Ontario's Vintage Theatre Festivals 

Page 4 of 5

Jim Mezon delivers a riveting performance as Sartorius, a demonic slumlord who keeps rentals reasonable for the poor by ruthlessly neglecting upkeep and maintaining inhuman living conditions. Lisa Norton is nicely neurotic as the capitalist's pampered daughter, and Dylan Trowbridge is passionately corruptible as Dr. Harry Trench, the would-be idealist who falls in love with her. Supporting characters are tellingly pointed: Patrick Galligan as Trench's fastidious mentor and Peter Millard as Sartorius' opportunistic lackey, Lickcheese.

There hasn't been a scrap of Sean O'Casey in the 16 years that I've reviewed theatre here in Charlotte. So I wasn't turning back for home without seeing The Plough and the Stars even if we did have to pay for preview tickets.

Watching the Easter 1916 uprising come to life, I was quite content with my investment. Neil Munro directs with a keen sense for dramatic pacing, imaginatively utilizing Cameron Porteous' hardscrabble set while treading softly on the terrorism theme. The resonance with our post-9/11 world happens naturally, but we're still seeing O'Casey and Ireland instead of Munro. That's a handsome tribute to the work and its timelessness, beautifully accented by lighting designer Kevin Lamotte.

Slated to open on July 4, Plough was almost completely polished when my wife and I saw it 12 days earlier. Benedict Campbell won my pity as the backsliding drunkard Fluther. Simon Bradbury as the irascible revolutionary Peter Flynn was a superb foil for his Marxist tormentor, the Young Covey of Ben Carlson. Wendy Thatcher was a delightfully thorny monarchist as Ms. Burgess, softening beautifully after the carnage begins.

But I do wish Munro would take Kelli Fox aside for a heart-to-heart. Her intensity as the downtrodden widow Mrs. Grogan is arresting, but the Irish accent is thicker than three-day-old porridge and mostly unintelligible. We're missing key exposition as a result.

Royal George Theatre Something's screwy here. The Campaign for the Shaw is trying to raise $30 million to upgrade Festival Theatre, the best facility at the Shaw, while nobody seems concerned about the woeful inadequacies of this quaint 328-seat bandbox.

Peep in on the current production of On the 20th Century and the embarrassment is palpable. Large chunks of this Comden & Green musical are supposed to occur in adjoining sleeper cars of a legendary luxury train. Yet the bustling actors in Yvonne Sauriol's impoverished set design must execute their comedy shtick while miming the walls and doors of the adjoining rooms. Thousands of spectators who have never seen this musical before won't comprehend what's going on. Or where.

CP Summer Theatre delivered a more realistic simulation of the 20th Century train at Pease Auditorium in their 1992 production and CP's pickup band of paid musicians playing the Cy Coleman score was easily the equal of the Shawfest's 10-man orchestra under Paul Sportelli. The talent level onstage and the directorial style of Valerie Moore and Patricia Hamilton scarcely inspire more confidence.

Putting it bluntly, this is second-rate summer stock that deserves to be buried deep in the Catskills. Small stage, small theater, and small budget, hammed up for an audience that's presumed not to know better.

You'll get a smoother ride at the George in the simpler one-set production of Blood Relations. Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock constructs an interesting reprise of the sensational Lizzie Borden murder case, retold in retirement by Lizzie in an encounter with her actress girlfriend at the Fall River, Massachusetts, family home she allegedly axed for.

It would be overpraising Blood Relations to say that it was either shocking or profound. But Pollack keeps us engrossed with her research and her convincing portrait of the tensions and personalities in the Borden household. Eda Holmes directs with a sure hand, designer William Schmuck has an unerring feel for the period, and the well-chosen cast are all festival topliners.

Festival Theatre In fact, five of the seven actors who wowed me at a Saturday matinee performance of Blood Relations greeted me in bravura fashion that same evening at the big house in GBS's Misalliance.

Design and direction, by Peter Hartwell and Neil Munro respectively, bordered deliciously on the perverse but puzzlingly out-of-sync. While it's often said that Shaw's characters are nothing more than the playwright's mouthpieces (cf. the famed Hirschfeld drawing for the My Fair Lady cast album), the Shaw Festival is the last place you'd expect such sacrilege.

Yet Hartwell literally scribbles over his parchment-hued set design for John Tarleton's Surrey home, flooding the stage with meaningless calligraphy. Pointing up Shaw's subtitle, "A Debate in One Sitting," Hartwell deploys two lecterns in perfect symmetry in front of Tarleton's imposing bookcases. At odd moments, Munro deploys his characters to these lecterns, where they discover their next lines by reading them from the script!