Stratford….something for everyone!

It is probably true to say that no subject has stirred the soul or inspired the hearts of writers, poets, playwrights, composers, lyricists and artists more than the subject of love. (with videos)

Colm Feore as Cyrano de Bergerac.  [David Hou photo]

 It
is probably true to say that no subject has stirred the soul or
inspired the hearts of writers, poets, playwrights, composers,
lyricists and artists more than the subject of love. 

Colm Feore as Cyrano de Bergerac.  [David Hou photo]

The pursuit of love – in all its imagined forms – has probably been the single most compelling literary, if not also personal, preoccupation of men and women, young and old, rich and poor, across all time, place and culture. Is there any age of mankind or stage of life at which the idea of perfect love – sweet, pure, generous, everlasting – does not evoke a smile or a sigh?

To be sure, every culture has its own ways of easing love’s burdens or of laughing at love’s misadventures or of grounding love’s airy loftiness in real life’s more pragmatic, earthy details. Yiddish-language culture for example is quite piquant in this regard. “Love is sweet, but tastes best with bread,” the wise but poor housewife knows. Or as the observant wiseacre said of the fawning young couple, “They are madly in love – he with himself, she with herself.”

Love is indeed one of life’s most dramatic motivators.

The playbill this year at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival offers us wide, delightful, convincing proof of that. Three of its plays in particular provide very different views of love.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum features the naïve infatuation and puppy love of teenagers. West Side Story, a modernized adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is a tale of the urgent, passionate, desperate love of youth. Cyrano de Bergerac is a moving paean to idealized, self-sacrificing, romantic love.

Each of the plays is unlike the other. Yet each is masterful entertainment.


Forum is an uproarious romp of mischief and mayhem. The fortuitous collaboration of Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, who wrote the book, and Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the music, the play first appeared on Broadway in 1962. It is a throwback to the days of vaudeville and burlesque, combining a racy story with multi-layered, twisting turns of an outlandishly impossible plot.

The story has an uncomplicated core. The young, inexperienced Hero has fallen in love with the concubine next door, Philia. Hero promises to grant freedom to his slave, Pseudolus, if the slave will somehow arrange the acquisition of the young girl. Hero’s parents leave for the weekend and Pseudolus sets to work trying to secure his own freedom by conniving the purchase of Philia. But unknown to Pseudolus, Philia has already been sold to a self-adoring, macho Roman warrior, Miles Gloriosus. But the prospect of freedom is too strong an incentive for the undauntable slave who embroils everyone in his hilariously tangled web.

From the very opening ensemble musical number, A Comedy Tonight, the audience knows it is in for rollicking, frolicking, sassy fun. The music is bold, the slapstick is perfectly executed, and the comedy is a fast-paced, amusing blast of fine farce and fancy. Bruce Dow as Pseudolus is superb. Stephen Ouimette as Hysterium, Hero’s parents’ slave, is the ideal shlemielish foil to Pseudolus.

In sharp contrast to the frolic of Forum, the intense heat and emotion of West Side Story sears the audience.

The story is well known but brought much closer to audience sensibilities by its modern adaptation. It is an in-your-face depiction of the prejudice, intolerance and violence experienced on the hardscrabble, ghettoized streets of the alienated urban life of the 1960s. The play takes place in New York, but it is not about New York.


Jerome Robbins created the original concept for the story and choreographed its dance. Arthur Laurentis wrote the book, Leonard Bernstein wrote the score, and Stephen Sondheim the lyrics. The sheer theatrical power of that super-talented collaboration was said at the time, in 1957, to have changed the face of Broadway forever.

Apart from four adult characters, youth dominates. The play is about the unsettled state of youth. All the roles are of young people in or at the periphery of street gangs. The terrain they inhabit is bleak: anger, anxiety, torment, tension, low boiling points; hair-trigger emotion and guns are the landscape. Amidst this repressive and oppressive environment, Tony and Maria find one another. Love, they are certain, will transform the desperation of their lives. But in the end, the desperation of their lives merely accentuates the impossibility of their love.

The cast is outstanding. Seamless ensemble teamwork, unending energy and brassy, athletic, audacious, choreography highlight this dance extravaganza. Choreographer Sergio Trujillo deserves commendation for his work. And the music simply soars. Whether solo, in duet or in ensemble, the singing and the acting lift the audience experience into a higher realm of theatre enjoyment.

The entire cast performed wonderfully. However, first-time Stratford performers Chilina Kennedy as Maria and Jennifer Rias as Anita were absolutely outstanding.

Cyrano de Bergerac presents a third face of love. Essentially a tale of unrequited love, it deals with notions far less explored today, far less familiar to us in our civilization of machines and high-tech wizardry: honour, duty, ethics, integrity, probity, character.


Ever self-conscious about his appearance, the central swashbuckling, erudite, occasionally pedantic Cyrano believes that the love he bears in his heart must always be a secret.

Written at the end of the 19th century by Edmond de Rostand, the story takes place some 200 years before, based upon a person who had actually existed and tilted at the noble windmills of his heart and conscience.

Rostand very consciously and deliberately focuses attention on the poetry of Cyrano’s life – both as metaphor and as fact – on the words of discourse that convey their messages through sound, structure and imagery as well as meaning.

Donna Feore directs the play after the fashion that Rostand had imagined Cyrano lived his life: with flair, panache and an overriding regard for the esthetics in the details of human endeavour. She astutely melds comedy with melancholy, French with English, swordplay with tranquillity, buffoonery with sublimity. As an example, the balcony scene involving Cyrano, Roxanne and Christian is deeply moving.

Rostand has written the role of Cyrano as a profoundly complicated warrior, philosopher and poet. Colm Feore plays the role to the exciting, occasionally pitiable, always emotionally evocative hilt of the character. He displays a verbal and physical virtuosity that commands the stage. We laugh and we cry with Cyrano. And we feel for him and for the love whose embrace, though so close at hand, he was destined to know only at a heartbreaking distance.

The three plays – Forum, West Side Story and Cyrano – are very different meditations on love. They are very different emotional explorations of the subject. Tears and laughter, sensation and sorrow, hope and despair, possibility and fulfilment are the terra sancta of love and as the Stratford Shakespeare Festival has proved, excellent material for the theatre too.