C A N N O P Y
Art is True North
Stratford Festival 2024: A World Elsewhere
Mark Uhre as Nick Bottom (centre-left) and Dan Chameroy as Nostradamus with members of the company in Something Rotten!. Stratford Festival 2024. Photo: Ann Baggley.
INTERVIEW — Director Donna Feore serves up Something Rotten!
Words by Michael Zarathus-Cook
ISSUE 13 | FOURTH WALL
The bus ride from Downtown Toronto to Stratford is just a little over two hours long, along the unscenic highway routes through cities like Milton and Kingston. At a point equidistant between the township of New Hamburg and Stratford, sits the village of Shakespeare, a small enclave of about 160 people within the larger Perth County municipality. It’s usually along this point that the monotony of the trip transforms into something theatric, and the allure of Stratford as a getaway destination rolls into view. In his introductory message for the seasonal brochure, titled “A World Elsewhere”, Stratford Festival’s Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino asks, earnestly: “What does being away from home teach us and bring to us? What are the benefits, and what might be the risks, of seeking out worlds elsewhere?” Regardless of what’s happening on its proscenium and thrust stages, the true charm of Stratford is that it’s both a destination and a portal─it’s a city where people go to be elsewhere, but it nevertheless feels completely lived-in and maintains its sense of hereness. The 2024 festival season which Cimolino and his team have concocted aims to meet the post-pandemic travel boom by leaning into the city’s magnetism as a cultural destination while staging works that transcend our time and the city around it.
The season, at a glance, features a Shakespearean trio (Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline); a bouquet of dramas (Salesman in China, Hedda Gabler, The Diviners, Who is Sylvia, Get That Hope); a comedy directed by Cimono (London Assurance); two musicals (La Cage aux Folles and Something Rotten!), and more. It’s the latter of these musicals that brought me back to Stratford on its opening night in late May. Billed as a musical comedy, Something Rotten! is a hilarious vichyssoise of references to the Shakespearean canon, mixed in with nods to almost every recognizable musical. It reaches, ambitiously, for the soil of the 16th Century Renaissance London that fertilized William Shakespeare’s celebrity; and manages to tumble through a rough history of the musical as an art form of its own: from The Sound of Music to Hair, Rent, and beyond. At a length almost as long as my bus trip, Rotten wins a war of attrition against even the most hardened opposition to the musical as a storytelling medium─by the end, the audience is completely won over, worn out, and clap-happy. But more than that, it poses a fairly convincing answer to some of Cimolino’s questions. Sitting through two hours of wall-to-wall numbers, about 190 costume changes, and relentlessly precise choreography, one realizes that nothing else does what live theatre can do. In fact, the redundancy of “live theatre” becomes more apparent as this production reminds us that in order for it to be theatre, it has to be alive, warts and all. In our current social fabric where it seems intelligence is increasingly artificial, and our points of connection are accelerating toward the virtual—the Stratford Festival is wagering that the analog and ephemeral experience of theatre is precisely what we need most.
This wager seems wise inasmuch as ephemerality is becoming an increasingly precious commodity. In a world where rarely anything goes away, and seemingly everything can be recorded, remixed, and regurgitated by AI, there is something noteworthy about the many months of rehearsal that went into creating a two-hour musical that can only linger in your memory afterward. Even more, like any worthwhile comedy, Rotten doesn’t appear to be designed for memory: it seeks to entertain you thoroughly in the moment, get a few good laughs, and be done with it. This mission is worked into the sinews of the plot, wherein two struggling playwrights (the Bottom Brothers), contemporaries of Shakespeare who are exasperated by the bard’s outsized notoriety, opt to outdo him by creating the first musical. The ethos of both their plan and of Rotten is, more or less: if you can’t be great, be entertaining (or, if you can’t beat them, set a beat to them). Indeed, the audience on the opening night of this production didn’t miss a beat; they came in for a good time and the cast delivered with a level of audience-stage chemistry that is seldom achieved without completely shattering the fourth wall.
CANNOPY x Donna Feore
Directing Something Rotten!
Based on a book by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell—which Karey then turned into a musical with his brother Wayne—this production is brought to life by director and choreographer Donna Feore, a perennial presence at Stratford for the last four decades. The morning after opening night, I sat down with Feore at the festival’s head office, a busy labyrinth of creative and administrative workrooms at the business end of the sprawling Festival Theatre. Feore’s artistic sensitivities and surgical eye for detail were immediately evident, adjusting the windows behind her till she found the perfect balance of airflow and sound insulation against the outside noise for our conversation. The work-life balance Feore has struck with the festival roughly reflects Stratford’s duality as a destination-portal. First arriving in Stratford in 1990 as an actor, she went on to start a family in the city with her husband─actor Colm Feore─wearing the many hats of choreographer, associate, and director as the years progressed. Her frequent stints away from Stratford afford her a vantage on how the city has changed and how it expands and contracts in step with the festival, “It’s an interesting town because it’s small but it gets really big at certain times of the year,” Feore remarks. This pattern of expansion and contraction also describes her social availability throughout the year as she takes on projects like Rotten, “I go into the zone, my friendships with people are based on that understanding that I go underground for a few months and then come back up for air.” Rotten is the first production Feore is directing after her brief hiatus from Stratford in 2022 to pursue projects in New York. Her hands-on approach throughout the rehearsal process was the perfect match for this detail-heavy musical, and Stratford’s gravitational pull brought her back to stage a work that demands the two separate parts of her brain as a director and choreographer.
In her approach to staging Rotten, Feore objects to my dichotomy between being great or being entertaining, noting that “I think you have to both. Great is subjective, but entertaining is not,” the result of which is a production that manages to do both. The production’s success relies as much on Feore’s vision as on its stellar cast, with standout performances from Mark Uhre’s Nick Bottom, Henry Firmston’s Nigel Bottom, Starr Domingue’s Bea, and Jeff Lillico as a raunchy and sinewy William Shakespeare with a Kardashian sense of stardom. Such standout performances are made possible by an ensemble effort sustained over 8-hour daily rehearsals for at least the first ten days, working at the breakneck pace of learning a song and dance number each day. Throughout the rehearsal process and across the 16 preview performances, Feore’s guiding ethic was to never lose sight of the audience. “In a 25-member cast, the 26th member is always the audience and this show is about the audience,” says Feore, “it was an important show for me because to be in that space after COVID had taken us out for so many years, and now coming back to laugh together, I don’t know if there’s a better feeling than that. Theatre is communal and we were robbed of the ability to sit with people for a while. You can put a film on pause but you can’t do that in theatre. It’s alive, it’s breathing, but the greatest thing is to be able to provoke a conversation amongst the audience.”
Perhaps more difficult than provoking conversation after a performance is provoking laughter during, and here too Feore’s eye for detail meets the moment: “This show is witty, it’s sophisticated, and of course very silly at times. The one thing that I was really clear on with this cast is that they have to be honest.” As in, being honest about the laughs they’re going for, and not straining too hard for the punch lines. “Just let it be, don’t exhaust the audience with the little things. Don’t go for minnows, go for the trout, thankfully I had very experienced actors who are disciplined, and comedy is all about discipline.”
One of the production’s notable comedic characters is Dan Chameroy’s Nostradamus, a soothsayer who provides very little soothing on account of his inability to correctly relay the details of his forecasts. But there’s an aspect of the soothsayer’s blunders that is oddly reminiscent of the gaffes committed by AI programs like ChatGPT when they fail to mimic human intelligence and is revealing of the limits of this artificiality. Likewise, the moral pill which Rotten wraps in comedy, infectiously catchy numbers, and a particularly athletic choreography is to be true to oneself─a hard-won lesson for the Bottom brothers’ mad pursuit to steal the bard’s next big hit and regurgitate it as their own. Even without these gaffes, Feore is confident that AI can’t replace what laughing together does for an audience, “AI can’t sweat,” she adds, “AI can’t get the nuance and the wonderfulness that we are as human beings. And there’s nothing like seeing someone put everything into something the way these actors do.” Comedy’s awesome power, and the secret sauce that makes Rotten work so well, is that it can reach for profundity precisely at the moment when you’ve let your guard down. This production reaches and reaches, each time coming away with a handful of substance. ─MZC
Choreographing Something Rotten!
The typically unheralded hero of every musical, and especially of Something Rotten!, is the choreography; a musical number can hardly be learned without the muscle memory of the accompanying choreography. Here is where the other half of Donna Feore’s creative cortex—the one that counts steps, refines gestures, and synchronizes breathing to every aspect of the mise en scène—reigns supreme. For Rotten, the real test isn’t just memorizing a number a day, but maintaining the stamina to do so while singing to a live 12-piece orchestra. “This is a show where the leads are in all of the production,” Feore points out, “it’s not a musical where you have an ensemble that just does the numbers and then the leads do the scenes, so it's a demanding thing for all those principles that have to be carrying the show, but also it’s just as challenging for the ensemble.” Her method of meeting this challenge is to custom-fit bodies to the choreography. “Dancers are athletes, so they have to train too. It doesn't matter how fit you are coming in. This choreography is very specific and so their bodies have to get specifically ready for that.” Then there’s her own mental stamina to keep tabs on these moving parts while steering the larger storytelling locomotive from the director’s chair. How does she manage? “Experience. You need to have experience because you have to understand how to pace yourself and your brain. Staging is also all about movement, and you need to know the space well. I know the Festival Theatre space very well.”
Hitting every mark with precision is, however, not the only selling point for Feore’s Rotten choreography. Improvisation and choreography can often seem to be diametric compositional forces in dance, in so far as the latter curtails the individuation and eccentricities of the former. Feore’s choreography gets interesting at that point where it makes space for seemingly unscripted idiomatic gestures that can only really work when the dancer puts their own style and stank on its execution. Feore insists even these signatures are a carefully calculated installation to offset expectations regarding the production’s Renaissance setting. “I wanted that to show that the world’s moving forward and that people are taken out of their boxes of what’s expected of them. And that’s why there’s a modern feel to it.” That modern stamp was delivered via little references to online meme-culture and dances that have spread through our cultural lexicon via vectors like TikTok and YouTube─all this in the full garb of 16th-century couture. This carefully calculated improvisation comes in handy when working with the comically voluminous costumes of this period piece, such that even the set and costuming—both under the auspices of designer Michael Gianfrancesco—are activated as components of the choreography. “But I do leave some freedom for the dancer as an individual,” Feore qualifies, “I always wanted that as a dancer. I didn't want to be put in some kind of straitjacket of ‘you have to do it this way’.”
How does a two-hour marathon of this kaleidoscopic choreography maintain cohesion and its center of gravity? That starts with what Feore calls a “foundation of truth,” and then improvising on that foundation. “You can't break the rules if you don't know them, right?” she remarks, “I took a Galliard in that Renaissance number that opens the production and turned it on its ear. There’s a real Lindy Hop in there, but it's based on something real. Then we also had tap, which is a different thing altogether. Tap is about rhythm. Tap is about the heartbeat, and you have to understand this basic ground. You have to go to the source.” Likewise, it’s the viscerality of this production’s choreography that keeps it beyond the realm of the descriptive─to comprehend it, you have to go to its source, live and in person.
Something Rotten! runs till October 27
at the Festival Theatre
