Bard in the rough

Bob Frazer (left) as Petruchio and Colleen Wheeler as Kate in Bard on the Beach's new Wild West version of The Taming of the Shrew (David Blue/Bard on the Beach)

This summer, once again, Canada’s parks, beaches and riverbanks will be taken over by teenage lovers and cross-dressing girls, along with battling couples, mischievous sprites and moody, skull-toting Danes. Not to mention some murderous Scottish kings and their insomniac wives. Yes, it’s the outdoor Shakespeare season, when actors, from polished, Stratford Festival-bred professionals to gung-ho students and amateurs, leave their usual dark theatrical habitats to venture into the sunlight and spout Elizabethan blank verse.

This June marks the 25th anniversary of Canada’s longest-running alfresco Shakespeare, Toronto’s Dream in High Park, produced by Canadian Stage. But it isn’t alone in its longevity. Calgary’s Shakespeare in the Park is toasting its 20th year in July, Saskatoon’s Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan is turning 22, and Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach has just launched season 18. They’re joined by younger Bardfests in, among other cities, St. John’s, Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg and Edmonton.

Although subject, like all theatre, to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (or lack of fortune — financial problems have led several smaller troupes in the Greater Toronto Area to suspend operations this year), open-air Shakespeare continues to grow in popularity. Apparently, rain, lightning, mosquitoes, heat waves, and even the occasional premature snowfall can’t keep Canadians from getting their fill of Will.

“Our biggest challenge these days is capacity,” says Christopher Gaze, the British-born actor who founded and runs Bard on the Beach, the largest and most ambitious festival of the lot. “Frankly, we just don’t have enough seats for the demand.” Bard has a $3-million budget and operates two tents in Vanier Park, overlooking English Bay, where Vancouverites flock to see professional productions of Shakespeare featuring top Canadian directors and actors. Its four-play season regularly draws more than 80,000 patrons, both for the crowd-pleasing fare typical of outdoor Shakespeare — sexy, slapstick comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, and that ever-green teen tragedy, Romeo and Juliet — as well as less familiar works like Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens.

Thanks to Vancouver’s temperate climate, Bard is able to run an extended season, from the end of May through late September. The outdoor concept also fits well with the city’s fresh-air culture. “Outdoor activities really reign here in the summertime,” says Gaze, “and with Bard you can stay [outside].”

Calgary, despite its short summer and freaky weather, is no less receptive to the idea. Shakespeare in the Park, produced by Mount Royal College and featuring a combination of professional actors and new theatre-school graduates, often plays to audiences of more than 1,200 in the city’s Prince’s Island Park — hardy patrons who’ve braved lightning storms and mosquito infestations to get their Bard fix. “And, being Calgary, every year we’ve played in the snow,” adds Martin Fishman, the company’s artistic director. “In August, it snows. And we’ll have nights on the island where we’ll have people sitting in the rain watching a show. It’s quite a remarkable experience for everyone.”

Paul Gross, left, as Romeo and David Ferry as Mercutio in The Dream in High Park's 1985 production of Romeo and Juliet (CanStage)

Ahdri zhina mandiela, who is directing Dream in High Park’s silver-anniversary revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, believes the audience appeal of open-air Shakespeare is that it’s both informal and festive. “It’s less of a distancing art experience,” she says. The Jamaican-born Toronto dub poet and theatre artist is capitalizing on that festive aspect with her recipe for Dream, which will mix up Caribbean carnival traditions with a graffiti-sprinkled urban setting and fold in references to media influence and pop culture.

The play’s fairy king and queen will suggest their carnival equivalents, she says. “You have Oberon, who is really embodying Papa Bois, the god of the woods. Titania is like Mama Moon.” The trouble-making Puck and their other fairy minions, who manipulate the foolish mortals, “represent the paparazzi that control the images [the humans] see.” As for that irrepressible ham, Bottom, and his troupe of amateur thespians, expect “a takeoff on the boy-band phenomenon,” she says. Her cast ranges from popular Toronto stage actress Karen Robinson as Titania/Hippolyta to ex-Cirque du Soleil acrobat Colin Heath as Puck.

Mandiela’s brash updating is typical of outdoor Shakespeare, where the mantra is “accessibility” and the productions are unapologetically populist. Bard on the Beach’s new version of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Stratford fave Miles Potter, transplants the ornery newlyweds Kate and Petruchio to the Wild West. Last year in Calgary, Fishman staged a hip-hop Romeo and Juliet — a popular ploy to attract young audiences — and when you attend a green-space Hamlet these days, you’re just as likely to see the Danish prince soliloquizing on a cellphone as contemplating Yorick’s skull.

The open-air companies see themselves as providing entry-level Shakespeare for the uninitiated or the wary. “A lot of people come to Shakespeare in the Park going, ‘I’m not going to understand this,’ because they went through the whole high school experience, where it’s like learning Latin and you have to translate every word,” says Fishman. “And a lot of them come out going, ‘Oh! I understand Shakespeare now.’”

The troupes will also tell you this is Shakespeare as he’s meant to be played. “The plays were written to be performed outdoors,” claims Fishman, alluding to the playwright’s original 17th-century venue, the Globe Theatre, where audience “groundlings” milled about an unroofed courtyard. “The language is huge, the emotions are huge. There’s very little subtext.”

Performing theatre outdoors has its hazards, of course. Gaze says his bête noir is the noise from passing party boats in English Bay. “Sometimes they’ll play their wretched music incredibly loudly,” he sighs, “but we live with that.” Shakespeare in the Park, with its downtown locale, is subject to, as Fishman puts it, “sketchy” types wandering onto the site and getting too involved in the action. “They’ll see the actors fighting onstage with swords and want to join in. We’ve had to restrain a few people like that.” But, he adds, there are also street people who’ve become faithful attendees of the “pay-what-you-will” performances.

The natural environment more than compensates for the risks. Bard on the Beach leaves its tent flaps open for a magnificent backdrop of water and mountains, while both Shakespeare in the Park and the Dream in High Park have been known to incorporate the surrounding trees into their set designs. Then there are nature’s unpredictable effects. Gaze recalls a production of King Lear starring his mentor, Stratford legend Douglas Campbell, with Campbell’s son Torquil as the Fool. “I’ll never forget, just before the Fool said, ‘Winter’s not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way,’ a whole flock of geese flew past the back of the tent. That was fantastic.”

Fishman had the same kind of avian assistance just last year. “When we were doing the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet, about 20 ravens came and sat on the tower beside the stage and cawed all the way through that scene. It was a remarkable effect — I wanted to hire them every night.”

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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