Intriguing changes at Shaw Festival
When it comes to planning the 2012 season for the Shaw Festival — now entering its sixth decade — Jackie Maxwell found herself wearing two hats.
First, she had her usual role to play as artistic director, conjuring up a bill of plays she wanted to present for the festival’s devoted audience, while finding ways to use the pool of actors, designers and directors she has nurtured over the past decade.
Then there was that second hat. With the festival in search-mode for its next executive director, Maxwell took on the role on an interim basis. That means when it comes to budgeting the shows, projecting attendance revenues, calculating government subsidies and making it all come out to a break-even point, getting the numbers to add up was also her job.
Balancing artistic ambition and fiscal reality is almost always a tricky juggling act for any large arts institution.
“There are several issues,” Maxwell explains with a sigh of relief at the end of a successful opening week.
“The most important one is what to put on the stage at the Festival Theatre. With 950 seats, it is by far the largest of our theatres. That makes it the financial engine of our whole operation. And my challenge is to fill those seats without ever sacrificing our artistic integrity.”
This season, as usual, there are three major productions at the flagship theatre. And, in the most startling break with tradition, no work by George Bernard Shaw is included in the mainstage lineup.
In recent years, the top revenuegenerator tends to be a big musical. This year, it’s Ragtime, an epic of U.S. social history in the early years of the last century. It is staged 16 years after Garth Drabinsky presented the world premiere in Toronto. And the director of this ambitious project is Maxwell herself.
“The world has changed since 1996,” says Maxwell. “For one thing, the U.S. now has an African-Amer- ican president. To me, this seemed a good way to take us into a new conversation as the festival enters its second 50 years.”
Her task was to fill the stage and thrill the audience without breaking the bank. That meant using 28 actors, instead of the 54 who appeared in the Drabinsky version; a smaller orchestra and spending far less on sets and costumes.
“We couldn’t afford all the bells and whistles, so we had to create other ways to make it exciting,” says Maxwell.
Judging by the ecstatic response of the opening-night crowd, I’d say she succeeded. Shaw’s Ragtime is clearly a hit.
Then there are two comedies with strong histories of pleasing audiences. One is Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, about a matinee idol who is constantly besieged with admiring fans, lovers, ex-lovers, and other hangers-on. At the centre of it all is witty, scheming, narcissistic and impossible Gary Essendine — widely considered to be based on Coward’s own life as a performer, celebrity and bon vivant, not merely a writer.
Along with Private Lives, Hay Fever and Design for Living, this is one of Coward’s enduring sex comedies. The leading role is often given to a big-name star, but Maxwell has en- trusted it to a veteran member of the Shaw’s acting family, Steven Sutcliffe. For the third main-stage show, Maxwell is relying on one of the most enduring comedy classics in theatre history — while introducing a new twist. The play was originally The Front Page, that 1920s classic about the manic goings-on in the insanely competitive Chicago newspaper world of the era between two world wars, co-written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. In His Girl Friday (1940), one of the many movies based on the play, director Howard Hawks transformed a male character, Hildy Johnson, into a working-girl reporter, resulting in one of the great- est battle-of-the-sexes comedies in film history, with ruthless editor Cary Grant squaring off against ace reporter Rosalind Russell. But it was not until the witty New York playwright John Guare created a new version, drawing from both The Front Page and the revisionist 1940 movie, that His Girl Friday made it to the stage. Guare’s hybrid had its premiere at London’s prestigious National Theatre in 2003, but he revised it for subsequent productions in Minneapolis and Boston — moving the story from 1920 to 1939, when the world was on the brink of World War II. The Shaw Festival is presenting the first Canadian production of Guare’s version, with previews starting June 22 and the official opening set for July 7.
Where does George Bernard Shaw himself fit into the 2012 season? Two of his plays are among the 11 shows being presented on the festival’s four stages. A lively, entertaining production of Misalliance has already opened at the Royal George Theatre. The Millionairess begins previews at the Court House Theatre on June 20 and opens July 5.
“In the old days,” Maxwell explains, “we would always do a Shaw play in our largest theatre, and we could feel we were meeting both our artistic and our financial goals at the same time. But things have changed as time goes on and we move further away from Shaw’s lifetime.”
The crunch came in 2011 when a big production of Heartbreak House had shockingly low attendance figures. That same season, the musical My Fair Lady, based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, set attendance records. One cancelled out the other, and the season ended with a $1.5-million shortfall on its $27-million budget. “We have had to become more strategic,” says Maxwell. “So we thought, ‘Let’s take the pressure off.’ We can examine Shaw’s ideas more intimately in our smaller theatres.” mknelman@thestar.ca