4w2 — Stratford Festival 2024: A World Elsewhere
INTERVIEW | Director Donna Feore serves up Something Rotten!
WORDS BY MICHAEL ZARATHUS-COOK
The bus ride from Downtown Toronto to Stratford is just a little over two hours long, along the unscenic highway routes through cities like Milton and Kingston. At a point equidistant between the township of New Hamburg and Stratford, sits the village of Shakespeare, a small enclave of about 160 people within the larger Perth County municipality. It’s usually along this point that the monotony of the trip transforms into something theatric, and the allure of Stratford as a getaway destination rolls into view. In his introductory message for the seasonal brochure, titled “A World Elsewhere”, Stratford Festival’s Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino asks, earnestly: “What does being away from home teach us and bring to us? What are the benefits, and what might be the risks, of seeking out worlds elsewhere?” Regardless of what’s happening on its proscenium and thrust stages, the true charm of Stratford is that it’s both a destination and a portal─it’s a city where people go to be elsewhere, but it nevertheless feels completely lived-in and maintains its sense of hereness. The 2024 festival season which Cimolino and his team have concocted aims to meet the post-pandemic travel boom by leaning into the city’s magnetism as a cultural destination while staging works that transcend our time and the city around it.
The season, at a glance, features a Shakespearean trio (Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline); a bouquet of dramas (Salesman in China, Hedda Gabler, The Diviners, Who is Sylvia, Get That Hope); a comedy directed by Cimono (London Assurance); two musicals (La Cage aux Folles and Something Rotten!), and more. It’s the latter of these musicals that brought me back to Stratford on its opening night in late May. Billed as a musical comedy, Something Rotten! is a hilarious vichyssoise of references to the Shakespearean canon, mixed in with nods to almost every recognizable musical. It reaches, ambitiously, for the soil of the 16th Century Renaissance London that fertilized William Shakespeare’s celebrity; and manages to tumble through a rough history of the musical as an art form of its own: from The Sound of Music to Hair, Rent, and beyond. At a length almost as long as my bus trip, Rotten wins a war of attrition against even the most hardened opposition to the musical as a storytelling medium─by the end, the audience is completely won over, worn out, and clap-happy. But more than that, it poses a fairly convincing answer to some of Cimolino’s questions. Sitting through two hours of wall-to-wall numbers, about 190 costume changes, and relentlessly precise choreography, one realizes that nothing else does what live theatre can do. In fact, the redundancy of “live theatre” becomes more apparent as this production reminds us that in order for it to be theatre, it has to be alive, warts and all. In our current social fabric where it seems intelligence is increasingly artificial, and our points of connection are accelerating toward the virtual—the Stratford Festival is wagering that the analog and ephemeral experience of theatre is precisely what we need most.
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