STRATFORD, Ont. — That could well be a white lab coat that Lucy Peacock is wearing when she first seizes our attention in Paradise Lost. To be sure, there are glimpses beneath of a clinging black outfit that makes its own insinuating statement, but the laboratory touch seems particularly appropriate given that this is someone who delights in treating human beings like specimens to be played with and driven into the abyss. …
STRATFORD, Ont. — The Stratford Festival’s 2018 playbill is now complete — and the final entry is an absolute winner.
Napoli Milionaria! is the name of the play, and it’s a wonderful, steaming broth of an entertainment — robustly staged with understanding and affection by festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino and featuring a stellar cast led by Tom McCamus as the beleaguered head of a turbulent Neapolitan household clinging to survival during the Second World War. …
STRATFORD, ONT. — By the time the assassination scene arrives in the Stratford Festival’s new production of Julius Caesar, the sense of foreboding is palpable.
It’s not just the soothsayer’s urgent warnings to “beware the Ides of March” or the fearful nightmares of Caesar’s wife who pleads with him to remain at home and not go to the Senate on this fateful day. It’s also the noirish atmosphere that shrouds Scott Wentworth’s production in its early scenes. …
STRATFORD, Ont. — It’s one of many startling moments in the Stratford Festival’s production of Coriolanus. Through pride and arrogance, the tarnished hero of the play’s title has squandered the love of the Roman populace and is fleeing for his life. So we see him behind the wheel of an automobile, speeding to safety as an increasingly forbidding landscape flashes past. It could be a journey into hell — it seems so ominous and interminable — and it’s happening within a rectangular, wide-screen frame surrounded by the blackness of the Avon Theatre stage. Finally when he halts the car and steps out, Coriolanus is clearly in a blighted, forsaken place. …
STRATFORD — We find ourselves immediately plunged into the opening shipwreck scene: sails flapping and breaking, winds shrieking through the darkness, frantic crew members shouting at each other — and, as always in productions of The Tempest, their words are pretty much unintelligible.
But Shakespeare’s lines don’t matter that much at this point, so we can simply sit back and enjoy the Stratford Festival’s formidable resources being put to work. Unfettered theatricality holds no fears for director Antoni Cimolino, and here he has some sterling collaborators — set and costume designer Bretta Gerecke, lighting wizard Michael Walton and sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne. …