Stratford Shakespeare Festival Announces 2013 Season

Antoni Cimolino, newly named artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, today announced the festival's 2013 playbill. It includes four of the better known plays by Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Measure for Measure – as well as two musicals: Fiddler on the Roof and The Who's Tommy. The latter will be directed by Des McAnuff, who won a Tony in 1993 for his direction of a revival of the show.

Other plays on the roster are Waiting for Godot, Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward, Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller and The Three Musketeers, adapted by Cambridge professor Peter Raby. There are two Canadian plays in the season; one is the intriguing Taking Shakespeare by John Murrell, about two men at a loose end who are unexpectedly brought together by William Shakespeare. It will premiere in January 2013 at One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre's High Performance Rodeo in Calgary. The second is the world premiere of The Thrill by Judith Thompson, a Stratford Festival commission.

Photo: Antoni Cimolino, courtesy of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

Soulpepper Theatre's Speed-The-Plow: Review

David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow is a bitter little confection, something like a theatrical version of a Sour Patch candy. Soulpepper Theatre's production, which opened last night, is directed by David Storch and stars Ari Cohen, Jordan Pettle and Sarah Wilson.

The play's title is a reference to a Medieval poem that calls on God to "spede the plow (...) our purpose for to mak"; an apt name for a play about the battle between God or virtue and the desire for wealth and power  – specifically, in this case, in Hollywood. It's about a recently-promoted young movie producer who must choose between two proposals: a dreadful, repugnant piece of formulaic schlock that's guaranteed to make him rich, and an eminently worthy though utterly depressing book adaptation that could change lives, but which will most likely bomb at the box office.

One has to imagine that Mamet had plenty of personal experience to draw on; by the time Speed-The-Plow was produced in 1988, he had already written screenplays for The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice, as well as The Untouchables and an episode of TV's Hill Street Blues. Of the three actors, Pettle (as the proponent of the violent and soulless prison film) is closest to perfecting the driving rhythmic flow of Mamet's language, as he registers his character's growing desperation at the increasingly likely prospect of being about to be destroyed by his colleague's random access of goodness.

The issues debated in Speed-The-Plow are certainly still on everyone's minds these days, almost a quarter century after its premiere. I found it in a way comforting to be reminded that a kind of generalized angst – not just every individual's uneasy apprehension of mortality, but an oblique dread of something much bigger (global warming? zombie apocalypse?) – was already in circulation in the late '80s, long before 9-11.

Presented without intermission, this production is an apt and amusing little fable that will certainly ring with painful, funny truth for anyone involved in the arts. Speed-The-Plow runs to September 22. For tickets, call 416-866-8666 or visit Soulpepper.

Photo credit: Cylla von Tiedemann. Ari Cohen (L) as Bobby Gould and Jordan Pettle (R) as Charlie Fox.

Million Dollar Quartet at Toronto Centre for the Arts: Review

It's a tricky premise for a writer to tackle: a musical comedy based on the historical chance recording session at Sun Records in 1956 when Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash all happened to be "in the building" at the very same time. Why tricky? Well, there's no hook for a storyline, or even any particular dramatic tension, or character development, or any of those other things a play's supposed to have.

In truth, Million Dollar Quartet's not really a play. Yes, writers Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux have managed to stitch together some wispy fragments of a plot: will Johnny Cash re-sign with Sun Records? Will Sun Records producer Sam Phillips leave the company for a job with Elvis at a bigger label? Is rock 'n' roll a passing fad or just a vey lucrative flash in the pan?

The most interesting of these plot shreds has to do with Phillips' talent for polishing the diamonds in the rough that came his way; we see him turning Elvis from a Dean Martin imitator into the King, and picking up Carl Perkins more or less off the sidewalk because he could see the talent shining through without the window dressing.

Ultimately, however, any production of this show is going to stand or fall on the vocal and impersonation talents of its stars, who perform all their own singing and musical accompaniment. In this production, all are capable, and they've certainly mastered the physical gestures and performance styles of the icons they're emulating.

Martin Kaye is an audience pleaser as a scrappy little terrier of a Jerry Lee Lewis at odds with the big, broad-shouldered Carl Perkins (Lee Ferris). But the most astonishing performance from the point of view of straight impersonation is Derek Keeling as Johnny Cash, whose resonant bass is uncannily note perfect.

As the cast worked its way through a roster of the "quartet"'s hits ("Blue Suede Shoes", "Great
Balls of Fire", "Folsom Prison Blues", "Hound Dog"), most of the audience ended up on their feet, clapping and dancing along. Somewhat to my surprise, so did I.

Photo credit: Jeremy Daniel. National Tour of Million Dollar Quartet (L-Rl) Martin Kaye as Jerry Lee Lewis, Lee Ferris as Carl Perkins, Chuck Zayas as Jay Perkins, Derek Keeling as Johnny Cash, Cody Slaughter as Elvis Presley.

Caribbean Dream

Speakeasy Productions is presenting a Caribbean Carnival adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Annex Theatre (730 Bathurst Street) from July 24 to 28. It coincides with Toronto Caribbean Carnival, and includes in the cast Joella Chrichton, who's won the Queen of the Bands title in the festival parade.

Adapted and directed by Marvin Ishmael, Caribbean Dream also stars well known comedian Jean Paul as Bottom, and features Katelyn McCulloch, a silks dancer and choreographer, as Puck. The production includes original music plus calypso, hip hop and rap. For tickets, call 647-938-2804.