Cross-border fun in Foster Festival finale
The Foster Festival has a parting gift for its second season finale — another Norm Foster world premiere.
Performed by three Shaw Festival alumni, no less.
Opening Friday at FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines, Lunenburg is Foster’s new Maritime comedy about an American widow and her friend (Catherine McGregor and Melanie Janzen) who arrive in a small Nova Scotia town to visit a house one of them has recently inherited. Knowing little about Canadian culture, they’re brought up to speed by their eccentric neighbour (Peter Krantz).
“It’s got a great sense of crosscultural fun,” says director Patricia Vanstone. “It has a wonderful sense of humour and life, but it also goes deep. Each of these characters is at a crossroads in their lives.”
It marks the second world premiere this season, following Foster’s Screwball Comedy which opened the season in June. Vanstone, also the company’s artistic director, can confirm there will be two more world premieres next season.
For this season’s finale, the company has gathered one of its most impressive casts. Janzen has been at both the Shaw and Stratford festivals, and starred in last season’s production of Here on the Flight Path at the Foster Festival.
McGregor and Krantz, meanwhile, are both Shaw veterans on a rare break from the Niagara-onthe-Lake company.
World premieres were few and far between at Shaw, says Krantz. It’s even better doing one by Canada’s most popular playwright.
“You don’t have anything else to compare it to,” he says. “You’re not thinking about some other
performance. If you work at the Shaw Festival, you tend to repeat plays.
“And I think this particular writer is getting better and better. This is his latest play, and as far as I can say, it’s one of his best.”
McGregor relishes playing a character that has never been performed before.
“When you’re doing plays that have been done over and over again, there are ghosts of every other actor that has created this person. To know this (character) has never existed before, it’s an honour.”
Janzen says the new show has all the Foster trademarks — flawed, believable characters any audience can relate to.
“True to Norm, he can elicit a tear or two, but always brings us back to a place of levity,” she says.
After several seasons at Shaw, Krantz says it’s an adjustment doing plays on such a tight timeline — the Foster Festival does three shows in just under two months.
“I like it, because it’s forcing us to sort of engage more,” he says. “You have to cut to the chase sometimes.”
“I’ve described it over the last few days as being spun in a blender or shot out of a cannon,” adds McGregor.
Another appealing aspect for McGregor is working with a playwright who’s still alive. In fact, she met Foster after she starred in Maggie’s Getting Married in 2002 and has been friends since.
“He has such a facility with language and a natural ability to understand how people talk to each other,” she says. “It’s very rare that what’s coming out of your mouth doesn’t feel like it absolutely would have been coming out of your mouth in this moment.”