A Midsummer Night's Dream - Stratford Festival - 08/08/2026

Upon repeat viewings of a play, interpretive novelties tend to shine. Thus, with Graham Abbey's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Stratford Festival, it's easy to lead with the fact that the prologue shows Titania's votaress friend giving birth to the changeling child. Through an elegant movement sequence "suggesting" childbirth, movement director Stephanie Graham shows the fairies aiding the woman in her delivery before premature mortality takes hold and the woman dies after the baby is born. We then through "theatre magic" see a red swaddling cloth turn into a young girl (Vivienne Abbey) who will become the subject of contention between the fairy monarchs Titania (Sara Topham) and Oberon (André Sills). Abbey as director ends up taking the reunification of Titania and Oberon as seriously as you could hope (he tries to believe they actually are "new in amity"), so focusing the beginning on the origins of their marital strife feels germane. The sequence also foregrounds the show as lush and lively with some spirited Celtic folk tunes played by Titania's henchwomen.  

This Dream is set in the regal Victorian era. Antoni Cimolino's production of The Tempest, also playing now, is set during the early 1800s. Stratford directors seem to have inherited former leader Robin Phillips' obsession for Shakespeare in the 19th century. Whatever the cause, the world of the play, with sets by Lorenzo Savoini and costumes by Joshua Quinlan, is pleasantly sumptuous while not reinventing any Midsummer color pallette. Forest browns and greens as branch and foliage is the name of the game.

Another novelty is the terrific performance of Vivien Endicott-Douglas, the best Hermia I've ever seen. She brings a full-throated poetic vivaciousness to the thwarted young lover. Her sexily chaste banter with Lysander (Jordin Hall, schticky but very endearing) in Act 1, Scene 1 shows as delightful a pairing of Midsummer lovers as you could hope to find. Jessica B. Hill also brings great sporting fun to Helena, though you wish she had broken up the verse less in the name of colloquial jokiness. Her embracement of the proto-kink relationship between her and Demetrius (Thomas Duplessie) is refreshing in its candor. 

Abbey's decision to make the "rude mechanicals" circus performers is confounding, as you'd suspect such professional performers would actually be good at performing. But the costume of Bottom (Michael Spencer-Davis) being quite stylish was a fun nod to both his vanity and his weaving profession. Their ultimate "Pyramus and Thisbe" is funny in a very predictable "theatre-y" way, but most audience members haven't seen the show 40,000 different times, and thus can be forgiven for finding it enjoyable. The piano stylings of Michael Man as a balladeer Starveling/Moonshine was a funsy addition. 

The production is a Stratford collaboration with Groundling Theatre, an immersive tech-based theatre founded by Abbey. As such, the lunar and astrological projections (by Normal Studio) play a sizable role on the Tom Patterson stage. A suspended moon is the central projection canvas, and the tech elements are pleasantly integrated for purposes of woodland mysticism.  

All of Graham's movement direction, including the early courtly dancing and the later bergamasque, not to mention the deeply-felt blessing of the newly-married couples, adds a great texture. If the higher-tech projection system took over a bit too much during the last speech of Puck (Mike Nadajewski), who can blame this drama nerd for still having a tear in his eye? That epilogue will always be the ultimate chicken soup for the Shakespeare soul. 

Overall, the production is a great hang with its heart in the right place, that leaves you pleasantly if not overwhelmingly enchanted. The superstition that Shakespeare wrote wicked magic into the text of Macbeth, and thus its performance is often cursed with unluckiness, has its inverse in A Midsummer Night's Dream. You feel like Shakespeare created incantatory benevolent poetry for the benefit of favorable emotional and spiritual transformation. Somehow the text always blesses the rendition at hand.

Even if no novelties were present, how could you ever tire of such good luck? 

Othello - Stratford Festival - 08/07/2026

A great Othello is one of art's finest endurance tests. In that vein, director Haysam Kadri's Stratford rendition is a stair-master. By way of being sleek, clear, and generally stylish, Kadri creates a taut and very upsetting tragedy. The story of a Venetian general brought low by the wicked machinations of a sociopath, Othello remains the most stressful drama in the Shakespeare canon. The interior monologue of an Othello audience member often reads as such: "wow, that...that was a stressful scene. [Another scene happens.] Wow, that was....that was another stressful scene..." and so on until its grisly conclusion. 

Despite the production's renaissance setting, Evan Buliung's Iago has a distinctly contemporary ick. Buliung brings the necessary self-aware diabolism and blue-collar charm that make Iago so disturbing. The casting of Jordin Hall, a Black performer, as Cassio, also gives Iago's motivation the air of a modern conservative railing against affirmative action. One can imagine this Iago venting his frustration at being passed over for the promotion that went to Cassio while calling in on alt-right talk radio. Props to Buliung and Kadri for creating an Iago whom we don't love to hate: the days of audiences gleefully chuckling at the antics of an evil white man destroying the life of a Black man as though the play were a perverse farce feel mostly over. 

André Sills' Othello is a slow-burn. He starts the play grounded to a (near) fault, with little of the sainted nobility often seen in the role's interpreters. However, his dedication to the terrestrial plain pays off by the play's end, when his commitment to psychological reality makes the murder of his wife Desdemona (Krystin Pellerin) all the more horrifying. Sills' résumé makes a strong case for him as the best classical stage actor of his generation: his intensely sympathetic Coriolanus, his wizened Lavatch, his clarion Edgar, his trickster Don Pedro, and his hilarious Orsino, all add up to an actor who can do basically anything. His emphasis on Othello's rugged military demeanor over any interior sanctity is clearly a deliberate choice, and one that ends up gruesomely effective as we watch this man we have come to know and trust be pushed into homicidal madness.  

The most formidable of the supporting cast is Jessica B. Hill as Emilia, Iago's wife. Festival regulars must surely have grasped the exceptional nature of Hill's finely-wrought characterizations, and so the quality of her repressed though ultimately hell-raising Emilia comes as no surprise. In addition, the casting of Chick Reid as a gender-swapped Brabantia (here, Desdemona's mother) usefully highlights liberal complicity in racist systems, especially by white women. 

Kadri's production aims for Swiss-watch-status, which it nearly achieves. Brian Dudkiewicz's set design brings a fractured Gothicism to the Tom Patterson stage, with its red, ruined, malleable architecture. Anita Nittoly's fight direction moves trippingly in the actors' bodies. Siobhán Sleath's lights usefully isolate Iago in his direct-address, and add an enjoyable sickly greenish hue to necessary moments (the "green-eyed monster" of jealousy, and all). Kadri's only stumble is the unintentionally comic use of slo-mo action during the scene when Iago maliciously gets Cassio drunk, but such a choice can reasonably be explained away as a "style" choice ("it'll help us understand time is passing," you can imagine the director saying in the rehearsal room). 

Iago appearing after intermission with the lieutenant's sash previously worn by Cassio was an excellent touch. And the audience getting to see Othello wipe away Desdemona's piteous tears with the infamous handkerchief during the story of his life was a brilliant illustration. When relating how he courted Desdemona through his life's travelogue, he says "I...often did beguile her of her tears, / When I did speak of some distressful stroke / That my youth suffered." Here, Kadri stages a meta-insert where we see some of those interactions between Desdemona and Othello during the speech, and getting to see the handkerchief during the incipient courtship is a brilliant inclusion.  

Despite an audience that seemed to basically know their Othello by rote, we were all suspended in horror during the last scene. Such a reaction is a testament to both Kadri's direction and Shakespeare's perennial ability to disturb us even when we know the ending. Truly, the Othello soundscape is enough for an event. The sounds and cadence and verse patterns justify any ticket-goer's purchase. This is sacrilegious to most theatrical practitioners' post-Method doctrine, which insists all words upon the stage must be excavated from the performers' inner recesses, and poetic diction should be the actor's last concern. All items cosmetic must necessarily follow foundational motivations, we claim. But really, when you're in the presence of Othello and its languages, that is a richness and power with which most of life cannot compete. The Stratford production makes the play gripping and disturbing in equal measure, and energizes you even as it puts you through the tragic wringer.  

Near the play's end, when Othello learns everything Iago has told him about Desdemona's infidelity with Cassio has been a lie, he assess his tormenter with the following words: 

"I look down towards his feet, but that's a fable." 

He means he is looking for the cloven-hooves that should prove Iago to be a devil. But the "fable" Othello knows to be false is that malicious people can be denoted by physical characteristics. The ensnarement Iago commits proves more terrifying by stemming from a secular being. Milton's Satan acted against God and his Angels "from sense of injured merit," and you feel like Iago was the basis for Satan, not the other way around.

Kadri's Othello, minus some psychoanalytic visual flourishes, keeps the status of Othello as Shakespeare's most domestic tragedy. The result is engrossing and unshowy and devastating. 

The Tempest - Stratford Festival - 08/06/2026

You would never have known Ben Carlson was an understudy. The rugged surety with which he brought psychic toll and paternal care to Prospero was unimpeachable. While the banished magus is often a role reserved for the victory lap of a theatrical grand old gent, seeing Prospero be closer to the textually appropriate 50 years of age was refreshing. We often have a bit of "Aunt May syndrome" when it comes to the role, and forget he's not actually supposed to be Miranda's grandparent. By which I mean, Carlson was more Marisa Tomei than Rosemary Harris. 

But had this been a standard performance in the run, Prospero would have been played by another Festival mainstay, Geraint Wyn Davies. Davies being indisposed this day, that also bumped John Kirkpatrick up to Stephano (where Carlson is normally). Seeing Kirkpatrick, the Festival's most reliable Duke/First Messenger, in a more substantive role, was delightful. Neither understudies missed a beat, and had there been no program insert, not a single audience member would have known anything was irregular. 

Twelve years prior to the one-day action of The Tempest, Prospero and his daughter Miranda have been banished from his Milanese dukedom, and put to sea to die. They ended up ashore on a magical, nearly deserted isle, populated by the spirit Ariel, and the monster Caliban. The play takes place on the day Prospero's enemies sail near the island, and he casts them ashore after using his magical powers to raise the titular storm, and seek a path to retribution, which eventually turns into forgiveness. 

The production on the Festival Stage in Stratford, ON, places the action in the early 1800s, a "modernization" so light it counts as period. As such, the Italian regents are vaguely Napoleonic, though the elemental Ariel and Caliban retain their respective ethereal and aquatic features. The production is Antoni Cimolino's last Shakespeare outing as Artistic Director, and he commendably refrains from the morphine-drip of reading Prospero as a Shakespeare stand-in. His production of The Tempest is charming, sturdy and reasonably moving, if not fully convincing (more on that later). 

The ensemble is uniformly reliable. The most original characterization comes from Marissa Orjalo as Ariel, who brings a sense of hobgoblin juvenilia to the role of Prospero's servant. Orjalo leans into the zoomy toddler energy of Ariel, effectively highlighting the role as Prospero's adopted child. If Orjalo veers a bit too far towards the sentimental with "do you love me, master? No?" how could she be blamed, aren't such moments why we're here at all?

Fiona Reid's gender-swapped Gonzala brings lovely feeling to her vision of a new "commonwealth" where the traitorous actions of her peers could never take place. Gordon S. Miller lends appropriate moustache-twirling energy to Prospero's usurping brother, Antonio, though when you've already conquered Iago, you seem overqualified for all other heavies. 

Carlson softens some of Prospero's harsher language to Ariel, and finds reasonable affection for Miranda (Ashley Dingwell) without veering too far into the earnestness of a contemporary girl-dad. I'd say his moral contrition started too early, and that it should have been more the result of Ariel's admonishment vis-a-vis "were I human," but such quibbles make me feel that, as a Shakespeare nerd, I should get back in my locker.  

As for the "convincing" claim: this Tempest leaves you satisfied if never energized. Cimolino takes the play's dramaturgy at face-value and doesn't attempt to hew it into a nail-biter or psychodrama. Cimolino makes the masque that Prospero presents to celebrate the engagement of Miranda and Ferdinand (Dakota Jamal Wellman) an underwater extravaganza, replete not only with mythical goddesses, but also attendant oversized jellyfish. Absolutely nothing is wrong with such treatment of Shakespeare's most vexing intra-theatrical interlude. The only ways Cimolino's Tempest doesn't succeed are in ways audiences are unaccustomed to seeing productions accomplish. When you have a capable and dynamic cast across the board, it helps cover up for the fact that, as written, Prospero feels like an absent protagonist between acts 1 and 4. When your production is attractively designed (set and costumes by Julie Fox), an audience doesn't mind that the plots with the nobles and the drunken clowns can feel like dramatic loitering. Shakespeare seemed more interested in dramatic symmetry than dramatic tension in his last solo-authored play. 

At least as preserved on TV format, John Hirsch's 1982 Stratford production is the closest we've come to the play onstage actually feeling like a corrective revenge tragedy with a pressure-cooker narrative. Despite the apparent urgency of one day's action that will make or break this unjustly banished duke and his innocent child, The Tempest just never feels like a nail-biter. Hamlet says "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough hew them how we will." The action of The Tempest often feels like the divinity without any of the rough-hewing. Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Book smartly dispensed with pretending to care about the plot, decided The Tempest was what happened when renaissance oil painting and baroque pageantry and mellifluous poetry collided, and was wildly the better for it. 

No one will leave Cimolino's production thinking he did wrong by Shakespeare, but justifying The Tempest as drama instead of emotional spectacle remains an open question.

Much Ado About Nothing - Chicago Shakespeare Theater - 12/10/2025

Lately, I find myself interested in what we cry about when we cry about Shakespeare. Focusing on weeping is not entirely fair in the case of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Much Ado About Nothing. The show, as directed by Selina Cadell, is fun and sunny and packed with good, warm-hearted vibes. But these are teardrops of another sort. Duke Senior in As You Like It invokes "tears that sacred pity hath engendered," and that assignment is the high-water mark for Much Ado. 

The dual love stories of Beatrice and Benedick and Hero and Claudio, despite their sturdy placement in a realistic township, present us with a fantasy world. The terrestrial fantasy that Shakespeare gives us in Much Ado shows us that whatever cynicism we've thrown at life, and whatever grievous errors of judgment we've committed, at the end of our saga there will still be a life-partner uniquely commensurate to our specific brand of idiosyncrasy. All our trials will find healing in redemptive meaning. Even if they've engaged in a lengthy "merry war," we love to imagine that Beatrice (Deborah Hay) and Benedick (Mark Bedard) can still find connection across a gulf of irascibility. We also hope against hope that when Hero (Mi Kang) forgives Claudio (Samuel B. Jackson) for his misinformed slander campaign against her, there could actually be a positive relationship on the other end of a real rough start. Also in this fantasy world is a supportive community of loving friends who know you better than you know yourself and will actively take time out of their day to make sure you end up with the right match. Add in that Shakespeare's Messina seems to be largely a resort/leisure town without a ton of sectional conflict (its police force is literally a citizens organization) and you basically pass the barrier from fantasy to delusion. And yet somehow this play has the reputation of being Shakespeare's most grounded comedy? 

Yet in production, despite the show's effervescence, the play's moments of tearful pathos tend to be what stand out, or feel equally missing. Here, Cadell and cast hit their marks lovingly. Hay as Beatrice is a superb vessel of poetic communication, and she makes her arias about stars dancing and eating hearts moving enough to pierce right through anyone's turtle-shell (poetry has a way of poking us where we have no protective armor). Bedard is beguiling in a rakish way that I wouldn't say his previous CST appearances have hinted towards. Along with Scenic & Costume Designer Tom Piper, Cadell has concocted a warm, Tuscany-like Messina that feels like an enviable vacation spot. Her embracement of the beach-read elements of the play, and her sensitivity to the nuances of Shakespeare's verse (and prose), make her an ideal director for this text. After this and her recent Hamlet with Eddie Izzard, hopefully she'll become a CST mainstay, as this and Tamara Harvey's Pericles have been the Shakespearean highlights of Edward Hall's recently-assumed tenure as Artistic Director. 

While Cadell's first half is a perfectly calibrated lyric stanza, it would be disingenuous to say the second half is as strong. The emergence of Dogberry (Sean Fortunato) and team adds a layer of humor too artificial to stand comfortably next to the easy, unforced laughs of the first half. Cadel's more "meta" insertions don't sit easy, like a repeated transitional birdsong, a "Hero out of time" moment on a balcony, and the self-congratulatory "make sure you're in the right costume" bits foisted upon Jaylon Muchison (a delightful performer, the bits are not his fault). Though whatever quibbles on the way to the comedic conclusion, the world of the play is just so fun to be in that such immersion is likely to be one's ultimate impression. The vibes are just that good. 

Debo Balogun stands out as an absolutely terrific Don Pedro. We get to see him be the good angel schemer in contrast to his brother Don John's bad angel schemer (Erik Hellman as John is a highly amusing Snidely Whiplash). CST stalwart Kevin Gudhal also shines brighter than usual as a memorably feeling Leonato; this might be his most moving patriarch. Bedard's bit of hiding his newly-shaven face with the excuse "I have the toothache" was a gem of textual revelation. And Hay's desperate legalistic pleading after she's announced she's in love with Benedick but still has to exclaim "I CONFESS NOTHING" was hilarious. 

You wouldn't claim this production "fixes" the fact that Claudio and Hero are not equals in delight to Beatrice and Benedick. But Cadell shows the play can stand on its own, without the need for any overt moralistic hand-wringing. This is definitely not Chris Abraham's 2023 production at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, where playwright Erin Shields was employed to give the denouement extra dialogue to damn well make sure the audience could stomach Hero and Claudio by contemporary standards. Not to be glib, but Cadell does not try out-woke Shakespeare on this one.

A beautiful choice is made when Balthasar (Muchison) is asked by Pedro and friends to sing the song "Sigh no more, ladies." As Balthasar intones the ballad, Pedro and Leonato and Claudio are clearly having a blissed-out time, and the song is so enchanting it causes the hiding Benedick to almost reveal himself and join in the chorus. Thus, Cadell shows that this song is a part of the love-trap Pedro and bros are laying for Benedick, as a cunning way to lower his defenses through music. 

If this review can stand one more theory, it's this: all emotionally moving Shakespeare is moving in the same way, though not necessarily equal to each other. While there may be cosmetic variations from actor to actor, there's really only one right way to be moved when Lear commands "Howl, howl, howl." Different performers will have different "takes" but there's only one correct reaction to a Juliet's well-delivered "thy lips are warm." And in CST's production, Hay in particular nails the necessary way in which Beatrice asks of us the tears that sacred pity hath engendered. The radiant utterance of "I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest" creates its own self-sustaining meaning that entirely justifies the theatre-going experience. 

Let's hope CST sticks with Cadell and Harvey as directorial gunslingers, because if so, this could be a delightful new era on Navy Pier. 

The Winter’s Tale - American Players Theatre - 08/27/2025

We seem to be living in a Sicilian golden age. Having had the unique experience of seeing two terrific productions of The Winter’s Tale in one calendar week – one in Stratford, ON, one in Spring Green, WI – it’s hard not to think the first three acts of the play are the best domestic drama this side of Eugene O’Neill. While not meaning to compare between the two, each version in its own way finds a special excellence through the acts set in Sicily, while Bohemia remains doomed to be a tougher assignment. 

In APT’s production, directed by Shana Cooper, Nate Burger as Leontes takes the reins and creates a brilliantly sensitive and sweaty monarch whose own intellectual genius ends up being the downfall of himself, his family, and his nation. Cooper’s production is gently modern in a way reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited and that certain school of British academia-chic. While suits-and-ties sit oddly with Shakespeare’s play in which everyone is praying to Apollo, having the character of Time (Sarah Day) begin the play by using her “wings” (here, the imagined hands of a clock) helps telegraph that we are watching a “tale” more than a realistic docu-fiction. Amidst a great ensemble, Burger makes every tangled, knotty thought of Leontes clear, digestible, and appropriately upsetting, which by its very nature justifies the production’s existence. Particularly his painful attempt to right his wrongs after the carnage of the trial of Hermione (Laura Rook, characteristically great) lands as devastatingly pathetic. 

Rook is as imposing as you'd expect from her body of work, and makes a brilliant choice when in the trial scene you can tell from her reactions that she didn’t know prior to that very public moment that her newborn daughter was “cast out” to the mercy of the elements. She smartly justifies Hermione’s frustration with the demanding Mamilius (Elijah Quigley, at the performance I saw) to be the result not of matronly coldness but of morning-sickness; Hermione after all is pregnant with the nascent Perdita. Earlier, her “what, have I twice said well?” nails the queen’s loving irony. And later, her improvisatory actions in her own legal defense showcase the extra-cruelty of Leontes in regards to her imagined affair with Polixenes (La Shawn Banks). 

Banks is the best Polixenes in living memory. Very goofy (then scary) in Bohemia, the level of world-weariness he brings to this notably purple-passage is stunning:

We were, fair queen,

Two lads that thought there was no more beyond

But such a day tomorrow as today,

And to be boy eternal.

Cooper’s changing of ‘behind’ to ‘beyond’ is notable enough, but Banks never wallows in the dialogue’s idyllic beauty, but proves he knows such a world is not recapturable. Rarely do you see a Polixenes who starts off with this much tread on the tires. While I wish the opening “movement piece” between Leontes and Polixenes had been more literal and less jarringly expressionistic (choreography by Erika Chong Shuch), the nostalgia the two kings both feel for Leontes “green velvet coat” is a fun insert. 

A review of this production seems to demand a catalogue of praises for the company’s members. Gavin Lawrence is incredibly easy to buy as a wise dignitary and compatriot: his Camillo likely has a military background. Sun Mee Chomet brings great post-natal feeling to the servant Emilia, and Rassell Holt nails the earnest gravity of Antigonus: his bear-mauling death-screams are disturbing in the best way. (Speaking of which, while I don’t know how the lights and fog would work on a sunny Sunday afternoon, that bear was scarier than it had any right to be.) Dee Dee Batteast as Paulina makes no bones about referring repeatedly to Leontes as a “tyrant,” and brings necessary wry sarcasm to the self-deprecating references to her supposed “rashness of a woman.” David Daniel’s Old Shepherd delightfully uses “a pretty one” to answer his own question about the infant being “a boy or a child?” and even Cleomenes and Dion are fun in their own bumpkiny way (as played by David Alan Anderson and Nathan Barlow). 

Tale as told as time: the scenes in Bohemia are just not as riveting as the ones in Sicilia. Whatever its bucolic, visual charms, Bohemia just has a habit of outstaying its welcome. Marcus Truschinksi is enjoyably rakish as the rogue Autolycus, and the first song of the sheep-shearing festival is delightful in its romp and added references to mosquitoes. But I dare anyone to care about Camillo getting Florizel and Perdita on a boat to Sicilia as much as they do about Hermione’s trial. The first part of The Winter’s Tale excels because it has no exposition: Shakespeare drops you into the twisted psyche of Leontes and expects you to swim or perish. Thus, the end of Act 4 demands that we deal with our young lovers (Xavier Edward King and Molly Martinez-Collins) getting back to Leontes’ court so the play’s big reunion can be effectively achieved. Shakespeare’s narrative strategy ends up being curiously bottom-heavy. Despite having also played Florizel at the Goodman Theatre in 2019, King adds too many subliminal modern tags to his language to ever be fully endearing, though the montage sequence where we see the new love of the younger generation preparing for their voyage, contrasted with the stationary pain of Burger’s older generation, is quite moving. 

If a catalogue of actors is tolerable, hopefully a compendium of smaller moments is acceptable:

The eeriness of a shadowy Hermione appearing to Antigonus. Hermione practicing palmistry on Polixenes in the midst of their “pinching fingers.” Mamilius worrying about his dad as he claims “I am like you they say.” Leontes genuinely doubting himself with “thou dost make possible things not so held.” Burger and Rook’s upsettingly long kiss before Hermione’s exit with Polixenes. The earth-consuming devastation of “it is a bawdy PLANET” and “Your eyeglass / Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn.” André Pluess’ heartstring-tugging sound design. The audience laughing when Polixenes and Camillo bring up the newfound richness of the Old Shepherd (sometimes just understanding Shakespeare’s plotting is enough to make you chuckle). 

All riches aside, I wouldn’t say Cooper lands the plane. The presentation of Hermione’s statue is too clunky, and the assembled not impressed enough by her revivifying, for the ending to be ideally affecting. Mamilius’ reappearance after an extended moment where Hermione decides to exit hand-in-hand with Leontes is a reasonable button to the action, but ends up not saying all that much. 

I also don’t know why Leontes’ “spider” speech was cut, or how Paulina knows about the Camillo/Polixenes poisoning plot when she wasn’t present for its revelation. But let’s put quibbling aside. Cooper’s production may not play as much of the piano as Antoni Cimolino’s Stratford production did, but at its best nails a more limited range, and is absolute catnip for the Shakespeare kid’s soul. This version justifies itself in such moments as when we see Nate Burger reacting through pain to the sounds of his baby daughter crying but still demanding that his lackeys “carry this female bastard hence.” Also through such memorable staging inventions as when we see Leontes begin to choke Hermione during the trial scene, a choice we think might tip the play’s sympathy balance much too far, but then find that Hermione ends up encouraging him to continue the violence after he relents, as she proves her “fear to die” has been untimely killed. 

Clearly we’re in the midst of a Winter’s Tale bumper crop, and let’s decide it’s exciting that a definitive Bohemia has yet to be harvested.

Macbeth - Stratford Festival - 08/22/2025

Is there a heart to this Macbeth? I’m not convinced. Robert Lepage usually excels at the good-faith, high-tech, theatrical extravaganza, and is generally easy-to-clear against charges of empty spectacle. His use of cinematic techniques in a live setting can be stunning. His father-son autobiography 887 was one of the best things I’ve seen on a stage, his Coriolanus (also at Stratford) was a thrilling visual and textual reconsideration of a knotty tragedy, and his opera of The Tempest found superlative magical fantasy with no wires visible.

In Macbeth, every wire is visible. But rather than being thin and sleek, the wires take the form of huge, lumbering platforms upon which stand a towering motel complex, where much of the show’s action is set. They creak when they move and they move slowly and often. They are also operated by largely visible stagehands in head-sets. In this world, Macbeth’s castle of Inverness is a seedy roadside motel which is represented in mutli-level detail. I can appreciate the scale of the vision, and also wanting the emotionality of the play to live in huge scenic components, but I can’t imagine this is the ideal outcome Lepage had in mind. When manipulated during scene changes, the things are just too cumbersome to watch. Surely the goal was more transitional flair. 

Lepage sets his Macbeth in the world of a modern biker gang (very Hell’s Angels). Recontextualizing Shakespeare is often fun and daring, but this socially-specific setting ends up being a real head-scratcher. Not to be that guy, but many things just translate so badly in this milieu. As presented here, the culture of “bikers honor” is so opaque as to be unintelligible. We have no faith that Macbeth (Tom McCamus) is any worse a leader than Duncan (David Collins), particularly when the show begins with us seeing the traitorous Thane of Cawdor executed by Duncan’s forces with cinderblocks chained to his ankles and being thrown into a river. The image is spiffy in its staging, but it establishes that in this Sons of Anarchy world, brutality is the law of the land. We’re brought into a theatrical universe where caring about the tortured psyche of the uniquely brilliant but violent Macbeth becomes impossible. We also have zero faith that Malcolm (Austin Eckert) becoming “king” at play’s end will have any restorative effect: they’ll just go on being bikers, and why in an already violent subculture Macbeth inspired so much animosity remains confounding. 

The hewing of Birnam Wood feels comically out-of place: the foliage doth not mask your Harley. While the show doesn’t spell it out for us as to whether the three weird sisters (Aidan DeSalaiz, Paul Dunn, and Anthony Palermo) are meant to be drag queens or trans sex workers, either way the context is uncomfortably represented. The fact that the incantations of “double, double, toil and trouble” are invoked in a locale resembling a hospital garbage dump, and the visions that Macbeth gleans from the witches’ prophecies are so obviously psycho-hallucinogenic, makes Macbeth’s belief in their supernatural prowess all the more perplexing. This production goes so far out of its way to downplay any element of the supernatural, that Macbeth’s belief in prophecy feels anachronistically wrong-headed, not to mention his blind-spot for the possibility of running into someone born by C-section.  

For a director with such technical agency, the show runs away from anything that could be considered “magical”: all is hyper-literal. Macbeth needs to see a dagger, so a dagger is digitally rendered within a window’s screen. The Thanes are bikers, so onto the stage atop their HOGs they ride. For such a mechanistically ornate production, the result falls quite flat. Surely the director of Cirque du Soleil’s Ka could have managed more fun along the way.

Three moments popped (with reservation): Lady Macbeth falling off the balcony during “tomorrow and tomorrow” was effectively eerie; the smash-cut from the gas station of Banquo’s murder to the BBQ-feast hosted by Macbeth (clothed in a ‘King of the Grill’ apron) was fun, though wildly pleased with itself; and seeing the Thane of Cawdor descend to his watery grave would have been awesome, had the moment not been marred by Lepage inserting movie-style credit projections as part of the show’s opening, a choice that couldn't feel more tacky. 

McCamus is a fine actor, but his Macbeth never gets across the footlights. Admittedly, the soliloquy convention sits uncomfortably amidst such hyper-modern machismo, but the interiority of McCamus’s Macbeth feels addressed only to himself, and almost never to his audience. Lucy Peacock as Lady Macbeth manages to both engage with her audience and bring sparkling clarity, even amidst such heavy directorial interference. Thus, while there is a visual charm to their grizzled ambition, never once do you feel guilty for feeling badly for their plight: you basically – often literally – watch them through glass. 

All the performers suffer from a labored sense of pacing: lots of sentences have air enough to run a Triumph through. For a short tragedy with crackjack plotting, this Macbeth is not a nail-biter. 

Some actors do fine. Tom Rooney gives a moving rendition of the moment when he as Macduff finds out his family has been murdered. However, Lepage screws this up too by cutting the actual murder scene of Lady Macduff and Son, and turns out you really need that to care about Macduff’s grief and revenge against Macbeth. Basically, Rooney gives a good Macduff in a vacuum. Maria Vacratsis fares the best of any performer, as a front-desk Porter of the Inverness motel, and is both funny in her ribaldry and sweet in her concern for Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking. Vacratsis gives us a Porter straight out of the Coen Brothers universe, and is a welcome ray of light. 

That being said, why would you cast heavy-hitters like Graham Abbey as Banquo or André Sills as Ross if you’re just going to smother them in “concept?” But I must say, I see you Emilio Vieira (Lennox), and I support every emotionally nuanced character you’ve created at the Festival thus far, and may you have many more shining opportunities to show your talents on its various stages.

If Lepage didn’t want us to take his concept literally he shouldn’t have rendered his show so completely lacking in the figurative. A biker gang is an emotionally chilly place to set a Shakespeare tragedy, as their petty squabbles can’t really be said to have international consequences. I’ll always thrill to a director completely overhauling a text and making you think you’re watching the story for the first time, but this Macbeth is misguided and undercooked. Rather than being complicit to acts of violent horror by the brainiac king and queen of fictional murderers, we are subject to an insular, hermetic, and clunky piece of theatre-tech that doesn’t justify its operating cost. 

May Lepage arise refreshed from his rest.

The Winter’s Tale - Stratford Festival - 08/22/2025

The first half of Antoni Cimolino’s production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Tom Patterson Theatre is basically perfect. I say this not to complain about weaknesses in the second half, just to explicitly appreciate what occurs before intermission. The texture and nuance the ensemble brings to Shakespeare’s language under Cimolino’s direction pulls off a magic trick: through the love and detail of the cast’s characterizations and psycho-elocution, this production manages to make The Winter’s Tale sing as both a cosmic Greco-Roman myth and also a taut and a searing chamber drama. 

The story deals with the chaos wrought when the (initially) good King Leontes (Graham Abbey) is driven mad with senseless jealousy by the idea his wife, Queen Hermione (Sara Topham) is having an affair with his best friend, Polixines (André Sills), the King of Bohemia. She isn’t, but Leontes is so certain of his suspicion that he causes both Polixines and Camillo (Tom Rooney), friend and advisor, to flee the country. Also, Leontes declares his recently-born daughter to be illegitimate (she isn’t), and casts her forth to be eaten by crows. The show-trial of his wife’s guilt ends up being so stressful it causes the death of the son of Leontes and Hermione, the promising young Mamillius (George Robinet, at the performance I saw). Immediately thereafter, we witness the grief-induced demise of Hermione. Leontes ends the first half of the play with no wife, no son, no daughter, and a nation wracked in the midst of his self-inflicted familial carnage. He will spend the next sixteen years doing penance under the watchful eye of Paulina (Yanna McIntosh), until events conspire for some divine intervention.  

All this trauma leads to one of the most razor-sharp intellectual thrillers in classical literature (at least before the bathroom break). Time has come for Shakespeareans to recognize The Winter’s Tale is no longer “underrated” or a “hidden gem” but a play that has justly made its way onto the hot B-list of Shakespearean production (I’m seeing three renditions this August alone). Like with Richard II, many Shakespeare lovers and scholars are wholly alike in thinking their passion for The Winter’s Tale makes them unique. Luckily, the fandom is deserved, and Cimolino’s version makes as eloquent a case as you could hope for in regards to its popularity. (Shakespearean taste always varies by era; in the 19th century Henry VIII was a blockbuster, which today feels perplexing.) 

Abbey and Topham in particular essentially have honorary DFAs in verse speaking, as they are able to mold and articulate the language to doctoral proportions. Abbey walks us through every step in Leontes’ upsetting journey and we become complicit in our understanding of his irrationality. The scene where Leontes attempts to convince Camillo to poison Polixines is so finely-spun as to be terrifying. All the lords attending on Leontes in the Sicilian court deserve acclaim: David Collins, Paul Dunn, Tarique Lewis, and Dakota Jamal Wellman, all intelligently populate the group of men attempting to dissuade Leontes from his insanity, and having a strong chorus of reasoned voices benefits the play immeasurably. The quality of the listening in the audience was so high that people could be heard gasping when Leontes instructed Antigonus to throw his newborn in the fire, and laughing when Polixines talks about his son passing time at the cottage of a “most homely shepherd,” so easily did they grasp the aural storytelling.

At the start of the second half, the character of Time (Seana McKenna) uses her pleasingly angelic wings to push the story sixteen years into its future, and causes us to spend time with a newer Bohemian generation (one can imagine this Time announcing “The great work begins”). I would never claim the second half of this play is rendered unsuccessfully. I only suspect most directors fundamentally have a Sicilian bias. In the way that many fans of the movie Full Metal Jacket love the basic training section with the drill sergeant played by R. Lee Ermey and then concoct reasons as to why the later Vietnam sequences are in the film, most directors of The Winter’s Tale fall in love with Sicilia and learn to tolerate Bohemia. Sicilia invariably feels like the star with Bohemia as supporting act. This is not inherently wrong, only some day I would like to meet a theatrical artist whose love for the play had its inception with Bohemia and then grew outwards. Though all this really means is that we might be doomed to excellent Sicilias (at least occasionally), and Bohemias that feel marginally less inspired (and clearly this review is under that same spell). 

But there are still highlights in these sunnier climes. Marissa Orjalo does a terrific job as the lost-princess Perdita, especially in her long discourse about the metaphorical significance of flowers. This scene is a tough one to find charming, but Orjalo inhabits the pastoral regality of Perdita in such a way that you see her, even in Bohemia and at such a remove, being Hermione’s daughter. Such lineage is also apparent in her banter with Sills’ Polixines, who clearly gets a whiff of the Queen he once knew in this seemingly low-born country lass. 

The only real strike against the Bohemian scenes is the satyr dance during the sheep-shearing: just because it’s textually supported doesn’t mean a director should jump at the chance to include a phallic jig: we already get we’re in the “rural” part of the play. Even the plot with the vagabond Autolycus (Geraint Wyn Davies) makes a fun and credible case for itself, though you wish that strain of characters (Autolycus, plus the Shepherd and the Clown) all could have been included in the final scene of revelation. Making room for the adopted family would have been nice. 

Which brings us to the scene that all productions of The Winter’s Tale get judged by: did you make us cry at the awakening of Hermione’s statue? I’d say this one was laudable. The effect of the statue coming to life is helped by some hand-held lanterns (lighting design by Michael Walton) being the only light sources for a while, and thus it’s easier to imagine seeing the “marble” at which the characters believe they’re looking. If ever there were two actors who could marry the bitter with the redemptive, it’s Topham and Abbey. 

Though even after this celestial reunion, Cimolino’s production ends with Time accompanying Mamilius back onto the stage, to remind Leontes that, whatever the powers of divine grace and redemption, there are some wrongs that can never be righted. Cimolino also began the play with Time prompting Mamilius to “tell us a tale,” and along the way, showed us a folkloric saga that also has a surprising kinship with both Jung and Pinter. 

All in all, the production is as gripping a version of the late-period romance as you could ever hope to see. Victory in Shakespearean staging often looks like leaning forward in your seat and watching much of the action through a haze of “tears that sacred pity hath engendered” (as the author says in another play). This show very much accomplishes that, and leaves you thrilled and moved. Ultimately, quibbling over Sicilian versus Bohemian inspiration is likely critical covetousness.