Stratford: Two Magical Afternoons

For forty years, any activity that required more than 20 minutes of steady sitting was agonizing. Until knee replacement surgery, my knees simply couldn't tolerate a long movie, concert, sporting event or play. I was thrilled to experience zero pain last week during Stratford Festival performances of The Sound of Music and Hamlet.

The Sound of Music
This Globe and Mail review does a better job than I of critiquing this joyous, (to me) surprisingly emotional musical. I loved everything about it: the music, dancing, sets, costumes and, of course, the stars and von Trapp children. The dark, ubiquitous presence of the Nazis dims the bubble gummy quality of some of the pieces in the score and serves as a grim reminder of the desperate state of Europe in 1938.

I loved the abbey nuns' Gregorian chant and polyphonic choral pieces, and was interested in what I perceived as a "German" sound to the chorus -- not that pure, open, St. Olaf Choir quality that I tend to prefer. The nuns' voices were exuberant and the music was believable as prayer, rather than performance. The interpretation seemed very right for the circumstances.

Like most others in the theatre, I shed a few tears. A perfect afternoon after the awful previous day.

Hamlet
Unlike most of the people in the audience, I've seen only one or two performances of Hamlet, and at least one of them was on TV, so I didn't have a wealth of personal experience to inform an evaluation of relative merits of this production.

The Globe and Mail's review is one of the few negative commentaries I saw on this year's Hamlet. I guess I found the interpretation interesting rather than "disjointed", and I looked to this National Post review for a little balance. I wasn't sure about the costumes (vaguely contemporary) or the hair (also contemporary; at the end, hairspray sixties styles for the women), and on that afternoon, the sound seemed "blurry" on occasion, least from our excellent seats fairly near the stage.

No matter. What can I say? I like something a little edgy and daring. I appreciated the actors' involvement with the audience, almost inviting us to comment on the events on stage. My sister Marilyn, a veteran psychiatrist and very knowledgeable theatre goer, said Ophelia portrayed the best true-to-life madness she's ever seen in the many productions of Hamlet she's seen. And here's a personal bias: Jonathan Goad is a very good looking Hamlet with a perfect delivery of a brilliant text. I also liked Geraint Wyn Davies' somewhat beefy, dissolute Claudius who reminded me of a Minneapolis Aquatennial commodore.

These two great afternoons were a gift from Marilyn. I was delighted with the entertainment and in awe of the fact that I had no knee pain at all on either afternoon.