Previews
and Reviews by Jeniva Berger
covering the best of the Toronto entertainment scene! Updated weekly.
covering the best of the Toronto entertainment scene! Updated weekly.
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Previews
and Reviews by Jeniva Berger covering the best of the Toronto entertainment scene! Updated weekly. |
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Plays about the beginning of the modern world
by
"Love,
sex, marriage, family - the lure of the domestic - and in the hands of
great writers, the entry point to unknown worlds, events, vast contexts
that become illuminated by the stories within. This is theatre at its
best, plays that make you laugh, cry, gasp and ultimately care, and make
you leave the theatre questioning, mourning for or marveling at a world
that has touched you in a way you will never forget."
Saint Joan Mack and Mabel Hotel Peccadillo The Circle The Philanderer Summer and Smoke A Month in the Country The Cassilis Engagement Tristan The Kiltartan Comedies For theatre tickets and full season brochures, please phone the Shaw Festival box office at 1-800-511-7429. Brochures and tickets may also be ordered through the website at www.shawfest.com.
Reviews
Maxwell also does another about turn in the production by using the epilogue as a prologue when Joan returns after death to chat with all the people who refused to help her. It's a scene that would seem Shakespearian if it weren't for Joan's Shavian quips, jolly considering the circumstances. "Now tell me what has happened since you wise men knew no better than to make a heap of cinders of me?" It wasn't that tidy an ending as an epilogue; as a prologue it fares better, at least to introduce the figures in this epic tale who will soon parade before us in Shaw's dramatization of Joan's rise to fame as the savior of France, and her fall as a heretic condemned by the church. And they are an incongruous lot, this passing parade of soldiers, royalty, henchmen and ecclisiastics. Joan begins her campaign to get the Dauphin of France crowned king even though this Dauphin is a bit of a nincompoop, played by Harry Judge as if the future King of France was used to having breakfast with the leprechauns. With the crowning of the king under her belt as well as driving the English out of France, comprising a good day's work, Joan has her admirers and her detractors. Applauded by the equally nationalistic but level headed French Captain Jack Dunois (Patrick McManus) who cautions her not to place much faith in gaining the respect of the English - "Do you expect stupid people to love you for showing them up? " - Joan as usual with her misguided faith in mankind and prompted by her voices, underestimates the revenge in store. Led by the cruel Richard, Earl of Warwick, Blair Williams biting into the juicy role, Joan's fate is sealed. Captured at Compiegne after her disastrous defeat, and sold to the English by the French, she awaits her trial. Guided once more by her voices, Joan can only use their direction from a higher source as the rationale for her actions. Though her commune with the voices don't impress, Tara Rosling's sympathetic portrayal of a frightened but faithful peasant girl - it is always difficult to think her as a woman - does. The Inquisition trial is a great scene and it's greatly done by a handful of Shaw's best: Ben Carlson as the crisp, clear headed Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, Ric Reid as a chilling single minded Inquisitor, and Peter Krantz who manages humor as the petty Chaplain John de Sotgumber during the trial but returns after Joan is burned, horrified and in inconsolable mourning. A quick salutation for Norman Browning's unforgettable Executioner, shrouded, spooky, and looking like a Dickensian Ghost pointing his way to the grave. With Sue LePage's simple but elegant, atmospheric set, and Kevin Lamotte's stunning lighting, St. Joan is a theatrical treat and a grand opening to the Shaw Festival's 2007 season. It plays in repertoire until Oct. 27 at the Festival Theatre.
Campbell, a versatile actor who has performed everything from G.B. Shaw to Bertolt Brecht to Arthur Miller at the Festival, looks as if he were born to do musicals; he sings (extremely well), dances, and well, we know from many past roles at the Festival how good an actor he is. His voice is richer and fuller than Robert Preston's who starred in the original production back in 1974, but he has the same kind of sly sassiness that Preston used to great advantage in shows like The Music Man and Mack and Mabel. Come to think of it, Campbell would do a bang up job as Professor Harold Hill. Mack and Mabel, with a book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, never found an audience when it first opened on Broadway though it earned eight Tony nominations. The book was revised by Francine Pascal and eventually found its way to London's Piccadilly Theatre where it ran for a very respectable 270 performances. Though the show was performed in concert in Vancouver in 2004, the Shaw Festival production is the first full production in Canada. With all its lively songs, snap, crackle and pop choreography by Baayork Lee, and spirited direction by Molly Smith, Mack and Mabel is still very much vintage Broadway and seems more out of the 1950's than 1970's with a great chorus line (who double here as the Keystone Kops in a dazzling dance number) and a predictable plot (small town girl becomes big silent movie star, falls in love with the director, can't really handle fame and fortune and eventually loses her way in booze and dope.). Still, there is so much that is sheer entertainment in the production, you really don't mind the very broad, very visual pie in the face jokes or the dull film footage of Mack Sennett's bathing beauties which supposedly saved him from Hollywood extinction when he lost Mabel Normand to the classy William Desmond Taylor, played as an unctuous cad by Peter Millard, a theatrical producer and director who wound up dead involving Normand in the famous murder case. Scandal surrounded many of Sennett's actors - and the 1920s was prime time for some juicy ones - but Mabel Normand was Sennett's golden girl, a sweet faced kid who, according to the musical, wandered on his set one day delivering sandwiches from a local deli and wound up as the star of Sennett's films. It really didn't happen that way but I bet you're not surprised. Despite the fabrications which won't matter a jot to anyone seeing the show, one thing is certain: Glynis Ranney seems born to play the role. As Mabel Normand, she combines an artless naivety and freshness that Normand was famous for, with a great and natural gift for comedy. Much is made of Mack and Mabel's longstanding love affair, even after Normand in the musical version leaves Sennett because he can't get his head around anything but slapstick, as well as his ongoing insults to another of his actors, Charlie Chaplin, which angered Mabel. Chaplin went on to greater glories, but whether Normand and Sennett's love affair lingered or not, their relationship as seen through Jerry Herman's eyes does provide us with a couple of the best numbers in the show, I Won't Send Roses, Mack's warning to Mabel that he's not and never will be the romantic suitor, and the more memorable When Mabel Comes in the Room, a true Herman song which fits neatly inside the shoes of his biggest hit, Hello, Dolly!. Although there are unobtrusive references to the various scandals which plagued many of the silent film stars, there is nothing salacious in Mack and Mabel, and even Fatty Arbuckle, one of Mabel's favorite co-stars and Sennett's leading comedian, nicely played by Neil Barclay in the Shaw production, doesn't have to suffer from his own scandal which rocked Hollywood at the time and cost him his career. That part is neatly left out. In fact the musical has been sanitized to fit all viewer's palates. It's a grand night for singing but If you want to read about the real Mack and Mabel, you'll have to buy the book. Mack and Mabel plays in repertoire until Oct. 28 at the Festival Theatre.
A Month in the Country
It's difficult to think of the play as an attack on marriage these days with its inferences on infidelity and adultery. In the current production at the Shaw Festival, directed by Tadeusz Bradecki and adapted by Irish playwright Brian Friel (the play title is called A Month in the Country - after Turgenev), a loveless marriage with long days and nights tempered by adulterous affairs, seems to be a fashionable outlet rather than an anomaly. Even if they look the other way, almost all of the plays characters in Friel's adaptation seem to know that the lady of the manor, Natalya Petrovna, is famous for her amorous dalliances. Perhaps that's due to Friel's interpretation of A Month in the Country with its Irish "imprint" on the play and its neutral language and style. But the addition of Dublin-born composer John Field's nocturnes heard throughout the play that expresses "the emotions that the characters find to difficult to articulate," (according to the essay in the program), don't seem to be attributable to either Natalya or to several others in the household who seem to have a grand time venting their emotions.The Russian influence may have been down played by the author and though the household seems more active than the usual long languid days Chekhovian style during a non-ending summer in the family country home, Peter Hartwell's design for the small stage of the Court House Theatre is economical and could work for any comfortable 19th century summer place. There's no question that Natalya, the fidgety lady of the estate, played by Fiona Byrne, seems itching to get out of her skin. Arkady, her trusting husband - it's quite true here that the husband is the last to know - is given a wonderfully subtle performance by Blair Williams as a wealthy landowner who is too deeply engrossed in his new threshing machine to take note of Natalya's flirtations. Natalya, on the other hand, has no such pretensions for worthwhile distractions. She's an industrious juggler alright, a professional tease with the baleful Michel Rakitin (David Jansen) a family friend who is madly in love with her, and soon she's casting a wandering eye on her son Kolya's live-in student-tutor, the young good looking Aleksy played by Martin Happer. Natalya isn't even particularly amused - though we may be - by the country house's guests, one of whom is Anna, Arkady's widowed mother. Patricia Hamilton's Anna is a snapping turtle of a mother-in-law, protective of her son but as crusty as an old card shark with some smart critiques of her playing partner, the distracted Herr Schaaf (David Shurmann) another tutor, whose malapropisms with the English language lend strong doubt to his tutoring ability. Anna's own companion, Lizabeta, is a spinster, but Sharry Flett molds her into something much more than a gossip and minion to Anna. In a later scene with the bombastic Dr. Ignaty Shipigelsky, a frequent visitor to the estate who either regales or bores everyone with his stock of old jokes, both realize that they couldn't do any better than being married to each other, she with her snuff, he with his drinking. The scene is surprisingly moving but that's only because we can actually see the light beginning to dawn in Lizabeta's eyes, Flett letting the character slowly comprehend that this is the best and only moment she will ever have to change her life. As Shipigelsky who knows he'll always be a mediocre doctor with only a talent to amuse, Ric Reid turns in a virtuoso performance. Scenes come and go in this three-hour drama, but the best ones have their dynamics working full tilt: the manipulation that the jealous Natalya practices on her teen-aged ward Vera, played with the enthusiasm of a romance driven young woman by Marla McLean as Vera who clearly reads more into her friendship with the young tutor Aleksy than he does; Natalya's seduction of the supposedly innocent Aleksy, though Martin Happer's has the good performance sense to show that Aleksy's hormones are working overtime in tandem with Natalya's; and the final acerbic showdown between the two women when Vera understands what Natalya has been doing and strikes back. In the end, Natalya is the one most hurt by her passionate affair which alienates everyone she has loved. There is enough drama packed into the last part of A Month in the Country to make amends for all the emotional undercurrents that never quite make it to the surface in the rest of the play. Whether the Irish influence makes any sense at all to the audience isn't something that can be second-guessed. For this reviewer, all of Turgenev's original Russian names that are used by Brian Friel don't invite comparisons to anything remotely Irish. And there's not a happy ending in store, only bitter resignation and the mourning of lost chances as life resolutely goes on. How very Russian. But Irish or Russian, it's a long summer and at the end of A Month in the Country, you need a vacation. A Month in the Country plays in repertoire at the Court House Theatre until Oct. 6.
Photo: by David Cooper. Moya O'Connell and David Jansen. In The Circle, one woman has done exactly that while another waits in the wings to exit from the confines of her loveless marriage. At the outset, everything looks sunny and contained and certainly from our vantage point designer Christina Poddubiuk's tastefully designed drawing room in Aston-Adey is the very picture of an award-winning room as seen in the best magazines. It is in fact the country residence of Arnold Champion Cheney, M.P. and his lovely bride Elizabeth, a young married couple who seem to have everything going for them. But we're quick to notice that the prissy Arnold with his fixation on the correct position of his newly acquired period chair in the drawing room draws even a raised eyebrow from the butler. Played with the right mix of stiff upper lip manners and self-absorption by David Jansen, priggish Arnold is thrown into a tizzy when his chair is out of place, and more so when he finds out that his errant mother, Lady Kitty, and the man she left his father to marry, Lord Porteous, are coming to lunch. Arnold hasn't seen her since childhood when she disappeared during a party she was giving and ran away with her husband's best friend. Not only are they coming to lunch but so is his father, Clive Champion-Cheney, who has a cottage on the Aston-Adey estate. Up to this point we are firmly in the terra firma of arch 1920's English comedies and it is a territory that bemuses as well as it entertains. People who lived and talked like that are rather exotic, almost other worldly. But Maugham himself enjoyed that same kind of lofty lifestyle throughout his life, and if the characters in The Circle at first seem all too familiar and overdrawn, they become richly endowed with some very human characteristics as the play goes on. Director Neil Munro has given the production a wonderful cast for this charmed circle. Wendy Thatcher's Lady Kitty with her penchant for cosmetics, expensive clothes and an indolent lifestyle, ultimately demonstrates something resembling a brain beneath her careful coiffure, and a heart underneath her haute couture, while Michael Ball's overbearing, loud-mouthed Lord Porteous, who once was slated to be the next Prime Minister before his blatant indiscretion, has no regrets that he gave up a promising career to become an outcast because of Lady Kitty. It would be 15 years before another royal love affair told a similar story. Lady Kitty and Lord Porteous entertain us with their acid barbs and wicked banter leveled at each other, smacking of a soured love affair which has left in its wake a couple who have become caricatures of what they once were. Perhaps, but their love, albeit tarnished by time, is one of the few good things that is intact in this divided household. Thatcher and Ball get the lion's share of sharp dialogue, but there is some division of humor between them and David Shurmann's dry wit as Clive Champion-Cheney, a man who clearly revels in what his ex-wife has become. Echoing some Restoration dandy, he says to his daughter in law Elizabeth, "My dear, her soul is as thickly rouged as her her face, . . . Why when I think of what she was, if I didn't laugh at what she has become, I would cry." Maugham, however, has cleverly twinned another affair to that of Lady Kitty and Lord Porteous and it is here where the theme of The Circle comes, well, full circle. Elizabeth has fallen in love with Teddy Luton, a friend of the family and the manager of a rubber plant in Malaysia. The scene between Elizabeth and Teddy is not the best in the play with its plunge into melodrama ("I'm glad you don't know how to make love. It would be almost more than I could bear."), but Moya O'Connell's stately Elizabeth has such a pervading air of sincerity about her that you like her from the very start of the play when she uses 'damn' despite her husband's patronizing disapproval. Gray Powell is less likeable as Teddy who can't decide whether his good business sense is getting in the way of his sentimentality. You begin to wonder whether Elizabeth's trade-in will be worth it. The Circle ends as you hoped it might but thought it wouldn't. Maugham may offer one-dimensional dialogue through much of the play, but thanks to Neil Munro's astute direction, characters come alive with all the doubts and fallacies, ideals and ignorance of ordinary people. The characters in The Circle have plenty of money, but they make mistakes and suffer for them, or if they don't make mistakes they suffer even more wishing they had taken a chance. Lady Kitty listens carefully to all of Elizabeth's arguments for leaving her husband but smiles at Elizabeth's naivety in thinking that all she needs is love. "When we're young we think we're different from everyone else, but when we grow a little older, we discover we're all very much of a muchness." Full circle.
We can sum up Leonard's' characteristics fairly easily from his dapper appearance and florid conversation filled with affectionate phrases that sound well used or well rehearsed. But his reluctance to prove to Grace that he has broken up with his last paramour is our clue and hers that Charteris may have trouble parting with any of his past loves. In fact, it will soon be evident that despite his protestations, he's still under the thumb of Julia Craven, a blonde bombshell played by Nicola Underhay, who in very short time will come storming into Grace's drawing room unannounced, temperamental, and ready to claw her way back into Leonard's heart. Julia, as we'll soon see, is hardly the "New Woman" she purports to be, a member of the Ibsen Club, an association of men and woman whose sole membership requirement is that the men be unmanly and the women unwomanly. It's a sparkling first scene with Ben Carlson's crisp, double talking Leonard Charteris and Deborah Hay's smart and sensible Grace who will turn out to be the most liberated woman of the lot, play off each other effortlessly, while Hay's Julia Craven rants and raves and proves herself more stereotypical of a melodramatic heroine than an independent one. When Grace, lecturing Leonard about his relationship with the clinging Julia says, "No woman is the property of the man. A woman belongs to herself and to nobody else," it rings an all too familiar bell for us having been rung endlessly over the years, but little for Julia whose fashionable liberalism is only play acting. If designer Judith Bowden provides us with a handsome drawing room in London's Victoria District, her setting for the Ibsen Club, despite its both sex membership, is redolent of any men's club of the period with is dark wood and unobtrusive colors, especially Julia Craven's sister, the 'unwomanly', Sylvia Craven whose stark men's clothing and slicked back hair style give her the appearance of Madame George Sand. Though Nicola Correia-Damude as Sylvia, will do a quick change later on, she's an interesting contrast to sister Julia, whose very womanly pursuit of Charteris continues across the floor of the Ibsen Club. The Philanderer is listed as one of Shaw's three Plays Unpleasant, though up against the other two, Widowers' Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession, it seems almost tame by comparison. With all its sport and quick wit, there isn't much that's unpleasant about The Philanderer unless you consider the weightier fourth act which is only being done during selective performances this summer. Not being able to comment on the fourth act production, Alisa Palmer's direction of the three-act Philanderer is sharp and spirited with pointed clever dialogue and some winning performances. As Grace's father, Joseph Cuthbertson, Norman Browning gives a sterling performance as a booming and opinionated theatre critic whose views are left of conservative (he's a member of the Ibsen Club) even if he feels a manly man is best appreciated by a womanly woman, while Peter Hutt's Colonel Daniel Craven, a baleful looking ex-soldier who has been taken in by the witchcraft of modern medicine, believes he is dying but is more dead set against the infamous Ibsen Club and its rules of order. But then neither Cuthbertson nor Craven put much stock in the dress or behavior code of the Ibsen Club, though Colonel Craven has fallen under the spell of the club's Dr. Paramore, a self-satisfied intellectual who performs experiments on guinea pigs and fancies himself in the forefront of medicine with his discovery of the Guinea Pig's liver duct. Played by an earnest Peter Krantz, Dr. Paramore is as theatrical as Julia but not nearly as appealing. With some sharp satire on medicine and its practitioners and romantic notions, The Philanderer is almost as breezy as a summer day even if doesn't have the depth of other Shavian works and neither heroine finds any satisfaction in love. "Never make a hero of a philanderer," says sensible Grace to Julia just before the curtain falls. Neither have come away with Charteris, Grace by design, Julia by circumstance. Shaw described the distraught Julia as having the presence of "keen sorrow" but that emotion doesn't come across here. You may have to see the fourth act version to appreciate the darker side of The Philanderer. The Philanderer plays in repertoire at the Royal George Theatre until Oct. 7.
Festival Theatre All photos by Shin Sugino Mack and Mabel. Book by Michael Stewart, Music and Lyrics by Jerry Herman. Revised by Francine Pascall.
A musical about the movies! Hotel Peccadillo by Georges Feydeau. Adapted by Morris Panych.
When you put the words “Feydeau” and “farce” together, the image is immediate. Respectable Royal George Theatre
The Philanderer by Bernard Shaw.
In the best part of London, many of the august members of The Ibsen Club are
Court House Theatre
Tristan - Book, Music and Lyrics by Paul Sportelli and Jay Turvey.
A soaring romance set to music, where music
BEHIND THE SCENES
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© 2006-2007
Jeniva Berger
In the dreamscape opening scene of Shaw's St. Joan, soldiers dressed in the uniforms of the First World move in slow motion among the gunsmoke of battle. You might be watching a scene from All Quiet on the Western Front but two things work against that picture: St. Joan's war is more glorified, even in her defeat, while the contemporary battle garb in the production alternating with 15th century military attire, only serves as a reminder that war is war is war across the centuries, no matter what the battle fashion. It's a most unobtrusive reminder from Director Jackie Maxwell that there are no spoils of war, any war, except perhaps the human kind.
Show me someone who isn't stuck on the movies - and I mean the kind where you go into the theatre, sit down and watch the show - and I'll bet he or she is under the age of 12. Mack and Mabel is all about the early days of silent film and one of the great entrepreneurs of that era, actor/ producer/director Mack Sennett. Watching the big boffo opening number of the musical that has just opened at the Shaw Festival, reminded me of how great the old Broadway musicals were, when the star of the show grabbed hold of you with an opening number that knocked you out of your seat. Here, Benedict Campbell, who has rapidly become our newest musical theatre star, wrapped his arms around the audience and sent us back to the 1920's with Movies Were Movies, a flashback number that chronicles Mack Sennett's love affair with the silent films accompanied by some neat technical tricks that really seems to transport us back to that era. 
Ivan Turgenev wrote a mere ten plays in his long career, but it wasn't until the 1909 production of A Month in the Country directed by Stanislavsky, that the play came to be recognized as a classic theatrical work in its own right. It also helped put the Moscow Art Theatre on the map which was no mean achievement. Though the play was written in 1859 and has been the most produced of Turgenev's works, it suffered a long delay in its early production history. Because of its attack on marriage, performances in Russia were prohibited until 1872. 
"A woman in your position and a woman in mine will always be dependent upon the men who keep them," says one of the glossy well-heeled women in Somerset Maugham's drama, The Circle. Maugham made no pretenses in writing about a particular class of English society in the 1920s who had inherited country estates, indulged in lazy lunches and long, long cocktail hours, and enjoyed a stable of horses alongside their fashionable new Daimlers. A well ordered patriarchal society with stringent rules of behavior, it was seldom for the likes of independent women and indiscriminate men who were promptly excommunicated if they stepped outside the prescribed boundaries.
With the production of Shaw's 1893 "topical comedy" The Philanderer, The Shaw Festival presented the final opening week production under the banner of "Love, sex, marriage, family. - the lure of the domestic." In The Philanderer, the smooth talking, slippery Leonard Charteris, is anything but domesticated. An inveterate playboy, the play opens as he and a willowy youngish widow, Grace Tranfield, are making love, or as close to making love as was allowed onstage in the 1890s. 
Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw. In 1431 Jeanne d'Arc – a young peasant girl who led an army and crowned a king – died on the stake. In 1920 she was made a Saint. Bernard Shaw took this extraordinary story and brilliantly retold it, revealing it also as the beginning of a nationalism which dictated the very make-up of Europe until our own 20th-century apocalypse, World War I – our Hundred Years' War compressed into four. In 2007 we move between the France of WWI and Joan's War to re-examine Shaw's continually resonant play, which combines some of his most refined and provocative political thinking with fiercely poetic and passionate writing, all the while asking us: if she were alive today, would we recognize her – and would we listen? JM. Directed by Jackie Maxwell and featuring Tara Rosling, Ben Carlson, Blair Williams, Patrick McManus, Harry Judge and Peter Krantz. April 21 to October 27. Opens May 9.
The love story of an irascible genius and his brilliant protégée! An exposé of the clash between art and commerce! Mack and Mabel is all of the above, woven together in whirling, kinetic style. We careen from the early days of two-reelers in a tatty New York studio, where Mack Sennett and his creative “family” strike gold with the discovery of young comedienne Mabel Normand, to the heady days of champagne and success with the Keystone Cops in L.A. – and to the inevitable downside of that success. All through we are led by a vibrant blend of musical numbers that celebrate the crazy, freewheeling pioneer spirit of Mack and his gang, and tear-your-heart-out ballads that show the burning relationships underneath. JM. Directed by Molly Smith and featuring Benedict Campbell, Glynis Ranney and Gabrielle Jones. April 3 to October 28. Opens May 12. 
middle-class folk are manipulated with pin-point precision into a series of increasingly absurd situations where they must try to protect their specific secrets or misdeeds (usually only planned – rarely achieved!) 
The Circle by Somerset Maugham.
Elizabeth and Arnold Cheney live an ordered, respectable married life. This comes to an abrupt halt, however, when Elizabeth hears that Arnold's mother, who ran off to Europe with her lover many years before, has returned to England and decides that a reconciliation is in order. Add an unexpected visit from Arnold's urbane father, and the presence of a young man who dramatically pronounces his love for Elizabeth, and you have the ingredients for one of Somerset Maugham's most exquisitely glittering comedies. As in our recent hit The Constant Wife , Maugham explores the compromises and bargains that seem so necessary to married life – in this case putting to the test the notion of leaving everything behind for the sake of “true love”. JM Directed by Neil Munro and featuring Moya O'Connell, David Jansen, Wendy Thatcher, Michael Ball and David Schurmann. April 10 to October 28. Opens May 10. 
most put out when the institution decides to open its doors to… women?! One caveat, however, is helping a little – in order for a woman to qualify, she must first prove that she is “an unwomanly woman.” Once again Shaw has set up a delightfully comic context to examine the foibles of love and courtship, as played out by the “philanderer” Leonard Charteris and three sparkling and vitally different young women – Julia and Sylvia Craven, and Grace Tranfield – a combustible mix of womanly and unwomanly. The Ibsen Club has never seen such action inside its sacred walls! JM. Alisa Palmer directs and featuring Ben Carlson, Nicole Underhay, Peter Hutt and Norman Browning. May 1 to October 7. Opens May 12. 
Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams.
The delicate and refined Alma Winemiller has been irresistibly drawn to the troubled John Buchanan since childhood, but always they have circled each other without true connection. As events cause John to give up his dissipated ways, it seems that he and Alma might overcome the past. But Tennessee Williams has other plans. In one of his finest plays, Williams takes us to the sticky heat of Glorious Hill, Mississippi – a stifling community where a crazy mother, the clientele of the Moon Lake Casino and a group of literary misfits only help to separate the two. How much fight is left in either to stop their true desires from being repressed forever? JM. Directed by Neil Munro and featuring Nicole Underhay and Jeff Meadows. June 23 to October 27. Opens July 6. 
A Month in the Country - After Turgenev, by Brian Friel.
What happens when one of the 20th century's most celebrated playwrights takes on one of the most revered novelists of the 19th century? A thrilling alchemy occurs, producing a humorous, elegiac drama that reveals the complex emotional entanglements that bind a family to its friends and retainers. At the centre is the magnetic Natalya, who spins from her adoring husband to her faithful lover to her son's desperately attractive young tutor, sending all around her into a state of midsummer madness! Friel's humour and empathy highlight Turgenev's unerring portrait of the rueful absurdities of love, marriage, family and the whole damn thing. JM. Directed by Tadeusz Bradecki and featuring Fiona Byrne, David Jansen, Blair Williams, Marla McLean and Martin Harper. April 29 to October 6. Opens May 11. 
The Cassilis Engagement - A Mother's Comedy by St John Hankin.
Adelaide Cassilis is a very smart woman. But when her beloved son excitedly informs her of his engagement to a totally “unsuitable” young woman from the city, she faces an age-old, thorny problem – how to change your child's mind without him realizing it! Without missing a beat, she swiftly plans an open-ended visit from the girl and her mother, suspecting the languorous charms of country life may be less than enchanting for either! The result is a delicious clash between city and country, old-style and new-vogue, as, with gritted teeth and gracious smile, Adelaide manoeuvres everyone through the slow-moving vicissitudes of genteel living. Another gem from the writer of our successful The Return of the Prodigal , where the mores of the middle-class are gently but deliciously skewered. JM. Directed by Christopher Newton and featuring Goldie Semple, David Leyshon and Trish Lindstrom. May 29 to October 5. Opens June 15. 
itself becomes the ultimate catalyst. This is a world premiere of a musical developed at the Shaw Festival. In a spa in the German Alps at the turn of the century, patients, visitors and staff witness the flourishing relationship between the dark poet Spinell and the luminous Gabrielle, taken away from her husband and child to recover her ailing health. As in the Thomas Mann story upon which this is based, the conflict between duty and desire is clear. But also at stake is the fundamental issue of freedom – of choice, of expression – as Gabrielle's forbidden but impassioned playing of Wagner's famous aria from the ultimate love story, Tristan and Isolde , thrusts everyone into a new, unexpected drama. JM. Directed by Eda Holmes and featuring Glynis Ranney, Jeff Madden, Donna Belleville, Neil Barclay and Patty Jamieson. July 12 to October 6. Opens July 28. 
The Kiltartan Comedies by Lady Augusta Gregory.
Two note-perfect miniatures that present a rich, affectionate picture of life in a fictional (but very recognizable) Irish village. The Rising of the Moon sets up a hilarious but ultimately surprising meeting between a gullible policeman and a nimble-witted escaped prisoner. Spreading the News introduces us to more of the quirky denizens of the village, who are sent into a tailspin by a circular story that gains more and more momentum and less and less truth as it makes its way around town. Both reveal the considerable talents of Lady Augusta Gregory, better known as the co-founder, with W.B.Yeats, of The Abbey Theatre, Dublin. What a delight to shine a new light on a long-hidden treasure! JM. Directed by Micheline Chevrier and featuring Guy Bannerman, Douglas E. Hughes, Patrick McManus and Tara Rosling. June 20 to October 6. Opens July 7. (Lunchtime). 
Staged readings by members of the Acting Ensemble