Jackie Maxwell making splashy exit from Shaw Festival
She chose Stephen Sondheim’s most popular show, the bloody Sweeney Todd, to end her 14-year tenure as the festival’s artistic director
Sweeney Todd is a musical about endings: gruesome, gory endings. Bloody deaths and settled debts. But Jackie Maxwell’s ending at the Shaw Festival will hopefully be a lot sweeter.
The festival’s artistic director is concluding her 14year tenure with Stephen Sondheim’s grimmest, yet likely most popular show, 1973’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
The story of a falsely imprisoned barber returning to London to exact revenge on the evil judge who sent him away, losing his wife and daughter in the process, may not seem like the happiest note to end a largely successful stint in the festival’s top job. But it’s the one Maxwell wanted.
“It’s a monster. I mean, it’s a glorious monster,” she said from Niagara-on-the-Lake, as Sweeney Todd was in previews, starring Benedict Campbell and Corinne Koslo. When the production officially opened on Saturday, it was the final opening of the 2016 season and Maxwell’s final one as artistic director.
“Given that it was my last year, the joke was that I wanted my last two shows as artistic director to be bucket-list-ish. So that was (Anton Chekhov’s) Uncle Vanya, which I’ve always loved and thought would be great for this company. On the other side, I thought, ‘What would be big and fun and splashy?’ ” she said. Known for its use of fake blood, Sweeney is definitely a splashy choice.
Maxwell’s greatest contribution to the Shaw Festival legacy has been her work in diversifying the festival’s mandate to include contemporary playwrights who, according to her, share the “Shavian” sense of wit and humanity, such as Tom Stoppard, Suzan-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill and Sondheim.
She’s also known for hiring more female directors, and playwrights and actors of colour.
But Maxwell has also been a champion of musical theatre in general at the festival, which regularly produced small-scale musicals in the Royal George Theatre before she took the reins in 2002.
The smaller theatre is where she directed Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along the year she took over from former artistic director Christopher Newton. It was another Sondheim classic, Gypsy, that convinced her to make musicals a centrepiece in the festival season and move them to the 856-seat Festival Theatre stage in 2005.
Since 2002, the Shaw Festival has produced six Sondheim musicals, including Sweeney Todd, and Maxwell has directed half of them.
“I have a great love of musical theatre and I came to it kind of late,” she said, citing her arrival at the Charlottetown Festival and her direction of Johnny Belinda in 1997 as her awakening.
She was already an established actor, director, dramaturge and artistic director in Ireland, as well as at Canada’s National Arts Centre and To- ronto’s Factory Theatre.
“I realized what a great storytelling form it is. There you go; you have not just words but music and movement as well, and how interesting is that as a director to try to pull together.
“If directing is like tic-tac-toe, then directing a musical is like 3D tic-tactoe.”
Placing more emphasis on musicals was not only a beneficial artistic choice, it had a helpful impact on the festival’s bottom line. They’re partly credited with helping the Shaw Festival get out of deficit during the latter years of Maxwell’s reign, despite her taking over at a precarious moment: Sept.11, SARS and the Iraq War all drastically affected U.S. tourism in her early days as artistic director.
But the festival had major box-office successes with shows like 2013’s Guys and Dolls (directed by Tadeusz Bradecki) and 2012’s Ragtime (directed by Maxwell, her only nonSondheim musical at the festival).
Last year, the festival slid back into a deficit of $1.75 million when the three Festival Theatre productions, including the musical Sweet Charity, failed to meet box-office targets. The Pan Am Games and problems on the QEW were cited as causes for a drop in attendance.
“Accessibility is something that I’ve really worked on,” Maxwell said. “How do you get people to the Shaw that haven’t been before, because it’s a hard place to get to if you don’t have a car.
“There are lots of conversations like that that I’m passionate about, but I didn’t really get into theatre to talk about roads and bridges. I wanted to leave when I still felt really good doing it, while I still really enjoyed it and felt good about the work that we were doing. But, for a while, I’m going to go back to what I love doing most, which is directing.”
Next for Maxwell is Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in February. She’s directing The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley at the Stratford Festival next summer.
New Shaw artistic director Tim Carroll is announcing his first season of programming later in August and there’s no word yet about how he plans to continue Maxwell’s advocacy for the large-scale musical.
In the meantime, Maxwell is enjoying her time with Sweeney Todd and the audiences that are seeing it for the first or 14th time.
“As a director, I want at least three moments where the audience jumps out of their skin,” she said.
Even after 14 years, she still has some tricks up her sleeve.