Festival gets all romantic
Freewill Shakespeare Festival begins
Between them, they have a startling skill set that includes everything from releasing original CDs to improvising whole musicals to spirited public analyses of Canuck diet and culture.
Starting this week, every second night, Hunter Cardinal and Cayley Thomas will be doing something they’ve never done before. They’ll be onstage outdoors, flat on their backs, watching the sun go down in Hawrelak Park. And (spoiler alert) they’ll be dead.
Meet Romeo and Juliet, the repertoire’s famously star-cross’d lovers, who fall in love against lethal family feud lines, doomed by the dangerous fractiousness of the world around them. For A Summer of Love, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s 28th season, the company is once again alternating Romeo and Juliet with Love’s Labour’s Lost, an exuberantly verbal early comedy about falling in love and growing up.
In this, the festival revisits the pairing of 2005. And the Romeo and Juliet of John Kirkpatrick’s production of 11 summers ago, Kristi Hansen and Sheldon Elter, return to the company in other roles, including the former as Romeo’s mom Lady Montague.
So, we’re in the park last week. Verona is under construction onstage. Squirrels are chattering in iambic pentameter. Theatre-loving mosquitoes are hatching in the nearby lagoon. Romeo and Juliet are at a picnic table with a great long-shot view of the stage.
Cardinal, 22 and from an activist indigenous family, is remembering how he and 25-year-old Juliet first met. “In Grade 12, we shadowed Cayley’s (University of Alberta) class. “They were doing pirouettes and dips, and I was green and wide-eyed,” he grins, thinking of his eager younger self, who went full-immersion into musical theatre and the visual arts — painting and sketching — on the rebound from a soccer injury. “My introduction to theatre was the sound of my ACL tearing,” says the erstwhile soccer star.
He’s kidding, really. Even in high school, the exuberant Cardinal was en route to improv stardom at Rapid Fire Theatre. More recently he and composer/ musician Joel Crichton have developed a two-person musical improv called Resonance, “more into genre songs with a rich narrative,” he says.
With a puckish glance at Thomas — a notable young singer-songwriter with a highly regarded archive of songs and a resumé that includes an Iceland tour — Cardinal explains that he’s working on improving his mandolin skills for his Love’s Labour’s Lost assignment. “This has to happen!”
On the nights he’s not rhapsodizing about that Capulet girl in Romeo and Juliet, he’s in Love’s Labour’s Lost as Dumaine, one of the King of Navarre’s lords who swear off women for three years to focus on scholarly pursuits. This oath, needless to say, is doomed to failure even before the arrival of the Princess of France and her three ladies and a symmetrical four-point outbreak of falling in love.
Theatre artists don’t come any more versatile. While Cardinal and Crichton were in Calgary with Resonance two weekends ago, Thomas was having “a crazy marathon of her own.” After a day rehearsing Shakespeare, she played the Needle Vinyl Tavern (where her latest album Weird Love got released in April), the Aviary and Nextfest.
Freewill’s Summer of Love isn’t Thomas’s first foray into the great outdoors with Shakespeare.
In 2012, as a member of Freewill’s Young Company, she was Prospero’s daughter Miranda in The Tempest one night, and Mrs. Julius Caesar the next.
So, even before she graduated from the U of A, Thomas was savouring the felicities of “spending a summer doing something that’s important to you” — in the company of Mother Nature, who’s always lavish with unpredictable special effects.
“It’s a particular kind of audience,” says Thomas happily of the festive “picnic-y” feel at Freewill shows.
“A lot of give and take with the audience, direct address, fun and engaging.”
Cardinal agrees “Something about how everything plays together: the audience has no choice but to be invested.”
Even in theatre school, Thomas was “carving out a niche in Shakespeare,” she says, grinning. She recalls playing one of the queen’s thuggish bad-boy sons in Titus Andronicus before joining Freewill.
“I’ve never played a role like Juliet.”
For Cardinal, who’s been selected for Soulpepper’s Academy in Toronto for two years this fall, improv has been instrumental in “bringing Shakespeare to the immediate sense of the world, putting purpose to the words.”
“Great roles,” beams Thomas. “Juliet is pretty feisty, trying to take control of her own life when people are trying to make choices for her at a furious rate. It races along; everyone is kind of flustered.”
Cardinal beams. “The first scene, pure poetry, so beautiful … They belong together, these two.” calls it “a labyrinth of language.”
“The guys are appealing, but puppy dogs and dolts — I say this lovingly. The women are more sophisticated, more intelligent,” says Guedo.
The production is set in the ’60s. The oath put Guedo, a major Beatles fan, in mind of 1968 when the Liverpool lads made the decision to change their lives, go to India, and find a higher level of consciousness studying with the Maharishi Yogi. “Ringo lasted a week; he didn’t like the food and left,” laughs Guedo. “Lennon was caught out making out with Mia Farrow’s sister.”
“A quartet of guys writing poetry, sonnets, some of it in song,” and a lot of ridiculously purple: that’s the fun of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and it’s pure Beatles.