At the Shaw: The President

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #1 
Of the 11 productions at The Shaw Festival this year, there wasn’t a single one I enjoyed more than the lightening-paced lunchtime one-act The President. The zippy script by Fenrenc Molnar moves so fast that director Blair Williams seems to have choreographed it more than staged it- the entrances and exits are so precisely planned, the rhythms so crucial that one flubbed line or late cue could send the entire production off the rails. Luckily, Williams’ clever staging and Molnar’s thrilling script are in very capable hands.

At the Shaw: The Admirable Crichton

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #2
What makes The Admirable Crichton so notable is that it’s the only Shaw Festival production in my top 5 that really fits with the festival’s brand. While not a GB Shaw script, This JM Barrie play enjoys the conventional staging, English accents and Shavian commentary on the class system that proved so ineffective in many of the festival’s other productions this season. But The Admirable Crichton is actually pretty great. It’s more than great, actually, it’s my favourite full length production in 2011 at The Shaw Festival.

At the Shaw: Topdog/Underdog

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #3
I was dreading Topdog/Underdog. I had to read Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A in school and could not have despised it more. I was anticipating an angry, expletive-ridden, crass 2 hours designed to provoke response through discomfort. It’s possible that the script could read that way, but Philip Akin’s production in the Shaw Festival Studio Theatre is so much more than that.

I think what a Parks script needs is to not be just a script anymore. It needs warm bodies and beating hearts, someone to put a face on the rough characters. In short, what Topdog/Underdog needed was Nigel Shaw Williams, Kevin Henchard and director Philip Akin. In their hands, Parks’ characters (the fantastically named Lincoln and Booth) shone through for all their conflicted complexity and subtle humanity, Parks’ pulsating rhythms taking centre stage over the alienating intensity of the dialogue on paper. The beatnik mantra of the card game motif is particularly cool- recurring over and over with slight and beautifully revealing variants. With the help of relatable and engaging actors, Parks’ work goes from hard to read to fascinating to watch.

At the Shaw: When the Rain Stops Falling

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #4
There are a few truly stunning productions at the Shaw Festival this year- the top 5 in my rankings all really impressed. One of the most creative, most interesting, most effectively executed productions I’ve seen in quite some time was When the Rain Stops Falling in the Studio Theatre. With a criminally short run, you were very lucky if you got to see this special production, a 2 hour and 15 minute, intermission-less exploration through time and the generational ties that bind.

At the Shaw: Maria Severa

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #5
The new musical from Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli brings something very new to the Shaw, even if the plot is nothing new for musical theatre. Essentially a mashup of Carmen’s tropes and Aida’s plot, Maria Severa tells the story of a young Portugese prostitute (the titular Maria) who falls for a man above her station (the handsome bull fighter Armando De Vimioso), who is, in turn, being forced to marry a woman he doesn’t love for her money (Clara da Silva). Maria’s beautiful and groundbreaking music, fado, makes her an important advocate for her people in the poverty-stricken Mouraria, but her love of Armando forces her to choose between love and loyalty. Most of the songs are as derivative as the plot, but as played by an exceptional cast, Maria Severa’s sultry tones are a breath of fresh air in an otherwise dreary Shaw season full of period English living rooms and parlors.

At the Shaw: Heartbreak House

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #6
There are a few recurring themes at Shaw this year; the first is conventional staging, the second is excellent design, the third is strong supporting players, the fourth is obnoxiously long productions and the fifth is, well, Shaw I guess. What I mean by that is strong scripts with fantastically clever dialogue and well-drawn characters with obnoxious and preachy social themes. Those are the inescapable features of a Shaw play. And by “inescapable” I mean “the festival’s reverence for the playwright blinds them to the necessity of underplaying such things for a modern audience”. Heartbreak House is a perfect embodiment of everything the Shaw Festival is doing both right and wrong this season (hence it’s sturdy position in the dead centre of our rankings: 6/11).

At the Shaw: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #7
The first thing that stands out about The Shaw Festival’s current production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is Sue LePage’s perfect set. Tennessee Williams is notoriously detailed in his stage directions; he describes the feel of the place just as much as the look- the sounds, the smells, the generally intangible. With her detailed bedroom design, LePage captures all that with great power. Both beautiful and rundown, spacious but claustrophobic, the room the audience finds themselves spying on seems to steam with heat from the oppressive southern sun and repressed sexual frustration. Director Eda Holmes then fills that space with a compelling saga well-acted and staged if in desperate need of a more time-conscious cut.

At the Shaw: Candida

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #8
Candida is a play that is both fascinating and a little dull at the same time. It’s an inconsequential marital squabble that goes on a bit too long and contains perhaps a bit too much philosophizing on the meaning of love and marriage. It’s also revealing and engaging as a social study and a question of spousal selflessness. The production at The Shaw Festival this year is also all these things: predictable and dull some times, thoughtful and endearing at others. It features a middling performance or two but also a star turn from its youngest player.

At the Shaw: My Fair Lady

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #9
My notes on The Shaw Festival’s production of My Fair Lady contain only one word: “Birds!!!”. The reason for this is that there is very little to director Molly Smith and set designer Ken MacDonald’s interpretation apart from the far-from-novel metaphor of birds and bird-related things (various "spread my wings" themes and such- get it?!) Lerner and Loewe’s classic musical gets an energetic staging that is as entertaining as it is uncreative but even in its deepest moments I couldn’t help but laugh at those damn birds. They fly through the scenes along the animated backdrop, they chirp their way through the soundscape, they feature in set-dressings, props and hair pieces, their cages even descend from the ceiling to indicate that we may now be in Mrs. Higgins’ house but the metaphor isn’t to be forgotten (if that were at all possible).

At the Shaw: Drama at the Inish

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #10
Drama at the Inish, a comedy written by Lennox Robinson and directed by Shaw Festival Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell, does nothing in particular wrong. The dialogue is clever, the plotting concise, the staging effective, the set well dressed. The talented cast aptly juggles their quick comic material with excellent Irish accents. But the whole thing is somehow remarkably dull.

At the Shaw: On The Rocks

by Kelly Bedard

Ranking: #11 
At 2 hours and 15 minutes, The Shaw Festival’s weakest production of the year drags unforgivably. The story of a weak-willed Prime Minister whose sudden socialist enlightenment causes great tumult, On The Rocks has within it some great themes of idealism in government and the importance of standing for something, but it falls to George Bernard Shaw’s most obnoxious tendencies.