Actor Brent Carver is a national treasure
His wealth of talent is once again showcased at the Stratford Festival
The singular talents of the national treasure that is Brent Carver are on full and fine display this season at the Stratford Festival.
He tops the bill in Martha Henry’s inspired production of Twelfth Night and takes a slightly awkward back seat to his pal, Stratford veteran Geraint Wyn Davies, in The School for Scandal. On one lovely Saturday afternoon in June, he did his one-man show with the musical Art of Time Ensemble as a fundraiser for the Shakespeare festival, which he has been part of since the 1980s.
I have known Carver for some time. We met in 1995 after a matinee performance of Richard II at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre.
It was winter, yet, in the weirdness that is Edmonton winter, it felt like spring. All the better to enjoy the icy performance of a Richard in an electric wheelchair, turning to and fro on the thrust stage under the superb direction of Robin Phillips, the then artistic director at Stratford, working off-season in Edmonton.
I was there to talk to Carver about The Song Spinner, a movie we were setting up for Showtime, an American television network. The movie’s director, Randy Bradshaw, invited me to see Carver perform. It wasn’t a tough sell. Carver had won the Tony Award in 1993 for best lead actor in a musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman. He was a star!
Not a lick. Shy and unassuming, he spent a few minutes discussing the project with us, expressing his enthusiasm over the rest of the cast, including another Tony Award winner, Patti LuPone. Then he left to join family members gathered at the other end of the room.
Months later, the film was nominated for some Emmys, and the Alberta-based producers, Doug MacLeod and Bradshaw, decided they wanted to have a pre-show party in New York. I made one contribution: I suggested they call the Canadian consul general in New York, George Haynal, to see whether he would host the party.
The next thing I heard, LuPone was prepared to sing at the soirée for about 50 people in the consul’s Avenue of the Americas apartment if she could have her usual accompanist and his piano.
I wasn’t there to see the piano being hauled up the three or four flights of stairs and through the doors of the consul’s residence, but I was there later when LuPone sang like we were in her living room. No surprise, she killed. The phrase “tough act to follow” could have been coined that evening.
Carver stood by the piano and sang an original song from a musical that didn’t end up getting made. Slow and stately, it was the ballad of a soldier returning from the war. The room stopped. The hairs on our arms rose again. It was one of those transcendent moments.
I had never heard him sing live before. The combination of fragility and strength was incredibly moving.
Since then, I have been fortunate enough to see Carver at Stratford several times, including in Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. He even played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, which I initially scoffed at, since Brent Carver might be the least Jewish person ever.
I was completely wrong. He revealed a totally different Tevye — still funny, still strong, but with a vulnerability that made his relationship to the fiddler more palpable.
It is one thing to act and another to sing, but they don’t add up to two. It’s as though the combination produces a magical coefficient that Carver embodies, aided and abetted by a body that is, at 65, still lithe, like a dancer’s.
This quality is particularly apparent when he sings the songs of Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour — both actors, writers and singers — or poets like Leonard Cohen.
Martha Henry mines Carver’s talents for all they are worth in the role of Festes in Twelfth Night. Carver adds impishness to his role as the Lady’s clown — part fool, part minstrel, part angel fallen from who knows where.
If you catch this production of Twelfth Night, you will be among those who “have greatness thrust upon them.”
Twelfth Night runs until Oct. 21 at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ont. For more information, visit stratfordfestival.ca.