A TV star tends to his theatre roots
Eric McCormack is happy to return to the Stratford Festival for one night in The Fantasticks
“I know it’s been a long time, but I want to tell you a story.”
That’s Eric McCormack’s message for the audience when he stars in a onenight-only presentation of The Fantas
ticks at the Stratford Festival. Toronto native McCormack is best known for the TV comedy Will & Grace but, back in 1985, he was just out of Ryerson theatre school and apprenticing at the festival, soaking up everything he could from the seasoned actors around him. He left in 1989 but had long intended to return someday.
“I was talking to Antoni for years about coming back in some form or other,” McCormack says on the phone from Los Angeles, referring to Stratford artistic director Antoni Cimolino. “It never made sense in my schedule.”
The break came last fall, when McCormack was in Toronto to receive the festival’s Legacy Award. Cimolino told him about the Forum program, a series of one-off performances, talks, tours, demonstrations and other events meant to enhance the plays on the festival’s stages McCormack knew exactly what he wanted to do for the Forum: the 1960 musical The Fantasticks, known for songs like “Try to Remember” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.”
“It occurred to me that my favourite musical is something that Stratford has never done in 65 years,” says McCormack, who starred in The Music Manon Broadway and describes musical theatre as “a passion.” He had performed The
Fantasticks several times: in high school, in college and in Los Angeles nine years ago with Jason Alexander ( Seinfeld) directing.
“I just loved the character, loved the music and I loved the poetry,” says McCormack, who will again play the narrator, El Gallo, at Stratford’s Avon Theatre on Oct. 30.
“I love sharing this poetry with an audience,” he adds. “Some of the poems in the piece that my character says are things that have stuck with me more than a lot of the Shakespeare I’ve learned over the years. You have the cliché of the old Shakespearean actor who pulls out his Lear. This is the closest I have to that.”
This version of the musical will resonate with McCormack in other ways. The Stratford performance, billed as The Fantasticks in Concert With Eric McCormack, is being directed by Richard Ouzounian, the Star’s former theatre critic. Ouzounian was also the last person to direct McCormack at Stratford in 1989, as Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“It’s a show I love, but I’ve never done in my long and checkered career,” Ouzounian says about The Fantasticks, which is the longest-running musical in the world, having played for more than 50 years off-Broadway. Its plot concerns a boy and a girl in love, and their fathers conspiring to bring them together by staging a feud and an abduction. Plans go awry; the young couple splits up and learns some hard life lessons before coming back together again. It’s usually performed with minimal props, which will be even more minimal in Stratford’s concert version.
“In some ways it’s timeless, in other ways it is dated as hell,” McCormack says.
Ouzounian has made changes to try to address that. The meddling fathers are now mothers, played by Stratford actresses Blythe Wilson and Alexis Gordon. The doddering old actors who help with the abduction are now “old-school” actors played by Dan Chameroy and Rod Beattie, because “ageism is every bit as lousy as racism and sexism,” Ouzounian says. And instead of pretending to be an “American Indian,” the character of Mortimer now impersonates a Mus- keteer. (Here’s a fun fact: Chameroy and Wilson played the young lovers in The Fantasticks at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton in 1990.) The Fantasticks authors themselves removed the word “rape” from the song El Gallo sings about plotting the abduction, “It Depends on What You Pay.”
Stratford’s staging will also have a subtext specific to McCormack himself, of him “coming back here after 29 years just like El Gallo comes back and looks at what his life was like,” Ouzounian says.
“Stratford in many ways was my garden,” says McCormack, drawing a link to the musical’s garden imagery.
When he left — after new artistic director David William found his style of acting a little too “modern” — McCormack didn’t do so “with a heavy heart or a sense of failure. I had grown from someone who didn’t know himself, who just knew he was trying to please everybody else, to someone who had a much better idea of who he could be in the world.”
Returning to Stratford now “feels very personal and very subjective,” McCormack adds. “As much as I’ve done ( The Fantasticks) before I think it’s gonna feel very different this time and it is gonna feel like going home again.”
McCormack has never worked with the other actors in The Fantasticks, who include Sara Farb, Gabriel Antonacci and Genny Sermonia, and “we won’t be in the same room together until four days before we go (onstage),” he says. Ouzounian isn’t worried. “It’s working out,” he says. “It’s because I can safely say this Eric McCormack in 2018 is the same man I met in 1989. Becoming a star, and becoming rich and famous, has not changed the person he is. He still is an absolutely open, regular guy who loves theatre, and loves getting a good laugh and having fun.”