It is 1908, and Shaw's ideas about marriage and divorce are what Getting Married is all about. There's little action in the play - "Nothing but talk, talk, talk" said Shaw himself, though director Joseph Ziegler keeps it all crisp and well paced, and the characters as varied as the flowers in an English country garden.

While the bride and groom are ensconced in their own private corners upstairs mulling over the pros and cons of marriage, Alice 's sister Lesbia, a vibrant non-conformist played stoutheartedly by Fiona Byrne, who would like children but has no intention of giving up her freedom or cozy home for any man, refuses once again the marriage proposal of the pompous General 'Boxer' Bridgenorth, whose affection for her seems genuine. Boxer, played by Peter Krantz as if he were always shouting at an army of underlings, will never understand how Lesbia can refuse his generous offer of marriage. The audience certainly will.

Marriage was the only reasonable course for a woman at the turn of the century, especially if she was approaching a certain age and wasn't well fixed financially. Both Lesbia and the young and pretty Leo Bridgenorth (Nicola Correia-Damud) married to another relative of the bishop, the much older Reginald Bridgenorth, talk candidly about having affairs. Leo, who still cares a great deal for Reginald but has been convinced by him that she's much too young to love an older man, is in the midst of a messy divorce from Reginald and has been having an amorous fling with the dashing if snobbish playboy St. John Hotchkiss - played gregariously by Martin Happer - who has crashed the wedding party.

Shaw felt strongly about the unreasonably stringent rules of divorce that British courts imposed upon couples, causes which were reduced to adultery, physical abuse and desertion, often fabricated by the anxious parties waiting to get on with it even if it meant risking their reputations. Reginald Bridgenorth, played by Peter Millard with a sweeping sense of indignation, has complied with Leo's wishes, feigned abuse and fictitious adultery with a prostitute in a seedy hotel, but is still put out that Leo's lover has insinuated himself at the wedding breakfast. Reginald has more problems believing that Leo truly cares for him has than he does believing that she cares for the arrogant St. John who, according to him, has a "face like a mushroom."

It's interesting that the word love never comes into the picture or at least in the script, but remembering that the Edwardian era when love almost a by product of a sensible marriage, affection alone was rewarding enough. Alice Bridgenorth, a true homebody, played with consistent warmth by Sharry Flett, clearly loves her husband and understands why women have written to him with hope in their hearts. As for the handsome Alfred Bridgenorth, Bishop of Chelsea (David Schurmann), he's sensible and articulate and certainly very fond of Alice, but seems to enjoys the romantic aspirations of his parishioners, among them the the coal-merchant's wife, the Mayoress, the rubenesque clairvoyant Mrs. George Collins, who needs no invitation to go anywhere.

The inclusion of Mrs. Collins in this roundelay of interesting characters is a bit of a mystery. She's humorous, down to earth and exceedingly - but not legally - blonde, all due to the talents of Laurie Paton, but Mrs. Collins' ability to clarify anything or make sense of of the various relationship issues floating around the wedding party, is negligible More clearly outspoken against the institution is the delightfully sour chaplain Father Anthony Soames played by Norman Browning, whose does deadpan better than anyone around, and believes that marriage is an abomination and everyone should "take Christian vows of celibacy and poverty."

If there is any resolution to any of this it's through the bride and bridegroom themselves who decide to take matters into their own hands and elope. When Edith and Cecil finally emerge from their pamphlet reading and agree to accept the law for what it is and do their own private contract, it's very sensible and certainly devoid of any valentines. Krista Colosimo as Edith and Gray Powell as Cecil capture the essence of a realistic marriage in the making yet retaining the "affection" within its walls.

It's Shaw speaking, yet again through his characters, and with that we should give him the final word, or a few of his many thousand words on marriage and relationships, "Why should a marriage licence be held more sacred than a driving license?" He might have changed his mind if he were on the highways today. Getting Married plays in repertoire at the Royal George Theatre, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the Lake, until Nov. 1.Tickets may be ordered through the website at www.shawfest.com or at the box office 1-800-511-7429.
Photo: by Emily Cooper. L to R: David Schurmann, Krista Colosimo and Sharry Flett in Getting Married
(Reviewed by Jeniva Berger)


The Little Foxes

It's ironic that the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake is having a problem with dozens of wild foxes that wander through the community looking for stray cats, because one of the hit shows at the Shaw Festival is Lillian Hellman's classic, The Little Foxes. Director Eda Holmes gives us a sharp, clear look at the Hubbard family, a dysfunctional group motivated by greed and totally lacking in scruples. It's like watching an illegal cock-fight in the deep south, with spurs and flying blood.

At the centre of the piece is the stunning Laurie Paton as Regina Hubbard Giddens, who is struggling to win a rich, respectable place in southern society while her crooked brothers are prepared to financially ambush her and her sick husband. People who sit in the audience for this show stare with the same fascination you experience in passing a particularly gory accident on the highway.

What an ensemble! Peter Krantz and Ric Reid as the corrupt brothers and Gray Powell as the crooked banker set such a tone of malice that they rivet your attention. Not all of these people are evil. Essentially decent is David Jansen in a strong performance as the invalid husband and some truly wonderful moments are created by Lisa Codrington and Richard Stewart as the household servants. Hellman showered attention on even the smallest roles in her play, with these Codrington and Stewart supplying additional insights and social contrast.

Of particular excellence is Sharry Flett's touching performance as Birdie, an abused woman driven to alcoholism by the viciousness of her husband and the careless contempt of her worthless son. When you add up all these well-crafted creations, the end result is memorable theatre and something that will linger in the mind long after the curtain drops. The Little Foxes plays in repertoire at the Royal George Theatre until Nov. 1. Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the Lake, until Nov. 1. Tickets may be ordered through the website at www.shawfest.com or at the box office 1-800-511-7429.
Photo: by David Cooper. Laurie Paton as Regina Giddens and Krista Colosimo as Alexandra Giddens in The Little Foxes .
(Reviewed by Ric Wellwood, a London, Ontario based freelance theatre critic.)


An Inspector Calls

British playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley had a compulsion about time. Priestley's so-called "time plays" where time not only figured heavily in his plots but affected his characters' lives, played a big role in several of his works, especially Time and the Conways, and in his 1946 play An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 northern England. It was the latter that earned him popularity due in large part to the film version starring Alastair Sim. It was last seen at the Shaw Festival in 1989, one of an informal series of mystery plays that played at the Royal George Theatre into the 1990's, and returns to the Festival Stage this time around where it plays until November 2.

An Inspector Calls isn't a traditional mystery though its plot seems as simple as an Agatha Christie thriller: A police Inspector comes to call at the home of a wealthy industrialist named Arthur Birling, to question him and his family about the suicide death of a young woman who had worked in the Birling factory. Birling's family has gathered around the dinner table for a intimate celebration of daughter Sheila Birling's engagement to Gerald Croft. It's not the best time for an inspector to call, but without revealing the twist ending, it's a very well timed entree to begin the deconstruction of a crime.

What can be revealed is that by the time Inspector Goole will have completed his investigation, every one of the Birling family will be known to have contributed to the girl's death. Director Jim Mezon, who had taken over the direction for an ailing Neil Munro, has let several Munro touches remain and they add monumentally to the effect of a family that seems frozen in time and space. The stunning set design of Peter Hartwell complemented by Kevin Lamotte's lighting sets the atmosphere right from the start.

The enormous dining room of the Birlings' looks as if it's set in a circular museum or art gallery. There is no art on the walls, but there is still an ostentatiousness about the room despite its lack of anything decorative. A large elevator at the back of the room announces its coming and going with mechanical grunts, and curious chains hang from the ceiling. Then there are the Birlings, especially Arthur Birling and his wife Sheila, who seem small in stature, physically and mentally, compared to the size of the room. Arthur, played by Peter Hutt, is loud, bombastic, and overbearingly right, never wrong; while Mary Haney's well etched Sheila is shrill, almost crude, blind to any of her own faults.

The self-made upwardly mobile middle class who treat others from the same background as if they were serfs or slaves, wasn't lost on Priestley who used The Inspector Calls as a mouthpiece for his socialism. Arthur and Sheila Birling whose treatment of anyone they consider beneath them is appalling, who take advantage of their underpaid, unprotected workers and laborers in the Birling sweat shop, have made sure their children are raised as if they were to the manner born. Still, son Eric (Andrew Bunker) is an alcoholic playboy who has no taste for work. It's only the warm and spirited Sheila Birling (Moya O'Connell) who has a semblance of humanity about her and the only Birling who freely admits her culpability in the young woman's suicide.

As the unerringly perceptive Inspector Goole, Benedict Campbell is measured, cool, removed from the ordinary. It's an interpretation that works well in this mausoleum of a home which looks as if a deus ex machina is waiting in the wings to bring it all to a finale And when it does, Priestley's play still satisfies as a first rate mystery, one that still has a delicious element of surprise no matter how many times you've seen it. An Inspector Calls plays in repertoire at the Festival Theatre until Nov. 2. Tickets may be ordered through the website at www.shawfest.com or at the box office 1-800-511-7429.
Photo: by Emily Cooper. Benedict Campbell and Moya O'Connell in An Inspector Calls.
(Reviewed by Jeniva Berger).


Wonderful Town

Economically and artistically, Broadway musicals play an important part at both the Shaw and the Stratford Festivals. With the Stratford Festival's two hit musicals, The Music Man and Cabaret, drawing audiences, the Shaw Festival's Wonderful Town, one of it's five opening productions, has been a popular choice for the summertime theatre crowd.

Like Stratford's The Music Man, Wonderful Town under Rodger Hodgman's direction, is a true Broadway blockbuster, as someone enthused on opening night, 'a real feel good show.' It's not my favorite description but one can't argue with audience response.

Wonderful Town is a touch of nostalgia for musical theatre fans, a time when Broadway musicals were wholesome, with sex only hinted at and serious relationships pretty much squared off as preambles to marriage, career women mindful of the cost of outdoing their men, and pretty women, just as the song says, too good looking not to notice.

With Leonard Bernstein, Wonderful Town had a musical score that shied away from the lilting melodies and lyrics found in shows such as The Music Man, to sassy, sharp and citified songs about relationships (One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man) to tough advice given by hard boiled editors to junior job seekers (What a Waste - of money and time), to cautious romance (A Little Bit in Love). Both shows were terms of endearment for an America that had already vanished; each showed their nostalgia in different ways.

Based on the play My Sister Eileen, in turn taken from the autobiographical stories of Ruth McKenney, Wonderful Town with a book by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and music by Leonard Bernstein, had all the Broadway musical heavweights in its favor. It would be another four years before Bernstein collaborated on the landmark West Side Story, but if you listen closely to the music of Wonderful Town, especially in a number like What a Waste, you can pick out the familiar Bernstein strains used more predominately in West Side Story.

Wonderful Town is in fact that city where the Bronx is up and the Battery down (the title of the show was actually taken from the earlier Bernstein collaboration, On the Town), New York in the mid 1930's when our story takes place. The brisk opening number Christopher Street introduces you to an almost revered Bohemian area: Greenwich Village, the hangout and live-in for all the hopeful performers and writers who came to the village earnestly plying the casting agents and publishers who might give them a boost with their career. Ruth Sherwood is one of them, a feisty would be writer who has published little but is hungry to learn. Her sister Eileen is the pretty, feminine one of the two, attracting men like lemmings to their favorite hill and set on a singing career. She uses her advantages wisely and Chilina Kennedy as Eileen, plays her very much as a loving sister with a mind of her own, aware of her physical attributes and how to use them, but never exploiting them.

But it's Ruth Sherwood, more afraid of showing her feelings than facing the editor of the top magazine in New York, who gets the brightest numbers in the show. Lisa Horner is sometimes a little too sharp to have us believe that Ruth has vulnerabilities as well as strengths, but she belts out One Hundred Easy Way to Lose a Man right to the balcony of the Festival Theatre and it's totally satisfying. In Ohio, the sisters' opening number in their newly rented and basic in every sense of the word basement apartment in the Village which is continually rocked by the subway construction, the sisters ruminate about why they should have stayed above ground in Ohio. Designer William Schmuck has supplied a clever set to show how far underground they are.

Ohio remains a good introduction for the city shy, homesick Eileen and Ruth and their first night in New York, but the pace of the first act seems too slow. It doesn't start to pick up until well into the act with one of the best numbers in the show, Pass the Football, sung by Wreck, an ex-football player played with lots of heft by Thom Marriott who doesn't hesitate to admit that he wasn't given a football scholarship because of his intelligence. In this scene, the backyard of the apartment where Ruth and Eileen live, Wonderful Town begins to feel more like a musical version of Elmer Rice's Street Scene or an old radio show from the 1940's called Grand Central Station where a hundred million lives pass through its doors.

There are lots of characters in Wonderful Town, and lots of stories, all anchored by Ruth's attempts to find herself in the journalistic world and Eileen's attempts to find a job - along with the right man. Both come out alright on that score with Ruth finally finding a soul mate in Robert Baker (Jay Turvey)an editor, who believes in her talent, and Eileen having a wide selection from which to choose.

The number that everyone waits for or what they used to wait for was the exuberant Conga in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where Ruth goes to get an interview the Admirals on a Brazilian training ship and instead is coerced into a conga line with the Naval Cadets. It's an amusing number though not nearly as wild as I remember it. On the plus side, I don't recall that the Village Vortex nightclub scene was as funny as it was here under Roger Hodgman's direction. Lorne Kennedy as the nightclub owner Speedy Valenti hung up on jive and generally hung up, is a revelation. Kennedy isn't known for comedy but his character of Valenti is a true blues brother from another planet.

There are additional perks to the show with Jane Johanson's spirited choreography in dance and song numbers like the Erin inspired My Darlin' Eileen in the police station with the ever endearing William Vickers. Even in jail, Eileen can charm the lads in blue. There's also a tribute to the jazz music of the era with the number Swing sung by Ruth and Village Hepcats. But then Wonderful Town is one big colorful tribute to the golden age of Greenwich Village and its bold innocents who left their quiet home towns to find a niche in the most exciting city in the U.S. Author Ruth McKenney turned it into a real love story, not so much between people, but about the city. The title of the show says it all. It's as American as apple pie. Wonderful Town plays at the Festival Theatre until Oct. 2.
Photo by David Cooper. Lisa Horner and Chilina Kennedy in Wonderful Town.
(Reviewed by Jeniva Berger).


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