Interview with the Feores

From Richard Ouzounian at The Toronto Star:

"It's rare that the entertainment gods allow both partners in a marriage to step into the spotlight at the same time, but that's just what's happening this coming week to Colm and Donna Feore, the 'first couple of Canadian show business.'

"Tomorrow night, Colm makes his first appearance as a regular character on 24 in a special two-hour TV movie prequel, Redemption (Global/Fox at 8 p.m.), while on Thursday evening, musical comedy stage veteran Donna will debut as the director of a straight play when It's a Wonderful Life opens for the Canadian Stage Company at the Bluma Appel Theatre.

"They're both riding the crests of incredibly successful careers these days, but a double play like this is still cause for celebration, so they are marking their good fortune with dinner at Nota Bene.

"You might think a duo as glamorous as the Feores do the fast-lane restaurant number all the time, but nothing could be farther than the truth.

"'The first question I always ask myself about every job,' insists Colm, 'is how much time I'm going to have to spend away from home.'

"Home is a gorgeous house in Stratford – literally, a stone's throw from the Festival Theatre – where they live with their three children.

"'I know it would be easier if we had all moved to Los Angeles years ago,' Donna concedes, 'but we both decided that Canada is where we wanted to raise our kids.'

"Most of their lives are spent juggling their respective calendars around who's going to be home, who's working in New York or Europe, who's making dinner (usually Colm) and who's ferrying the kids to their various sporting events (usually Donna). With all that, you can understand Colm's answer to the question, 'What did it feel like when you were offered a role on 24?'

"He raises one eyebrow. 'I told my agent, I don't know how to tell you what I feel until I check with Donna.'

"So he called her from London, where he was shooting a movie, and said, 'This is a stupidly good opportunity. I don't think I can pass this up, but it will f--- up our lives.'

"Luckily for all concerned, Donna's answer was: 'Go ahead and do it. We'll make sense of this when we get a chance to.'

"The part is a fascinating one. Colm was asked to play Henry Taylor, the husband to Allison Taylor, the first woman president in American history.

"The fact that two-time Tony award-winner Cherry Jones would be playing his wife made the deal even more attractive.

"'I don't know if they knew what they were getting when they hired Cherry,' quips Colm. 'Not only is she the best actress in New York, but she can be presidential just standing there.'

"Discussing details of 24 with a cast member is always a tricky business because of the cloak of security the producers insist on wrapping around everyone.

"'Our one rule in the house,' Donna says with mock gravity, 'was that no 24 scripts were to be left out.'

"'Because you're weak,' Colm taunts.

"'Okay,' Donna admits, 'I looked at one. I love that show. It makes my heart race.'

"Colm is surprisingly forthcoming, however, about some details concerning his character.
"Cherry and I have had a tragedy in our lives,' he reveals. 'Our son has died, but we have differing opinions about why and how it happened. I become fixated on finding out the truth and everyone else tells me I'm being delusional. But, somehow, it all dovetails with the stories about Jack Bauer and the big guns and world terror.'

"Pausing with a piece of pasta close to his mouth, he adds, 'Oh, and by the way, Tony Almeida isn't dead,' referring to Jack's right-hand man apparently slain in Season 5.

"'Colm!' chides a shocked Donna.

"'Oh, everybody knows that,' he says with a grin. 'It's all over the Internet.'

"Sunday night's two-hour movie is meant to set the stage for the January debut of Season 7 of 24, which was delayed a full year owing to both the Hollywood writers' strike and internal problems relating to script and budget.

"'I think, originally, they wanted to shoot a lot of Season 7 in Africa, but it was just too expensive,' Colm explains. 'But, now, they put it into the prequel and, I tell you, it's very timely, very politically charged stuff. I'll be curious to see how much makes it to air.'

"Getting on the air is also the theme of Donna's current project, because the adaptation of Frank Capra's classic 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life, which she's directing, is set as a radio play of the period.

"'I don't know how else you could do it,' she admits. 'It's such an episodic film and such an iconic one that if you tried to duplicate any of its scenes totally, people would always just compare it to the movie.

"'This way, they get a certain amount of distance and novelty, which makes them look at the material in a different way. It's really a simple story and doing it as a radio play removes all the excess fat and lets us concentrate on the story.'

"The original film, with its tale of how a seemingly prosperous town suddenly totters on the edge of bankruptcy thanks to problems at a savings and loan company and the machinations of a greedy banker, has some scary echoes in today's headlines.

"'I'm shocked at how relevant it is and I'm always surprised by how much it still moves me,' Donna says.

"'It's about one individual asking what his whole life has been worth, which is something we're all doing a lot more of these days.'

"This summer brings the Feores back to Stratford, where Colm is playing Macbeth and Cyrano, the latter directed by Donna. After that, will there be another year of 24 for Colm?

"'I only signed for one season,' he hedges. 'I don't know if they have any further use for me or not.'

"When asked if that means he's alive at the end of Season 7, he tries to shove the words back into his mouth.

"'Oops, that's plot. Can't tell you that.' Then he smiles wickedly. 'I will say one thing, though: This is one program where you really don't know from week to week whether or not your head is going to blow up.'"

Meet Christopher Plummer

Christopher Plummer will be at the Indigo on Bay and Bloor in Toronto this Sunday, October 26, to promote his memoir In Spite of Myself. The event, which includes an interview, question-and-answer session, and book signing, begins at 3PM. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Christopher Plummer can be seen in Caesar and Cleopatra at the Festival Theatre until November 8.

Interview: Graham Abbey

Richard Ouzounian interviews Stratford veteran Graham Abbey (click to get personal and see the timeline):

"Relax, fellow Canadians.

"You can sleep securely as long as Graham Abbey is standing on guard for thee, which he will continue to do as agent Gray Jackson in the popular CBC TV series The Border, which starts its second season Monday at 9 p.m.

"Four years ago at Stratford, I described him as 'boyishly handsome.' Abbey is 37 now and he has a leaner, meaner edge to his appearance. Underneath, he remains the nice guy he's always been.

"It's early on a misty morning and Abbey has been working since 6:30 a.m. at the former Rochester Ferry Terminal, home base for The Border's production.

"'What have I learned about myself on this show?' he asks rhetorically on a break. 'That I can get up at 4:30 a.m. and still function.'

"The scene being shot today is a low-key, largely informational affair, but during the dozen takes, Abbey keeps tightly focused, snapping out his lines with just the right measure of casual tension, then relaxing as lights are reset and cameras adjusted.

"'For me, there's one basic thing that took getting used to,' says the veteran of nine seasons playing leading roles at the Stratford Festival.

"'It's that when you're performing in the theatre, it's dark and everyone disappears. Here on TV, when you're ready to go, suddenly 40 people with booms appear.'

"Throughout his career, Abbey has had a knack for learning where to seek the best counsel. In this case he turned to Colm Feore, who can play Coriolanus at Stratford or appear on the upcoming season of 24 with equal skill.

"'Colm gave me great advice,' recalls Abbey. 'He told me to remember that the actual size of the Festival stage is so intimate that you don't have to change your performance style that much from stage to screen.'

"Watching Abbey breaking hearts and taking prisoners as the complicated Gray Jackson in The Border, it's obvious he's learned his lessons well.

"The series is on one level an exciting drama about the people guarding the Canada-U.S. border, but it also manages to work a fair bit of social and political commentary into its scripts. Abbey enjoys that a lot.

"'This show presents a great forum for Canadians to debate and think about what that border means. Usually we hear the voices from the south, so it's nice to give voice to our point of view as well.'

"During the first season, Abbey mainly dealt with what he calls 'the action stuff,' which gave him enough to worry about.

"'I joked with the guys on the show that I spent 10 years learning how to fight with a sword, and now I have to learn how to carry a gun.'

"Having done a convincing job of that, Abbey has been rewarded by having the scripts delve more deeply into his personal life.

"'Nick Campbell has been brought on to play my dad, which is great. On stage, I learned from Bill Hutt. Here on TV, I'm learning from Nick. You don't get luckier than that.'

"This year he also gets a relationship with Grace Park (Battlestar Galactica).

"Abbey jokes, 'Hey, you even get to see my apartment. You look at the set they've designed for the first time, and you say, Oh, that's what my character is supposed to be like!'

"Besides dealing with the pressures of filming the second season of his first TV series, Abbey has had to deal with some major joys and sorrows in the past few months.

"The joys came in August, when he married his former Stratford colleague Michelle Giroux. 'We were very dear friends who finally fell in love and decided to get married,' says Abbey of the woman he's known for over a decade. 'I don't know what suddenly shifted in my mind, I can't explain it. All I'm sure of is that it was the right thing to do.'

"The story of their proposal is classic Abbey, combining romantic bravado with adolescent insecurity.

"'I thought Ireland would be a nice place to propose and I knew we were planning a trip there. So I bought the ring and carried it with me.

"'We climbed up this high mountain and looked down on this beautiful vista – it's where they shot Braveheart, actually – and all the way up I kept thinking, It's going to be a long walk down if she says no.'

"Fortunately, she didn't, and they tied the knot in August.

"Only a few weeks later, Abbey faced the loss of one of the main influences in his life. Richard Monette, who had been artistic director at Stratford during Abbey's time there, died on Sept. 9 at the age of 64.

"'So many of us have him to thank for our careers,' begins Abbey, his emotions held in check. 'I wouldn't be an actor if it wasn't for him. He brought me up there, he fought for me, he kept me there...'

"Despite his best intentions, his voice thickens and the tears start flooding his eyes. 'Damn it, I thought I'd be better at this,' he says. 'I always meant to thank him, really thank him, but those moments go by in a flash and before you know it, they're gone.'

"A small smile breaks through. 'He used to watch The Border and told me he was proud of me doing it. So I'd like to think this season is for him.'"

Playwright: Joanna McClelland Glass

An interview with Joanna McClelland Glass from Richard Ouzounian at the Toronto Star:

"If Canadian playwrights ever achieve mythological status, there's one piece of casting that's already a done deal.

"Joanna McClelland Glass would have to play Athena.

"It's not just the cool elegance that this 71-year-old radiates that makes her right for the role, but the concern with serving wisdom and justice that she shares with her ancient Greek counterpart.

"Palmer Park, now in previews at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival prior to its opening next Saturday, is almost the quintessential Glass play in that it contains many of the features that have marked her work over the years.

"In the first place, it's based on historical fact: There is a Palmer Park in suburban Detroit and after the deadly 'black day in July' race riot of 1967, it was one of the few parts of the city where blacks and whites still tried to live together in harmony.

"It's also about an actual chapter in Glass's life.

"'I first came to Palmer Park in August of 1968,' she recalls now, sitting in the living room of her house in Stratford where she has been carefully supervising its restoration for the past year.

"'The city was still a shambles, even a year after the riots. It's hard to be diplomatic about Detroit. It's a very sad city. I find it second only to New Orleans in its sadness.'

"Glass is not speaking just from a subjective point of view.

"Before the 1967 riot, the city's population was nearly 2 million. In the six months following it, as Glass puts it 'the phone book lost nearly 300,000 names.'

"Today the city is home to 900,000 people.

"'I guess it all started with Henry Ford and his automobile,' says Glass.

"'He made the city prosperous, but he also planted the seeds of its future strife when he brought thousands of people up from the deep South to work on his assembly lines for $5 a day.'

"By the time the 1960s arrived, most Detroit blacks had trouble finding affordable housing and many were the subject of large-scale police brutality.

"Early on Sunday morning, July 23, 1967, a police raid on a 'blind pig' or after-hours speakeasy in the city's West Side served as the fuse that exploded a bomb of racial tension that had been building for decades.

"Before the violence was over, five days later, 43 people were dead and 2,000 buildings were burned down.

"That was the prelude to the situation Glass entered a year later.

"'The educational system in the States is built on property taxes,' explains Glass, 'but when so many white people moved away following the riots, the Detroit school system was in dire straits.'

"But the people of both races who chose to live in Palmer Park didn't want to see their local elementary school closed, or gutted, or overcrowded with inappropriate busing.

"'There is a cynical truism,' observes Glass, 'that integration in America is what happens between the first black moving in and the last white moving out. It usually takes two to four years.'

"To tell the story of what Glass saw happen, she creates two couples who live next door to each other – one black, one white.

"Like everyone in the neighbourhood, they're middle or upper middle class: teachers, doctors, professional people.

"'The character Kelli Fox plays is based on me,' volunteers Glass, 'but her husband, played by Dan Chameroy, is entirely different from my husband.'

"Glass is equally concerned about the black couple, Fletch and Linda Hazelton, played by Nigel Shawn Williams and Yanna McIntosh.

"'It's a little delicate to have a white lady writing about it,' allows Glass, picking her words carefully, 'but there hasn't been a lot written about the black middle class, the ones who did everything you were supposed to do to be accepted by the white community in those days, only to find the wall was still up.'

"But not in Palmer Park, at least not for a while. The residents convince everyone that an integrated neighbourhood can be a reality and raise money to keep their local school supplied and open.

"'At that point in time,' recalls Glass, 'the broke-down Detroit school system was using busing as its answer to everything.

"'They were taking kids who came from homes where there was one toilet down the hall for five families and sending them to schools in upper class suburbs where the recess conversation would be, Oh, are you going to Bermuda for Christmas?'

"And in a way, that's what finally did in Palmer Park. The school board sent 130 black children from an overcrowded school in an impoverished neighbourhood to the environment the parents had worked so hard to maintain.

"'It marked the beginning of the end,' sighs Glass.

"'By my daughter's last year in school, she was one of four white children in her class. Today, Palmer Park is only 10 per cent white and that's mainly old people who just don't want to leave.'

"The scars of the past obviously cause Glass great pain still, so why would she want to reopen wounds after 40 years?

"'Because segregation has seeped back into the American schools even worse than it was back in the 1950s. And the worst part is that it seems like there's hardly anybody even trying.'

"In a year when America might elect its first black president, Glass is wise to ask us to look at our past in an attempt to find an answer for our present."

Interview: Christopher Plummer

Christopher Plummer discusses Stratford, Caesar, and his career (including the perennial Sound of Music) with Martin Morrow:

"When interviewing Christopher Plummer, there is always an elephant in the room — a singing elephant, to be exact. You don’t want to mention it; you know that he’s referred to it disparagingly in the past as 'The Sound of Mucus' and 'S&M.' But readers are curious. After all, despite a vast and varied resume onstage and in film, Plummer’s most beloved role remains Capt. von Trapp in the treacly 1965 movie of The Sound of Music.

"Midway through our recent talk at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I broached the subject. No sooner is the title out of my mouth, than Plummer quickly nods, ready to set the record straight. Whatever he may have said about the picture itself, he has fond recollections of the people involved with it.

"'I made a great lifelong friendship with Julie [Andrews], whom I adore,' he says. 'And I loved the director, [the late] Robert Wise; I spoke at his memorial in Los Angeles. I have terrific memories of making it.' But he doesn’t think much of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s forthcoming revival of the musical in Toronto, or the way its star was chosen via the CBC-TV series How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? 'At one point, Julie and I were approached to do the reality show,' Plummer says, laughing incredulously. 'No, thank you!'

"Plummer discusses the film, along with many other highlights in his remarkable 60-year career, in his memoir, In Spite of Myself, to be published in Canada this fall. It’s a career that is still in full swing. At 78, the great Canadian actor is headlining at Stratford once again, in an eagerly awaited production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra that begins previews Aug. 7. He came straight to the festival from Berlin, where he was shooting The Last Station, a film about Tolstoy, with Helen Mirren and Atonement’s James McAvoy. Before that, he wrapped up his title performance in Terry Gilliam’s forthcoming fantasy, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, co-starring with the late Heath Ledger.

"That’s typical of Plummer’s whirlwind schedule in recent years, which has seen him appear in a succession of high-profile films while still taking on major stage roles – like the Clarence Darrow figure in last year’s Broadway revival of Inherit the Wind, which garnered him rave notices and a Tony nomination.

"'I haven’t stopped working for the last six years,' Plummer admits. 'It’s been bang-bang-bang, one thing after another.' The heavy workload is entirely intentional. 'You know, when you get to my exalted age, you have to work,' he says with a smile. 'The more you work, the younger you appear to be, I think, and the younger you feel.'

"Plummer does look youthful for a man near the end of his seventh decade. His grey hair is thinning, but his eyes are still a penetrating blue, and he retains that patrician elegance that has served him well in roles ranging from the Duke of Wellington to King Lear. Dapper even in his rehearsal togs – a black tracksuit topped with a black blazer – he leans back in his chair and toys with a pair of yellow wrap-around shades. It strikes you that he has the perfect air of regal amusement to play Shaw’s Julius Caesar – a part Plummer coveted in vain for years.

"'I could never get a director to be interested in this play,' he reveals. That is, until Des McAnuff, an old friend and Stratford’s new artistic director, agreed to stage it. 'It’s a tremendous director’s piece, as Des is proving.' It’s also a rare opportunity for Plummer to do a Shaw work. 'I think I have an ear for his rhythms,' he says, 'and I particularly like Caesar because the play not only is funny, but has a great deal of romance and an attempt at historical accuracy. It’s bigger than most of his other plays. Someone once said that it was the closest thing he got to a Shakespearean play in size.'

"But Shaw’s portrayal of the Roman general is very different from Shakespeare’s. 'Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play is merely a figurehead,' Plummer says. 'Shaw’s Caesar is huge in comparison and terribly funny, very witty. And then there are moments of great loneliness that happen to Caesar; you realize what a lonely person he must have been, because there were very few people in the world who could match him. He was so far ahead of the game and of the society surrounding him.'

"Shaw’s comedy focuses on the aging Caesar’s visit to Egypt, where he takes the teenage Cleopatra under his wing and teaches her to be a queen. Plummer points out its similarity to Shaw’s later, better-known Pygmalion – the source for the musical My Fair Lady. Caesar and Cleopatra here are mentor and protégée – with a hint of an underlying May-December romance.

"'There’s that hidden tease that Shaw is always giving us, that suggestion of a sexual relationship,' Plummer says, 'which, of course, they really had: he fathered her child. But it’s merely suggested in the play – subtly suggested.'

"Playing Cleo to Plummer’s Caesar is Nikki M. James, a protégée of director McAnuff’s and also the star of his Romeo and Juliet. 'She has such fire and energy and she’s absolutely delightful,' Plummer says of the 27-year-old actress. 'Never has there been a Cleopatra, in my memory, that suggested 16. She looks 16. So there’s an added sense of Caesar as a father-like tutor.'

"Plummer says he’s back at Stratford – in his first starring role there since 2002’s King Lear – partly to do this play, partly to throw his support behind McAnuff’s first season as artistic head. 'He’s probably the hottest director at the moment in the theatre, anywhere,' Plummer asserts. 'It’s wonderful that he’s here.' Plummer jokes that he’s even pushing McAnuff to cast him in Guys and Dolls, the director’s next Broadway musical. 'I keep auditioning for him all the time, just to tease him. I come in singing [he switches to the gravelly New York accent of Guys and Dolls’ Nathan Detroit] Serve a paper and sue me, sue me…'

"Plummer’s challenge would be to shoehorn another stage role into a calendar already overflowing with film work. He says he’s pleased with the kinds of films he’s being offered these days – movies like Syriana, Emotional Arithmetic and Closing the Ring. 'I haven’t always liked the films I’ve done,' he says. 'They have been a [financial] necessity, as they often are in most actors’ lives.'

Continue reading for more disucssion of Plummer's work in film.

Profile: David Ferry

From Richard Ouzounian at the Toronto Star:

"Talk about perfect casting.

"When Morris Panych went looking for someone to play the madly driven Captain Ahab in his new adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick – now in previews at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival prior to an Aug. 17 opening – he was lucky enough to get his first choice: David Ferry.

"It's not that the rugged 46-year-old actor actually has one leg or spends his nights and days chasing after an elusive white whale, but he does know more than a little bit about obsession.

"For 30 years now, Ferry has been pursuing his dream of creating great original theatre in this country with a single-mindedness that the captain of the Pequod would have envied.

"'Sometimes you want something so badly that you turn your back on other things you know you shouldn't ignore,' admits Ferry, blurring the line between Ahab and himself even further.
It's a day on which Ferry has no rehearsals and is ostensibly off, but the workaholic is spending the free time renovating his Toronto home.

"'I never knew there was so much to faucets,' he sighs. 'It's mind-blowing.'

"His wife, the equally talented actor and director Kyra Harper, is keeping a wary eye on the proceedings in the background. She's totally on side for the home renovation, but wonders – with a streak of practicality that Ferry blissfully lacks – if it's the kind of task a man ought to undertake while he's in rehearsals as Ahab.

"'Kyra,' he sighs, with that wonderful mix of resignation and affection only those married a long time can feel, 'she's the one who's always asking me, Do you have to take that third job?'

"But he does. That's what makes Ferry tick and it always has, although the clock only really seemed to start working in overdrive once he passed his 40th birthday, 'So much to do, so little time left,' he explains. 'I saw friends dying all around me with things left undone. I didn't want to be one of them.'

"If truth be told, Ferry was born to the breed. Some suggest he must have left the womb emoting. His parents back in St. John's were both heavily involved in the community theatre of the time. His father also ran a chain of radio stations in Newfoundland and his mother, while ostensibly a housewife, still found time to direct the first stage works seen on television in the region.

"Young Ferry had a baptism of fire at age 15, when he was cast in the leading role of Tom Cahill's Tomorrow Will Be Sunday, a play light years ahead of its time about a young man dealing with the emotional damage of having been sexually molested by an elder.

"In 1967, the centennial year, the Dominion Drama Festival decided that everyone should present a Canadian play, and Newfoundland's entry was Cahill's searing drama, with Ferry along for the ride. 'I got hooked for sure,' he laughs. 'We were all in the festival that year, R.H. Thomson, Terry Tweed, Robert Charlebois. It was amazing.'

"Taken with the young man's talent, Newfoundland playwright Michael Cook insisted that the National Theatre School audition on The Rock for the first time. Ferry became a student.

"After graduation, he soon found himself in what he called 'the defining theatre moment of my career' – the production of James Reaney's The Donnellys, directed by Keith Turnbull, which became the signature piece of the NDWT Theatre Company.

"But Ferry kept moving, and a stint opposite Glynis Johns in Terence Rattigan's Cause Celebre at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre wound up bringing him to Broadway.

"'They had mounted Hugh Leonard's play A Life with an all-American and British cast,' recalls Ferry, 'and they were going to take it to New York. But one of the young men wasn't any good and director Peter Coe remembered me from the previous year. So they flew me in and I got the part.'

"The show wasn't a hit, but one of its cast members, Helen Stenborg, was a member of the renowned Circle Repertory Theatre.

"She insisted that their resident playwright, Lanford Wilson, see Ferry in action. He was so taken that he wrote a part for him in their next show, A Tale Told.

"Ferry was well launched in America at that point, but his heart belonged up north, and he returned. For the next quarter century he criss-crossed the country, playing a wide variety of roles and eventually emerging as a first-rate director and administrator as well.

"But, as he puts it, "This was going to be the first summer I didn't have to run a theatre," and he was looking forward to resting, when Panych paid him a call and Ferry couldn't say no.

"'I've never done a piece like this. There's very little text, just voice-over, mixed in with the movement. Morris is truly in phenomenal form. At the end of every day's rehearsal, there's been applause from the actors to salute him for the work we've done that day. Man, that never happens.'

"The often-deadly Stratford buzz is good on this one, and Des McAnuff, Christopher Plummer and Michael Langham have reportedly seen it in previews and been generous with their praise.
To Ferry's eyes, 'It's about Ahab and his obsession. It's an insane spiritual journey. He chases himself trying to kill what he hates in himself and it drives him crazy.'

"All this sounds exciting enough, but the Studio Theatre is extremely small. What are they doing about the whale itself?

"The answer is vintage Ferry: 'There's no frigging way we can build a whale on that stage, so why even try?'

"Good point."

Q & A: Simon Callow

From Martin Morrow at CBC News:

"When you sit down to interview Simon Callow, you are confronted by two men. One is Simon Callow, the distinguished British stage actor, currently performing a one-man tour de force called There Reigns Love at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ont. The other is Simon Callow, the author, whose non-fiction books include a major — and perhaps definitive — three-volume biography of Orson Welles. To these two, add several subspecies of Callow, including the film actor (A Room with a View, Shakespeare in Love), the theatre director (Shirley Valentine, The Pajama Game) and the book critic for the London Guardian. Callow seems to have taken Shakespeare’s claim that 'one man in his time plays many parts' as his personal credo.

"It’s Shakespeare that has brought Callow to Canada this summer, where he’s making his Stratford debut with There Reigns Love. The production itself is a premiere, created for the festival by the 59-year-old actor and woven out of Shakespeare’s sonnets, some 82 of which Callow recites in the course of his performance. Not merely a mnemonic feat, the show also offers a possible key to Shakespeare’s most enigmatic body of work. Callow strings the sonnets together with a narrative based on their interpretation by the late British psychoanalyst and literary scholar John Padel. In his playfully titled 1981 book New Poems by Shakespeare, Padel puts the 154 sonnets in a new order and theorizes that they recorded Shakespeare’s unrequited infatuation with a young aristocrat, William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke – the 'W.H.' to whom the poems are dedicated. Padel also posits that the mysterious 'Dark Lady' who appears in the sonnets was Shakespeare’s mistress and acted as an intermediary between the poet and Herbert.

"Chilling in a white T-shirt and black jeans in a lounge at Stratford’s Festival Theatre, Callow poured some of his surfeit energy into an eloquent discussion of the sonnets and Padel’s theory. But inevitably, our conversation also strayed to the Welles bio and the protean Callow’s other recent pursuits – including his Satanic leading role in Chemical Wedding, a bizarre occult horror film penned by Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson.

Q: There is a real sense of discovery in There Reigns Love — not only in your presentation of Padel’s theory of why Shakespeare wrote the sonnets, but also in hearing so many of the poems recited. Even people who know their Shakespeare quite well are often unfamiliar with the bulk of them.

A: Yes, I was astonished. In the show we have what we call 'the groundlings,' people who sit on the stage on cushions, and I talk to them afterwards. I said, 'How well do you know the sonnets?' And most of them said, 'Not at all.' They know 'Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…' and 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds…' but that is sort of it. And there are great, towering pieces of poetry there – especially the poems against time. They’re absolutely overwhelming in their scope and verbal magnificence.

Q: During the performance, you explain that Padel’s theory is just one way of viewing the sonnets. What is your personal opinion of his interpretation?

A: His way of ordering the sonnets I am entirely in accord with. The historical superstructure that he constructs around them is very speculative, however. It’s based on very well-informed guesses. To me, the whole fascination of this exercise is not so much that it tells us something about William Shakespeare, it’s that it releases a narrative of compelling authenticity – a story about the human heart. The psychological sequence of emotions that the poet experiences tells an extremely recognizable and true story to me, as it has never been told before. I don’t think there exists a better account of that kind of abject infatuation and the agony of acknowledging that the relationship is one-sided and doomed. The feelings of self-rejection, loathing, hatred, are just horribly, vividly conveyed.

That’s the wonder of the evening to me. The autobiographical Shakespearean dimension is sort of neither here nor there, except for one important thing: I find it perfectly credible that Shakespeare was that kind of a man, that Shakespeare was indeed someone who, once an emotion had started in him, had to let it run to the bitter end. This is what we find in the plays, in characters like Othello, Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth. That’s the kind of man Shakespeare was, in my view.

Read the entire interview.

Caesar Should go to New York: Chris Plummer

An interview with Christopher Plummer from Gary Smith at the Hamilton Spectator:

"'I don't feel old at all, you know.'

"Christopher Plummer leans back in a comfy leather chair and smiles.

"And there it is, up close and personal, that chiselled face, those liquid blue eyes, that handsome frame.

"Surely this is a real Canadian matinee idol. 'I'm not you know.' But when you tell him that at 78 he still looks like a million bucks, he turns pink, then he grins.

"A blue turtleneck hugs his neck and a white sweater dangles carelessly over broad shoulders giving him a tennis pro look.

"Playing with the yellow band of his designer watch he talks about life, love, booze and the pursuit of art.

"'I love my work,' he says, nodding. 'I'm not going to do anything stupid like retire. I promise you that. I'm going to drop dead on the stage.'

"'It's scary you know. These days you can almost live forever. And I don't really know what it means to feel 78. I walk, I exercise, I play tennis. And I have loads of energy. I feel fit. I credit my wife Elaine with much of that.'

"Married for 37 years, Plummer calls his wife his saving grace.

"'You could say she saved my life. I don't drink like I did -- and I was a big boozer. And I eat right. Elaine is a cordon bleu cook, only she knows how to limit the sauces and doo-dahs that clog up the arteries.'

"Born in Montreal, Plummer came to Toronto as a young lad. 'It was dull as horse muck,' he shrugs. 'I couldn't wait to get back to Montreal.'

"Referring to pals Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris, he says: 'I'd like to think I was one of the bad boys.'

""Hard drinkers, they loved to laugh.'

"'In those days I was ashamed to be Canadian.' He shrugs. 'There was such a lack of love for the arts here then. And the life here initiated a sense of rebellion in me. You just wanted to break the rules, be rebellious, break out and take risks.

"'In some quarters it's still that way. There's this feeling, or attitude, you can't be Canadian and be any good. You certainly can't be a star. We're all too suspicious of that. I made my exit as fast as I could. I got the hell out.'

"In New York City, Plummer found his theatrical way. He also knew every bar on 9th Avenue as well as the Upper West Side.

"'In those days a real man had to drink a lot and still be able to go on word perfect as Hamlet.'

"'But I guess like all the others, I gave up drink with advancing years. It's hard to be 40, out of shape and still give a performance eight times a week. Know what I mean?'

"'I was never drunk on stage, you know. I always worked like a fiend in the theatre. I did my boozing after hours. In the 1970s, everyone was sobering up, or taking drugs. It wasn't politically correct to drink.'

"Always a risk taker, Plummer remains so in his career. He might have given in after The Sound Of Music, played leading men and slowly atrophied.

"'Oh I just couldn't bear that,' he says, scowling. 'Contrary to what people think, I don't hate The Sound Of Music. It's just it's such a goody-goody movie, that's all. Maybe I said things against it out of my own rebellious instinct. I mean, face it, I've done well over a hundred movies. Some of them very good. Others? Well, they made money.'

"'And those von Trapps,' he shrugs, 'They weren't exactly loved in Austria you know. The people had them up to here.

"'But the Austrians shouldn't complain, they brought millions of tourist dollars into the country, precisely because of The Sound Of Music.'

"Now it's time to talk turkey. Plummer gets down to the reasons he's back at Stratford after several years hiatus.

"'I've always wanted to do Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra... It's a very sexy play for that old tease Shaw to have written. I mean I don't think he knew anything about sex, but this play comes pretty close.'

"Plummer has no secrets about the way he'll play the part.

"'I'm not thinking of him as Napoleon or anything. I'm just going to do the play as truthfully and as amusingly as I can. And I'm hoping my Cleopatra is going to be very sexy, dressed in something revealing, very revealing. It's just that kind of play.'

"Plummer's at Stratford because he loves the place and the years he spent here starring with actors like Tony van Bridge, William Needles and Douglas Campbell.

"'I miss those old boys,' he says. 'There used to be this middle-age range of actors here. Now they're all so young. It's scary. But you know the place is in good hands. I am so in favour of this regime. Des McAnuff is the right man for this place. He has an international reputation and he can get good directors to work here.'

"Plummer hopes his Caesar will go on to London or New York after Stratford is through. 'Things shouldn't end here.'

"Plummer also has a couple of films coming out -- The Last Station with Helen Mirren and Doctor Parnassus with the late Heath Ledger.

"'That was just awful,' Plummer says of Ledger's death. 'I didn't get to know him well, but he was a happy young man. I think the journalists were appalling suggesting he took his own life. It was an accident -- that's all.'

"These days in Stratford, Plummer rents a big house close to the theatre.

"'At West Over Inn in St. Marys, where I used to stay, they have a plaque on the penthouse door that says Christopher Plummer Suite. Well, the damn thing is, I can't even get in there anymore. It's always booked. So much for being a star.'"

Plummer Prepares for Caesar

From Richard Ouzounian at the Toronto Star:

"Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer walks into The Belfry Restaurant late on a summer's day.

"He pauses by one of the stained glass windows, splendidly backlit by the afternoon sun and looks about as regal as it's possible for a man to be without benefit of royal robes.

"At the age of 78, he still stands ramrod-straight, eternally tan, eyes flashing with mischief, as a slightly sardonic grin plays around his lips, making you feel he's just been told a joke that you couldn't possibly understand.

"We don't confer titles on our North American actors, but if we did, he would surely be Sir Christopher, if not Lord Plummer.

"Just the kind of man who should be playing Julius Caesar, which is a fortunate occurrence, because that's what he's here to do this summer.

"Not Shakespeare's Caesar, a dusty bore who dies before the show is half finished, but the one imagined by George Bernard Shaw in Caesar and Cleopatra, directed by Des McAnuff and starting previews on Aug. 7 at the Festival Theatre.

"Plummer sits down, orders a glass of red wine and relaxes. His jacket is stylishly cut, but the lack of a tie indicates that this man may be imperial, yet he's not imperious.

"Ask him why he wants to do this particular script and he cuts right to the chase.

"'Because it's very, very kinky. I feel like I'm playing Humbert in Lolita. A sexy, smart older man infatuated with a devilishly divine kitten of a much younger woman.'

"Having caused a shock wave with his daring opening line (as he knew he would) he instantly backpedals with grace, as the naughty but well-mannered Westmount boy that he was raised to be.

"'It's not quite as lascivious as Lolita,' he purrs, 'but there is that naughty frisson behind the relationship that keeps the audience on their toes without being filthy.

"'I've loved this play for a long, long time. It's not done very often because it's expensive to mount, but it's so fascinating because Shaw suddenly becomes a sexy writer, a sensual writer. My God! It's a romantic comedy up there on the stage.'

"Cleopatra isn't present this afternoon, but Plummer hastens to praise the actor playing the role, the 24-year-old Nikki M. James.

"'I'm so glad we've got someone truly young in the part,' exults Plummer, 'and I'm thrilled with what she's doing. She's got great energy and grace and youth...ah, youth!'

"But it takes more than a charming leading lady and a tempting script to get Plummer to commit his time and energy. He's still in demand for stage work in New York and London as well as for movies around the world.

"So what brought him back to Stratford this year?

"'I'm here because I wanted to come and support Des (McAnuff),' says Plummer simply, speaking of the Festival's Artistic Director. 'I thank God that he's here. He takes risks, he dares, he's got a wonderful theatrical sense. He's just the right kind of person to take over at the moment.'

"Although always proudly Canadian, Plummer has been a citizen of the world for 50 years, working anywhere and everywhere he chooses, which is why he applauds McAnuff's decisions to broaden the Festival's artistic horizons by bringing in first-rate talent from America, England and Europe.

"'Des has got such great antennae towards the right people in other lands,' observes Plummer, 'and he's not afraid to ask them to join us.

"'We used to do it here at Stratford all the time and there were always some people who bitched and said "They've all got to be Canadian." That's ridiculous! How can Canadian actors ever learn unless they pitch themselves against stars from other countries?'

"Plummer is positive about a lot of the transformations he sees happening in this first season, even though he knows that some discord and a certain amount of financial pain has emerged.

"'It's all good. It's all exciting. It doesn't matter if it's rocky or not. It's change and this place needed it.'

"Of course, he wouldn't be Plummer the Perfectionist if he didn't find some faults and he's ready to speak about them as well.

"'We've got to get all the genteel theatre out of the place, the kind of thing that people love to come to see because they know they can drop off and have a nice snooze.

"'I also feel there are too many plays being done here. Actors can't do their best work if they're constantly running madly from one show to another. It's like going to a restaurant with a menu that's so big you know the chef just can't prepare every dish well.'

"Plummer's passion for Stratford even surprises himself and he pauses to take a sip of wine, speaking more softly when he resumes.

"'I guess I have an unconscious desire to always be a part of Stratford because the defining event of my life took place here.

"'I was 26 years old, it was 1956 and I played Henry V here. It was glorious. The French were played by actors from Quebec and the whole concept of bringing this country together became something that actually seemed possible.'

"Ask him what he remembers about Stratford when he wakes up at four in the morning and he laughs.

"'Going to bed at four in the morning. No, really, that's what it was. A big party. We were all like that.

"'The company wanted to test me. They would keep me up drinking till all hours because they wanted to see if I was tough enough to carouse all night and then perform Henry V at a matinee the next day. And if you did, you were a man, my son.'

"The word 'retire' isn't in Plummer's vocabulary and he grows excited again as he talks about the kind of work he still wants to do.

"'I want to play characters who drive, who do, who make things happen.

"'Al Pacino and I talked about doing Volpone together, but the only trouble is that Al always wants to do 14 years of workshops first and by the time he got through them, I'd be dead.'

"Plummer drains his glass of wine and looks off in the distance where the sun is sinking ever lower in the sky.

"'I do want to play Prospero one day,' he says a bit wistfully, 'but it's always regarded as a farewell performance and I don't even want to think of that.

"'No, not yet.'"

Stratford "Sacred" to Brian Dennehy

Gary Smith (The Hamilton Spectator) interviews Brian Dennehy:

"Brian Dennehy is a closet intellectual. I know because he said so.

"Never mind that he made most of his money in action flicks like Gladiator (the 1992 boxing film), Silverado and Assault on Precinct 13.

"'Half the time I don't even remember the movies I was in,' he says with a shrug. 'Hollywood is mostly a load of crap. The movies they make are strictly for kids.'

"A tall, handsome man, casual in approach, Dennehy sits back in a comfy chair and sips his coffee. Born in Bridgeport, Conn., he has the gift of blarney, as you might expect given his Irish ancestors.

"'I don't mind doing crap,' he says with a grin. 'If I'm asked, I'm there in a shot. But I have no illusions. Hollywood isn't all that interested any more. I'm too old, I suppose.

"'But I don't care. I've had a great ride.'

"Dennehy is in Stratford to appear in All's Well That Ends Well, as well as star in the double bill of Krapp's Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett, and Hughie, by Eugene O'Neill.

"With two Tonys on his mantel, he's no slouch in the drama department.

"'I come from Irish immigrant stock,' he says. 'But I'm not as tough as people think. I can be hurt.'

"He strokes a grizzled face and his blue eyes dance.

"I've been panned,' he says. 'But what are the critics? They're no help, really. They can't help you when you're bad, and certainly not when you're good. You spend months working on a part and some jerk comes along and tells you what you're doing isn't right.

"'And the audience? Well, they wait for their instructions. They have to see if the show is good or bad by reading a review? C'mon.

"'Of course every actor says he never reads reviews,' he continues. 'Hah. Paul Scofield told me never, never. Then his wife chimes in. "No, he doesn't read them. He has me read them to him, very, very slowly."'

"A roar from Dennehy, and the conversation moves on.

"'I love [the] Stratford Festival," he says. "This place is real. It's all about doing the work. Trying to make it good.

"'On Broadway, it's all about who you're going to get to star in the play, how you're going to beat the critics and how much money the whole thing's going to make.

"'It's commerce, not theatre.'

"That said, Dennehy has acted the socks off O'Neill on stage, from The Iceman Cometh to Long Day's Journey into Night with Vanessa Redgrave and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

"Then there were 650 performances as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

"'You know, in a part like that, you never stop growing. I was still learning at the very last performance. Now that's a role.'

"In Stratford, Dennehy is flexing his acting muscle, playing Beckett, O'Neill and Shakespeare.

"'Those are three heavy hitters,' he says. 'Maybe I'm nuts. But you know, I'm 70 July 9. I feel my head very close to the ceiling. I'm aware of mortality. Ten years ago, I thought, "Oh hell, I've got plenty of time." Now it's another thing.

"'I feel like I've used my days wisely though,' he says. 'I've squeezed it all out. That's not a sad comment, just an honest thought.'

"The topic returns to Stratford and the roles he's playing this season.

"'This is graduate school, you know," he says. "If you want to be an actor, this is the place to be.

"'I'm so glad I'm here. There's nothing like this in the States. Nothing. We have great regional theatres, but nothing like this. There'll be claw marks if they try to get me out of here, now I've discovered what it means.

"'This place has the right kind of ambition. It should be regarded as a sacred institution, nirvana.'

"Dennehy drinks the last slurp of coffee. He gets ready to go back to rehearsal.

"When you see the exit sign blinking in your face, you realize the only thing that matters is grabbing hold of each day. That's very Beckett, very O'Neill and very Dennehy to boot.

"'Come watch me make a fool of myself,' he says with a laugh.

"I doubt it, Mr. Dennehy. I doubt it very much."

Brian Dennehy Prepares for Opening Weekend

An interview with Brian Dennehy, from Richard Ouzounian at the Toronto Star:

"'When you walk with giants, you learn how to take bigger steps.'

"That's how Brian Dennehy modestly explains his legendary Tony Award-winning performances in Death of a Salesman and Long Day's Journey Into Night, giving the credit to authors Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill.

"But the big steps of Dennehy's past are about to become positively huge, as he soon adds two more theatrical giants to his repertoire and revisits a third.

"In the space of two days next weekend at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Dennehy will open as the King in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well as well as a double bill of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Eugene O'Neill's Hughie.

"It's a bill that would tax a man half his age, but Dennehy – who turns 70 on July 9 – is relishing the assignment. 'I've never done repertory theatre before in my life and it's certainly a challenge,' says Dennehy, unwinding in a Toronto bistro. 'But I love the Stratford Festival and everything about it. What a f---ing amazing place full of f---ing amazing people!'

"Bursts of blue language are not uncommon with Dennehy. He's a big, burly Irishman of a certain generation who grew up on Long Island and spent time with the Marines.

"But he's not as burly as he used to be, thanks to the Lap Band weight reduction surgery he underwent after a frightening bout of hypertension drove him out of Death of a Salesman for a few days in 1999.

"'This machine is all I've got,' he says, slapping the area around his heart. 'I've gotta take care of it.'

"That's another reason his hard-drinking days are long behind him and the Diet Coke he sips at is his beverage of choice nowadays.

"'Yeah, I drank a lot,' he says without affectation or drama. '"It was fun and then it wasn't fun any more. So I quit.'

"But Dennehy is aware of the legacy of drink and how it haunts many Irishmen, including his beloved author O'Neill.

"'He was one of those classic Irish alcoholics who got pissed off because he couldn't drink any more and that drove a lot of his work.'

"Hughie, for example, is a 1941 one-act play about Erie Smith, 'a small-fry gambler and horse-player' who is just coming off a five-day bender that he went on after Hughie, his favourite desk clerk at the crummy hotel he stays at, suddenly died.

"'His whole life has been an abject series of petty failures,' says Dennehy, 'but he always turns them into imaginary triumphs. It's a play about grief and so is Krapp's Last Tape.' A sunny grin spreads over Dennehy's face. 'Now I have a word to bridge the two plays.'

"Dennehy has performed Hughie several times before, always to great acclaim, and he calls it 'a series of conventional, if interesting, problems for the actor.'

"But Beckett, whose stygian nightmarish world Dennehy is entering for the first time, is something totally different.

"'I remember sitting with (actor) Patrick Magee in a bar someplace in New York many years ago,' Dennehy recalls. 'Magee was the first actor to ever portray Krapp and we were both in our cups and talking about the play. "Very dark," Paddy kept saying, "the play is very dark."'

"Dennehy snorts. 'Jesus, I should have listened to him.'

"Krapp's Last Tape finds a bitter old man on his 69th birthday, sitting alone and listening to tapes he has made over the years that allow him to review the wreckage of his life.

"'It's profoundly difficult,' admits Dennehy, 'which is as it should be, because it's a f---ing impossible part.

"'I feel like I've gotten a long way down the road in the last couple of weeks, but I don't know if it's the right road and there's no map available.'

"He is finding Stratford director Jennifer Tarver a real asset. 'I like balancing her fresh, new perspective against my pain-in-the-ass old-fart perspective.'

"But, in the end, Dennehy keeps coming back to the problem of what he calls 'the Beckett darkness.'

"When asked to compare it, for example, to the darkness found in O'Neill, he broods for a few seconds.

"'They both have a skull in their plays,' Dennehy theorizes, 'and the O'Neill skull grins . . . but the Beckett skull laughs out loud.'

"And then there's his third role: the King of France in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, which is being performed on the giant Festival stage as opposed to the intimacy of the Studio Theatre where Hughie and Krapp's Last Tape are presented.

"How is he finding that experience? 'I use the image of a horse on ice,' he chuckles, 'because I feel like I'm slipping and sliding around. I'm faking, but I'm surrounded by people who know what they're doing, like Martha (Henry), (Stephen) Ouimette, (Juan) Chioran and (Tom) Rooney.

"'With those people on stage, I cover my ass and my bets.'

"Then there's another, purely technical issue. 'On the first day of rehearsal,' he relates, 'I said to (director) Marti Maraden, "You've got the big Brian Dennehy problem. I block out the sun."

"'"That won't be a problem," she said sweetly.'

"Dennehy laughs so loudly he chokes on his Diet Coke. When he has recovered, he continues.

"'Now, suddenly, it's getting to be, "Brian, when you say that line, move this way, and when you say the next line, move the other way." And I said "You mean like over toward Cleveland?"

"'The other night, I was wearing one of those orange golfing shirts and I'm sure I looked like a Wal-Mart store up there.'

"Despite his enthusiasm and apparent vigour, it must still be a strain for a 70-year-old man to perform three demanding plays in one day.

"'Something I learned a long time ago: Physical fatigue is the actor's friend. You don't want to go too far with that, but the great doctor is always the audience.

"'There are two counter-intuitive processes that take place in acting: stripping a lot of s--t away and assembling all kinds of things to hide behind.

"'When you're tired, you can't assemble those elaborate barricades between you and the audience and it's amazing how many great performances come out of that inability to protect yourself.'

"When looking at the big picture, Dennehy thinks of himself as a combination of his father and grandfather.

"'My father had a good sense of humour about a lot of things, including life, which I think I inherited. And he was devoted to the job he was doing (as an Associated Press wire-man). I'm like that, too.

"'But my grandfather was a crapshooter. When he was 12, he left Ireland on his own and moved to America on his own.

"'I'm a crapshooter, too. Give me a ticket and I'll be there. I don't see that changing any time soon, but time has a way of making those choices for you.'

"But for now, with three giant authors to increase his stride and the Stratford machine buzzing happily behind him, Dennehy concludes, 'I can't think of a place I'd rather be.

"'The great thing about an audience is that you walk out there in the dark, the lights go up and you gotta just shut up and do it. They paid their f---ing money and you better deliver. And the next night you gotta do it again.

"'This ain't a movie where you do it five times and they pick the best one. This is ultimately you and them and the words.

"'There's something primitive and satisfying about that. It's being alive and being a communicator on cue.'"

Bringing Success Home

Choreographer Sergio Trujillo (at Stratford: 1999's West Side Story and 2000's The Sound of Music) may be mentioned in the latest article about Jersey Boys, but director Des McAnuff is once again the focus.

From James Bradshaw at the Globe and Mail:

"McAnuff, artistic director of the Stratford Festival (the last remaining member of its leadership triumvirate that imploded in spectacular fashion in March), said he was surprised it took this long to bring Jersey Boys to his hometown.

"'We started at [California's] La Jolla Playhouse in the summer of 2004, and audiences were literally standing up during the acts, which never happens. Ever. We were suspicious that we had a tiger by the tail, and because we were both Toronto boys, we started talking about Toronto immediately,' he said.

"The Toronto Centre seemed an attractive venue to McAnuff and the partnership with Dan came about through talks conducted by McAnuff's producer, Michael David.

"Rick Elice, who co-wrote Jersey Boys with Marshall Brickman, has high praise for McAnuff and said the initial search for a director was brief.

"'I worked for Des as an actor back in 1982 when he was this freakishly talented, very strange Canadian boy who came to New York and was going to make his name. And so when we got to the point where we wanted to talk to a director, there was no list. It was Des. Des was the only guy who could have done this show, and he is absolutely at the top of his form,' Elice said.

"And though Elice said he considers Toronto a great theatre city, he hinted strongly that it was largely due to McAnuff that the show made it there. 'Des, of course, wanted this to be a real event here. And we'd walk through fire for him, which is why we're here,' he said.

"McAnuff's commitment to direct Jersey Boys in the midst of a full Stratford season has prompted talk that he is stretching himself too thin. When he signed on with the festival, the artistic directorship was shared three ways; now he fills the post alone. He is candid about the strain he will be under but insists he can weather the storm.

"'The key is just being willing to work seven days a week and 12 hours a day. I have a great team at Stratford that's evolving; you don't do this by yourself. I dare say Stratford wanted artistic directors who had outside careers, and this was a conscious decision of the board of governors. They thought this would be a good thing for the Stratford Festival. So hopefully I don't burn out,' he said.

Jersey Boys opens at the Toronto Centre for the Arts on August 21.

Romeo and Juliet, which McAnuff directed for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, runs until November 8.

Growing Up McAnuff

From Richard Ouzounian at the Toronto Star:

"To tell the story of Des McAnuff, the new artistic director of the Stratford Festival, you actually have to begin three months before he was born, on Dec. 15, 1951.

"That was the night his father William died at the age of 26 on an ice-slicked highway just outside of Princeton, Ill.

"For years, that's all that McAnuff knew, and he assumed it was one of those unfortunate coincidences of bad weather and careless driving that could happen to anyone.

"But, in his 40s, he went back to Princeton and discovered the truth. His father had been drinking that night and was drag-racing.

"'There's a very good chance,' says McAnuff, '"that one of the kids he was racing knocked him off the road.

"'That kid was the mayor's son; that's why there wasn't any investigation.'

"Speed, danger and going against the odds. Three things that may have killed his father, but three things upon which McAnuff has built a successful career.

"It's a few weeks before the opening of his first season as artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and McAnuff is taking a journey into his past to examine how he got to the exalted position he holds today.

"But he's not exploring the years at California's La Jolla Festival, where he took a sleepy suburban theatre to international glory, nor is he bathing in the bright lights of Las Vegas or Broadway, where his mega-hit Jersey Boys is breaking box-office records each week.

"In recent months, the press have been anxious to paint him as a Lamborghini-racing playboy with money to burn.

"In actuality, he drives a hybrid and labours with a puritan fervour that puts work ahead of pleasure at all times.

"And, on this humid Tuesday night, McAnuff is creeping through the rush-hour traffic on the Don Valley Parkway to get back to where it all began for him: in Scarborough.

"Sure, there were a few tricky steps along the way, but he relates them with a nostalgia devoid of sentimentality."

Continue reading.

Behind the Scenes: Millinery

Judy Gerstel, reporting for the Toronto Star, brings us behind the scenes of the millinery department at the Shaw Festival (I know).

"Margie Berggren is the head milliner, working with assistant Christine Grosskurth in what is charmingly referred to as the 'hats, spats and cravats' area of Shaw's wardrobe department.

"The milliners are responsible for 'any decoration on the head' of Shaw actors, including flowers, tiaras and military caps, explains Berggren. Helmets, however, are considered props and fall within the purview of the props department. 'I don't do metal work,' quips Berggren.

"What she does do is translate the designer's sketches into fabric. 'My job is to create their vision,' she explains. The process begins with selecting swatches and compiling a loose-leaf book for each show ('my bible') with a page for each costume with a hat.

"For musicals, says Berggren, there may be as many as 180 hats to fashion. This year, Wonderful Town, set in 1935, required 77 hats, including a handsome brown felt fedora worn by the character Ruth, the older sister.

"'The women's hats are mostly felts, hand blocked with creases,' she says, 'and we've tried to make them so they're not shading their faces or interfering with the sound, because the girls are all miked.'

"'Seasons can be very different in volume depending how much the characters are indoors or outdoors,' Berggren says.

"During Shaw's era (the Irish playwright lived 1856-1950), anyone who was getting ready to go outside would put on a hat but generally wouldn't wear one indoors, she says. [Hats were also essential to Shakespeare's era, and are often quite prevalent even in displaced productions at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.]

"The theatrical millinery process finishes with the fittings on the actors: 'Is there a wig? Is there a quick change? Any special action the hat has to do?'"

Leah Oster (Marion Paroo), who spent two seasons at the Shaw Festival, addresses the functionality of wardrobe in Wednesday Webcast #7: Rehearsing The Music Man. It will be posted to the archives and the Festival's YouTube channel later today.

In the meantime, you can continue reading about millinery at the Shaw Festival.

Martha Henry on the Birmingham Conservatory

Auditions for the next batch of students for the Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre Training end this Saturday, March 1 in Chicago. It is the only stop outside of Canada for actor and Conservatory Director Martha Henry, who talks to Robert Cushman in today's National Post:

"When Henry was approached, in the fall of 2006, to be [the Conservatory's] new principal, it was, she told me over drinks at a Toronto hotel, 'a complete surprise. In fact I said no. I didn't want to stop acting. But they told me that wasn't the idea.'

"'They,' in this case, were Antoni Cimolino, Stratford's new general director and Marti Maraden, one of its even newer triumvirate of artistic directors; the other two are Des McAnuff and Don Shipley, and the team launches its first season this spring.

"Henry is part of that season as an actress, with major roles in The Trojan Women [2008] and All's Well That Ends Well [2008]. The idea, plainly, is that she should lead by example as well as by precept and experience.

"'They insisted that I should continue to act: Not necessarily just at Stratford, they're not guaranteeing me years of work there.' (Though why would they ever want to let her go?)

"Henry has not, by her own account, had 'a lot of pedagogical experience,' though she has taught before: at the National Theatre School in Montreal (at which, back in 1960, she had herself been one of the first students), at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. She was also the artistic director of the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., for several successful years, with a de facto role in the nurturing of actors if not their formal training.

"When she began to think about the Stratford offer she 'tried to look back and see how much of it had gone into my head and my bones. At the end of two weeks I thought, I could do that. And so far that's proved to be true.'

"'So far' means the greater part of one theatrical/academic year. Henry's steering of her first group, the class of 07/08 has been, according to Cimolino, a roaring success: 'She's opened all kinds of doors, built all kinds of bridges.' She says herself that 'my greatest value is that I've done everything you can do as an actor; I've done stupid things, I've made all the mistakes.' (She's also done a lot of things right, which I suspect her students may find equally inspiring.)

"The [C]onservatory runs a 20-week, six-day-a-week, course -- she hopes, next year, to expand it to 21 weeks -- divided into three terms. They come in September, and emerge in mid-February, having spent five months in the Tanya Moiseiwitsch Rehearsal Hall, named for Stratford's first great designer and situated in the theatre basement.

"It sounds gruelling, not least for its principal who by her own admission is not a naturally early riser: 'They go from 10 to six, alternating voice and movement every morning. I sit in on classes, and I meet with them every Sunday.' The current group spent their first term working with a variety of teachers, including people from the company; they were also exposed to such visiting luminaries as Olympia Dukakis .

"In their second term, David Latham -- Henry's predecessor as principal and now in charge of the expanding area of training within the main company -- worked with the students on Macbeth and taught them mask-work.


"'David,' says Henry [pictured above], 'teaches with enormous concentration on the depth in Shakespeare: what goes on underneath the text. I try to give them the skills to do that.' (This includes 'giving them yellow Post-it notes on diction.') In their third term, Henry has been working with them on Twelfth Night -- and finding new things in a text she thought she knew off by heart.

"The Conservatory started during former artistic director Richard Monette's regime; it was one of his most cherished projects, along with the Festival theatre studio. Some of our best young actors emerged from the Conservatory's earlier years: Michael Therriault, Jonathan Goad, Michelle Giroux, and others.

"Goad [who will prove his singing talents this season in The Music Man (2008)] and Therriault [who will appear in the two-part adaptation of The Englishman's Boy (2008), airing the next two Sundays on CBC] were already in the Festival company when they enrolled in the conservatory, and some other experienced actors have gone there; a notable example is Dan Chameroy, already a well-known performer in musicals who has painstakingly and rewardingly made himself over into a dramatic and character actor.

"For the most part, though, the conservatory in Monette's time enlisted, as Henry says, 'people fresh out of school.' The new emphasis is slightly different: 'The present directorate want actors capable of playing medium or big parts in the fairly new future. For that to happen, you need fewer people with more experience. Last year, from hundreds of applications, we took eight, not 12 (the previous customary intake). They mostly have two years in the professional theatre -- no more than that, before they develop bad habits.'

"Conservatory actors generally progress into the main company; the current batch have small roles in several of the coming season's shows and will have one of them, the perennially young play Love's Labour's Lost, more or less to themselves. 'If you bring in twelve people every year willy-nilly, you end up after five years with a lot of the company being inexperienced young people. The company begins to look semiprofessional.'

"'I've enjoyed,' Henry says, 'watching these kids evolve, trying to make sure that what we're doing for them is the most constructive use of them in the long run. I don't care if they're in pain in week four, but I do care about their well-being at the end of week 20.'

"By their well-being, she means 'their potential as actors. If they can absorb the Shakespearean text, they can do just about any text.' Nor, obviously, can they all be expected to spend their entire careers at Stratford.

"Henry herself hasn't, though she's been a powerful presence there ever since playing Miranda in The Tempest in 1962, fresh from her own training. "It's very important to me that the students come out of this being productive members of the society and the community; that they're proactive-- terrible word--in rehearsals or in the running of a theatre. I want artistic directors, in any theatre in the world, to be glad to have them. No theatre school can teach what the Conservatory can -- being exposed to designers, cutters, lighting designers, what it's like to make a wig, how to treat dressers and stage managers -- that's with the assumption that they already have a natural graciousness. I had to learn all this by hook or by crook. Nobody said to me 'this is the way you say hello to a wig.'

"After checking my notes on this, I phoned her to ask if I had made a mistake. Didn't she mean, how to say hello to a wigmaker? 'No,' she said firmly. 'I want them to know how to talk to a wig.'"

In the News: Graham Abbey

Queen’s University graduate Graham Abbey was snagged for an interview with the Kingston Whig-Standard in light of his recent air time in The Border (2007), which also features fellow former Stratford actor Nazneen Contractor.

But this is about the Kingston connection.

"Abbey, who graduated from Queen's in 1994, plays Det.-Sgt. Gray Jackson, whom the show's bio notes is a 'womanizer, gambler and all-round cowboy, with an athlete's body and an easy, amiable smile.'

"'I'm the Action Jackson character,' chuckles Abbey, referring to the '80s film character who was big on acting macho and fistfights.

"In the most recent episode ['Bodies on the Ground', which you can watch online], Jackson was shot at and nearly blown up by terrorists on the lam in northern Quebec. The week before, he was nearly taken out by some Albanian mobsters while going undercover as a gambler at a casino on a native reserve.

"'My mother asked me if there was going to be a week when I wasn't covered in blood,' he said.

"It may seem a far cry from Stratford, where Abbey spent [ten] years playing almost all the good parts there are for young men. He also played Macbeth, a role normally reserved for older actors. He left after the 200[6] season, looking for new acting mountains to climb, specifically, the world of TV and film. However, he hasn't given up Shakespeare altogether. He is currently rehearsing Othello for a CBC-TV production.

"Abbey is nonplussed about the move to TV.

"'Acting is acting. It all has to do with listening,' he said."

In his last season at Stratford, in Coriolanus (2006), Abbey had time to discuss the change with his co-star Colm Feore, who has found success both on the stage and on the screen. Feore told him that "theatre prepares an actor for film and television".

"'Stratford is such an intimate world. You're acting on a stage with the audience almost 360 degrees around you. The greatest acting on Stratford stages, people like John Hutt and Martha Henry, made it extremely intimate. I'd heard that stage actors have to turn it down for film and TV but I haven't found it a big leap,' he said.

"'Doing Shakespeare is like a three-hour marathon because you don't stop. In TV, it's sprints because you shoot the same scene seven or eight times from different angles.'

"At least he doesn't have as many lines to memorize. Even though he had a major role in the last episode, Abbey probably didn't have much more than a page of dialogue to memorize. You don't talk much when you're dodging bullets.

"'The TV world is so quick,' he said.

"'They make changes so you're getting your lines the morning of the shoot. You have to learn that stuff instantly and on the fly.'

"And there are some things that Stratford couldn't teach him - like guns and explosions.

"'The guns were a little daunting,' he said. 'They are real and loud. Usually, you wear flesh-coloured earplugs but I'm still pretty much a novice at it and when we shot the gunfight scene I forgot to wear mine. I was in pain because I couldn't hear.

"'And in a scene where a car gets blown up, I was only 20 feet (six metres) from the explosion. I was pretty worried about that one.'

"One thing that makes The Border unique is that its characters have all been given detailed back stories.

"Abbey's character, besides being a Young Turk, was also given up for adoption when he was young and has issues with his father.

"'You don't see this a lot in TV,' he said. 'They've given us nice deep stories and backgrounds. Coming from my Shakespeare background, if there weren't deep stories that would be a lot harder for me.'"

That's it for the Stratford connection. Continue reading if you're interested in other claims Kingston has made on the successful show.

In the News: Evan Buliung

Evan Buliung is heading back to Stratford after five years (spent, variously, at the Shaw Festival and in Toronto) to take up such classic roles as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (2008) and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (2008).

In an interview with Richard Ouzounian in the Saturday Star, Buliung says an early goodbye to his deliciously malicious We Will Rock You (2007, Toronto) persona Khashoggi:

"For the past year, he's been delighting audiences (and himself) with his hyper-camp performance as the villainous Khashoggi in We Will Rock You, but before that he endured his stint as Aragorn in what he now calls 'the physical, spiritual and emotional barrage' otherwise known as The Lord of the Rings.

"It's probably a good thing Buliung spent some of his formative childhood years as a military cadet, because without that rigour, he might not have been able to stand the strain of his time in Middle-earth.

"'It became a personal agenda for all of us in the cast to just survive it,'" Buliung tells Ouzounian. "'And when it first ended, I was heartbroken and pretty shattered as a person. Very bleak days. And many of us from the cast were in the same situation. I didn't leave my apartment for days.'"

After being kicked out of the theatre program at George Brown College, Buliung wandered around the local theatre circuit before ending up at Stratford.

"Since he's going back to the Festival this year, he chooses his words carefully when discussing his five seasons there.

"'Stratford is a very big organization. It's easy for a young actor to be a ladder-climber and I didn't want to go that route.’

"For whatever reason, Buliung got a rude awakening in 2002 after playing Edgar opposite Christopher Plummer in King Lear when he was told he would not be going with the production to New York. He was replaced by Brent Carver.

"'It was an incredibly humbling and terrifying experience' is how he describes his departure. But he quickly got back up on his feet and went to his colleague Ben Campbell, who was joining his wife Jackie Maxwell at the Shaw Festival and said, 'Take me with you!'

"For the next three years at Shaw, Buliung honed his craft, moving to a new level of accomplishment in shows like Journey's End and Major Barbara. He loved it at Shaw, but when he heard a new giant musical version of The Lord of the Rings was auditioning in Toronto, he wanted to be a part of it.

"'I was a huge fan of the movies and the video game, but I'd never read the books,' he says, laughing."

The Lord of the Rings: The Musical (2006) also starred Dion Johnstone as Boromir and inaugural Birmingham Conservatory graduate Michael Therriault as Gollum (a role which he maintains today in London, England). Brent Carver, Buliung’s King Lear (2002) replacement, was Gandalf.

"'We spent a month and a half doing the Battle of Helm's Deep,' he remembers with a shudder. 'We wasted a lot of time on technical stuff and didn't spend enough time on the scenes.

"'You can throw as much money and effects as you want at a production, but if the heart of the story isn't there, it just doesn't work.'

"Still smarting from the LOTR experience, Buliung at first refused to audition for We Will Rock You, vowing, 'I don't want to do another big thing.'

"But the power of Queen's music and the Blackadder-ish humour of the book won him over.

"'I went in on the first day of rehearsals,' he says, 'put on the sunglasses and gloves and just went to town.

"'I went very, very large and explored the monster of it.'"

That monster – Khashoggi – will be laid to rest Sunday, January 27, 2008. Adam Brazier, who dabbled in Stratford ten years ago, and who was last in Toronto as the street rat in Ross Petty's Aladdin: The Magical Family Musical (2004), will pick up the reins.

Evan Buliung, however, is off to Stratford for table readings.