem Witch Trials (Mr. Goad’s production is oddly reminiscent of the Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Dominic Cooke that I had seen in London way back in 2006). I’ve long had some reservations about the play itself; it’s overlong (particularly the play’s didactic, somewhat self-important final scene) and its arguments are telegraphed. Nevertheless, the play’s core themes are clearly and compellingly laid out due to its its confrontational nature, which often times verges on the melodramatic. Luckily, Mr. Goad’s sturdily-acted production mostly stays out of the text’s way, unlike the play’s most recent Broadway revival, which was radically if muddily directed by Ivo van Hove. Indeed, Stratford’s mounting extracts maximum impact from the play’s depiction of the horrifying, wrongful imprisonment and execution of Salem’s women at the hands of spirited girls who simply sought to redefine their roles as sensuous young women (not to mention the community’s puritanical men)  – circumstances that fit well with the festival’s larger inter-production dialogue.

THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL
Regional, Plays/Musicals
Festival Theatre / Avon Theatre / Studio Theatre
Various productions in repertory through October