A scene from Stratford's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum": It's noe playing in TorontoDavid Hou
If you didn't make it to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2009, you're in luck - two of that season's biggest hits are back onstage for a victory lap.
Artistic director Des McAnuff's zany production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum re-opens this weekend in Toronto, presented by Mirvish Productions at the Canon Theatre.
Meanwhile, in New York, Tony-winner Brian Bedford is once again donning Lady Bracknell's dress in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest based on the one he directed at Stratford.
Along with the recent cross-country film screenings of this summer's production of The Tempest starring Christopher Plummer, these two productions are the product of a renewed effort on the festival's part to extend its reach outside of Stratford, Ont..
"In the last four or five years, Des and I have worked very hard to project the festival to as broad an audience as possible," says general director Antoni Cimolino.
Transfers, tours and films are not only a way of extending the life of Stratford productions - but also a way of developing future festival-goers.
Even close to home, Stratford can increase its reach by taking an out-of-town trip. Despite the fact that 30 per cent of the festival's audience visits from Toronto, there are many theatregoers there who currently aren't making the two-hour drive. Before signing the deal to bring Forum to Toronto, Stratford and Mirvish Productions compared their customer databases. "We found that there was no significant overlap," says Cimolino. "We were drawing from different audiences."
As for projecting the festival's influence internationally, the pair have ambitious plans - with McAnuff drawing on the contacts he's making working on theatre and opera projects across the English-speaking world.
On his trips to London to work with the English National Opera, McAnuff has been talking to a British producer about potentially bringing Stratford productions to the U.K., while Australian producer John Frost has also expressed interested in touring a pair of Stratford productions in repertory down under. (McAnuff is directing a musical based on Doctor Zhivago for Frost that opens in Sydney in February.)
In a way, this outward outlook is a return to form for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. While the festival was initially created to lure tourists to the then-in-decline railway town, its productions began touring in 1956 under artistic director Michael Langham.
During the 14-season reign of McAnuff's predecessor, Richard Monette, however, Stratford retreated a tad in part due to the increased costs of moving shows.
When the current artistic regime took over, however, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival hired a New York-based publicist to reinvigorate interest in the festival in the United States - which, coupled with the presence of Christopher Plummer in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (2008) directed by McAnuff, immediately resulted in American critics returning to review a festival they had stopped visiting regularly during the 1980s and 1990s. (The festival has just hired a London-based publicist to try to similarly lure British critics.)
According to Bedford, an enthusiastic review of his The Importance of Being Earnest in The New York Times was all it took for New York producers to start revving up their private jets. "One very famous producer, his first question was, 'How long is the runway?' " the Tony Award-winning actor says. "I've never had a question like that before."
None of the offers, however, included taking the complete Stratford cast - including Ben Carlson and Mike Shara as Jack and Algernon - to Broadway with him. Opening in previews at the American Airlines Theatre this week, the Roundabout Theatre Company reboot retains Bedford as Bracknell, Sara Topham as Gwendolyn Fairfax and Tim MacDonald as Merriman, but the rest of the cast are new. (Festival regular Sean Arbuckle is also on hand understudying Jack and Algernon.)
Bedford says this is not that different from Stratford transfers he has been involved in since the Langham era. "I've taken a lot of productions from Stratford to New York, to Chicago, to L.A. and it's very, very rare that even one member of the cast was used," he says. "It's financial as much as it is anything." A transferred production would require plane tickets, as well as pricey New York accommodation and per diems for the Canadian actors - and with the economics of Broadway as shaky as they currently are, any extra cost is frowned upon by producers.
McAnuff is glad to see Bedford's Bracknell back onstage, but does wish that the Roundabout production was more than just "based on" the Stratford production. "It's no secret that I would prefer the whole company to go with him," he says. "It's certainly better than having no presence, but it's not as good as moving a whole production."
When McAnuff took the reins at the festival, his Broadway connections led some to dream that the festival would soon be dominating the Great White Way. As artistic director of the not-for-profit La Jolla Playhouse in California, he developed and directed musicals like The Who's Tommy and Jersey Boys - shows whose subsequent Broadway glory reflected back on their originating theatre.
In recent years, Stratford has indeed been more aggressively developing new work that has the potential for export. Playwright Morris Panych and composer Marek Norman are developing a new musical play called Wanderlust based on the life and work of Robert Service, while the creative team behind The Drowsy Chaperone is currently writing a new musical for the festival
But while it certainly wouldn't hurt the festival if one of those projects turned into a boffo Broadway success, McAnuff cautions that, at most, one in eight shows make back their investment in New York's famed commercial theatre district. "You'd be better off going to the track," he says. "It's just not a reason to do it - it's such a crap shoot."
For McAnuff, as for Cimolino, taking Stratford shows out of Stratford is first and foremost about spreading the word far and wide. "Our main goal is to get audiences to Stratford," he says.