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Entertainment Today 5/26/07: Tom McCamus

It's curtain call time: True stars at Stratford are waiting on stage
Sat, May 26, 2007
By JAMES REANEY, FREE PRESS ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST

Musicals, comedies big for summer theatre

Back in the day, when the Shakespeare and the stars were under a tent and the festival was new, my parents would bicycle in from a farm near Stratford to bask in the Bard.

Fast forward to 2007 and the tent is long gone. But, with the next generation driving up from London in a grey Impala, the family's festival tradition continues on Monday night.

The Stratford Festival opens its 54th season with King Lear at 7:30 p.m. on Monday. For all the glitz and pomp of opening night 2007, the truest stars and biggest names -- such as Lear's director and star, Brian Bedford -- are all waiting for us on stage.

I love glitz and the who's-that?-fun of opening night scoping. What will surely linger and stir memory and soul long after Monday is Shakespeare and what Bedford and company have found in their Lear.

Keeping Bedford company and offering some of the most tragically sane advice in all Shakespeare is the Fool, played by Bernard Hopkins.


I have always admired Hopkins for his ability to play wise fools, among other things, and for the way he can suggest all the anguish just under the jests.

Hopkins, the artistic director at the Grand Theatre in the early 1980s, is just the first of several London or London-tied performers who will be engaging and entertaining me -- and I would hope you, too -- at Stratford all summer long.

My personal list includes David Snelgrove, an Oakridge secondary school grad. Last year, he brought the requisite amounts of self-disgust, wit and weary pride to Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.

Snelgrove is directed again by Richard Monette, who helmed 2006's Henry IV, in The Comedy of Errors later in opening week. Snelgrove is Antipholus of Syracuse, one of a pair of identical twins who keep the errors rolling along.

In what must be some inspired Londoner-meets-Londoner casting, Tom McCamus plays Antipholus of Ephesus. McCamus was part of the London theatre scene in 1970s and Snelgrove in the 1990s, which means Monette must find something amusing about pairing these "twins." McCamus and Snelgrove also appear later in the Stratford summer in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

Like Snelgrove, McCamus's London connections include former Oakridge teacher Art Fidler and the old Gallery Theatre.

Another Fidler protege and Oakridge grad is Kyle Blair, who is the go-to musical theatre guy with roles in Oklahoma! and My One and Only. (Fidler is the first to point out these talented actors had many other mentors, too).

Shannon Eizenga, a later Fidler connection through the London-based Original Kids Theatre Company (OKTC), is in The Comedy of Errors -- at least three Londoners always make a comedy -- and The Merchant of Venice.

Still another young London talent is St. Thomas Aquinas grad and former High School Project star Aidan deSalaiz, whose Stratford duties include the role of Whit in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Like Eizenga, he has been part of the 2006-2007 class in the training program.

Of Mice and Men is directed by Martha Henry, a former artistic director at the Grand, who is also acting at Stratford.

Its cast includes Stratford-area actor Jerry Franken, a friend and ally in many of the works by my father, London playwright James Reaney.

It's great to see Franken back at Stratford.

Of Mice and Men and his other roles will give me the chance to see what he recalls about first meeting Graham Greene -- who plays the gentle giant Lennie Small in the Steinbeck tragedy. My memories have Greene, playwright Tomson Highway and actor and entrepreneur Gary Farmer as a First Nations contingent at UWO's University College in a drama workshop during one winter in the 1970s.

It seems so long ago the tent might still have been up at Stratford.

Now, that winter seems like a chance to claim Greene -- Oscar-nominee and TV star and a force in the Steinbeck and The Merchant of Venice this summer -- as still another London connection to the Stratford Festival 2007.

© The London Free Press

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