The Stratford Festival Information: A detailed 128-page festival schedule and visitors guide to hotels, B&Bs, restaurants and attractions is available from the Stratford Festival, Box 520, Stratford, Ontario, Canada N5A 6V2; phone 1-800-567-1600, fax 1-519-273-3731, e-mail orders@stratfordfestival.ca or visit www.stratfordfestival.ca. Tickets: Prices vary according to play, theater, location and day of week, ranging from Canadian $35-$102 (U.S. $31.50-$92); many are discounted. Schedule: "Coriolanus," through Sept. 23; "Much Ado About Nothing," through Oct. 22; "Oliver!" through Oct. 29; "London Assurance," through Oct. 21; "The Duchess of Malfi," through Sept. 23; "Harlem Duet," through Sept. 22; "The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead," through Sept. 24. Previous coverage: Shaw, Stratford festivals resonate

STRATFORD, Ontario -- "How happy could I be with either, 'twere other dear charmer away," sings Macheath in "The Beggar's Opera." He's singing about women, but I'll transpose his words to the two great Ontario theater festivals, the Shaw and Stratford.

These are two of the very small handful of the best resident theater companies in the English-speaking world. It hardly seems fair they should be just two hours apart in southern Ontario, but there they are, and Pittsburgh benefits, because it's just a brisk five-hour drive north to the Shaw and about 6 1/2 hours to Stratford. So we can have both (as Macheath also manages to do, but that's a different story).

I rarely see all the shows either company stages in any given year, but in 25 annual samplings, I've grown quite attached to both. Individually, the shows vary, but the overall quality stays high. To generalize, I'd say I feel more affection toward the Shaw but more admiration toward Stratford.

That admiration certainly has something to do with Stratford's greater house dramatist. This year, Shakespeare provides four of the 15 shows Stratford stages in its four theaters. Of those, 10 are now up and running, with the others coming on line in August; all 15 continue well into September and some to the end of October. With matinees and evening shows almost every day except Monday, when even the actors get to rest, careful planning could get you to all 15 shows in just nine days.

So far, I've seen the following seven.

Seana McKenna plays Lady Gay Spanker and Brian Bedford is Sir Harcourt Courtly in "London Assurance," the 1841 comedy by Dion Boucicault playing at the Stratford Festival. Click photo for larger image.

"London Assurance"

It would have been eight, but I couldn't resist seeing one play twice: the delicious 1841 comedy "London Assurance," by Dion Boucicault, an Irishman who reigned on the London and New York stages for several decades. This first of his many successes has survived mainly because it has a thwacking great role for a comic genius, but it's also a good solid comedy, sort of midway, as director Brian Bedford says, between Sheridan and Wilde (who were Irishmen as well).

And amid the stock characters (rakehell heir, demure heiress, country squire, meddling lawyer, etc., etc.) there are surprises. Chief among them are Lady Gay Spanker, a spunky, crop-wielding huntswoman who has her husband well in hand; that husband, who dithers delightfully and briefly discovers a spine; and even the squire, who has remarkably broad-minded views.

But the greatest surprise is the play's crowning glory, Sir Harcourt Courtly -- surprising because who would expect another aging fop, with antecedents going right back to Sir Fopling Flutter and his Restoration kin, to be so side-splitting funny? But it really isn't a surprise, because he is played by the wonderful Bedford (yes, the director), heir to a grand tradition of sumptuous British acting. Bedford turns Sir Harcourt into the most good-natured possible booby, enchanted with his own supposed savoir faire, and every awkward gesture of self-display is a study in comic conceit. Even his pauses magnetize attention.

The audience is hard-pressed to look at anyone else, lest we miss some nuance of humor. That's a shame, because everyone is better when Sir Harcourt is on stage. However, there is good support from the ensemble, especially from the grand eccentrics played by Seana McKenna and Brian Tree (Lady Gay and hubby).

The best support of all is the elaborate designs by Desmond Heeley in the 1,091-seat Avon Theatre. His three florid sets are individually baroque, floral and gothic, but all fantastical, and his costumes, especially for Bedford, match the sets in exaggerated color and architecture.

"Coriolanus"

David Hou photos Colm Feore plays Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" at the Stratford Festival. Click photo for larger image.

Admiring Bedford's dual achievement in "London Assurance" and knowing he soon plays Malvolio in "Twelfth Night," you might assume that this Stratford season belongs to him. But the picture on the poster is of Colm Feore, who merits a special sales pitch at the box office for not two but three starring roles -- the adamantine Roman war hero, Coriolanus; Fagin in "Oliver!"; and, coming in August, the title role in Moliere's "Don Juan," with some performances in English, some in French!

I saw Feore's first two shows on the same day, a great acting showcase if a strange pair (though I guess you could say that the general and the pickpocket are both loners). "Coriolanus" is directed by Antoni Cimolino, who has just been named to succeed artistic director Richard Monette as Stratford's next leader. With the aid of Santo Loquasto, a Theater Hall of Fame designer also known for 24 Woody Allen films, he presents a "Coriolanus" of timeless grit and determination.

It's not an easy play, but it certainly speaks to the difficulty of picking leaders in a democracy. Do we prefer to elect those better than us, or weaker? If we elect someone strong, does he become weak? When Coriolanus refuses to court popular support by showing his wounds, I couldn't help thinking of John Kerry.

Feore gives Coriolanus a contempt so pure its perversity burns away. His pride is shadowed with shyness, which is also pride; no wonder he rejects the political games of the tribunes. And what a stunning image he makes on the uncompromising 1,826-seat Shakespearean stage of the Festival Theatre: showing us rectitude at war with pain, his face aloof, upright in cream robes, he hears the pleading of his wife, son and mother.

I don't know what to make of "Coriolanus" as politics, but as psychology, it is powerful stuff.

"Oliver!"

David Hou photo
Colm Feore as Fagin with the Artful Dodger and Oliver in "Oliver." Click photo for larger image.

If Feore's Roman general is a study in sinew and marble, his Fagin is angular, stooped and scuttling. The two portraits share stillness, with the actor focusing on the moment without extraneous movement or emotion.

Elsewhere there is plenty of both in this big, rambunctious production directed by Donna Feore (Colm's wife) on the Festival Theatre's grand thrust stage, built out for this show. As a program essay points out, there are reminiscences of Shakespeare's "Henry IV" in the Lionel Bart musical -- all it lacks is the Bard's greater complexity.

As you'd expect, the character work (Bruce Dow's Beadle, Dayna Tekatch's Charlotte) is splendid. On that stage, the dance numbers are necessarily cramped but still vigorous. After Fagin, the most noteworthy performance is Tyler Pearse as a very small, golden-voiced Oliver.

"Much Ado About Nothing"

Richard Bain photo
Lucy Peacock as Beatrice in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." Click photo for larger image.

The third current attraction on the Festival Stage is that perennial charmer, "Much Ado About Nothing," featuring Lucy Peacock and Peter Donaldson as the feuding Beatrice and Benedick. Stephen Ouimette directs a straightforward production notable mainly for the believable midlife lovers and for more comedy than the comic scenes usually afford.

The period and place are early 20th-century Sicily, complete with a funny truck for the bumbling watch. On-stage musicians create a festive rural atmosphere, rather like that in Kenneth Branagh's 1993 movie version. The play gathers speed slowly, but it develops some real feeling in the eccentric courtship of Beatrice and Benedick, which reaches a peak when he avows his love and she asks him to take revenge on Claudio.

Their obvious experience in the skirmishes of love offers high comedy. Somewhat lower is Robert Persichini's fine Dogberry, a deeply self-impressed bureaucrat. Shane Carty's Don Pedro is unfortunately a lightweight, but Gary Reineke's Leonato adds personality. This is a very representative Stratford Shakespeare, with star glitter from Peacock, veteran warmth from Donaldson and clarity throughout.

Lucy Peacock plays the title role in John Webster's 1613 tragedy "The Duchess of Malfi." Click photo for larger image.

"The Duchess of Malfi"

Clarity isn't what you get in this bleakly dark 1613 tragedy by John Webster, especially in the murky motives of the duke and cardinal, brothers who use a malcontent henchman, Bosola, to spy on and eventually destroy their sister, the widow of the title. She has secretly married her steward, and he and their children prove further victims for the brothers' murderous pride.

But Peter Hinton's brilliant production turns this darkness to advantage, first by playing the cynicism and misanthropy without any concession to sentiment, and second, by embodying it in the glittering sable costumes and set designs of Carolyn Smith. Everything oozes with the cold, grotesque hauteur of Van Dyke and Velasquez. Smith's polished black furniture pieces and fabrics have a speaking sheen. Even the ruffs are black, and the contrasting silver and diamonds seem like blackness made visible.

The result on the Tom Patterson stage is something like a moody music video directed by a Jacobean Tim Burton. With the audience's 481 seats primarily on two sides, the stage is long and narrow, like a shimmering River Styx. This is a world which indeed seems "to sweat in ice and freeze in fire." In it, Peacock shines with a grim determination. But the overall impression is less of individual brilliance than of a vivid, compelling vision of hell on earth.

"The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead"

This completed my Peacock trifecta, but it needs a larger word to summarize an acting achievement that includes Beatrice, the Duchess and the seven additional characters she plays in this one-woman show by Australian Robert Hewett, staged in the 260-seat Studio Theatre.

Those seven include the three women of the title, a doctor, an elderly neighbor, a 4-year-old boy and, most remarkably, the middle-aged man who is at the heart of the plot. Starting with Rhonda, the mousy redhead whose story it is, the seven share their individual perspectives in monologues, one after the other, returning to Rhonda at the end.

The story is one of passion, catastrophe and partial redemption. Under the influence of a nosy friend who is more personally involved than she admits, Rhonda attacks a woman who is not her husband's lover, as she thinks. The consequences and varying motives are what the play is about.

It isn't every actor who could interest us in this saga of suburban infidelity, but Peacock is something special.

"Harlem Duet"

David Hou photo
Nigel Shawn Williams as Him and Karen Robinson as Her in Djanet Sears' "Harlem Duet." Click photo for larger image.

Djanet Sears' 1997 play is a surprising departure for Stratford, proving, along with "Blonde, Brunette," the value of the recently built Studio Theatre. With just 260 seats but an acting platform exactly the same size as that in the big Festival Theatre, it makes it possible to provide greater variety for both audiences and performers.

"Harlem Duet" is the first black play I can recall seeing at Stratford. Sears is English in origin, Jamaican and Guyanese in inheritance and Canadian in nationality -- so "black" is as much a portmanteau term as "white." But her play accepts the black-white dichotomy and sets out to question it.

The central characters are Othello (Nigel Shawn Wiliams) and Billie (Karen Robinson) -- Shakespeare's Moor re-imagined as a contemporary American living in Harlem, who has just left Billie for a white woman, Mona. Billie rages and plots revenge involving a magical handkerchief passed down in his family.

I guess we know the rest of Othello's story. But this play is concerned with Billie and through her, with the past and present of black-white power relationships. Intercut scenes take us back before Emancipation and also back to 1920s Harlem and a black actor forced to do minstrel shows, while frequent voice-overs of (mainly) Martin Luther King and Malcolm X create intellectual and historical context. Billie's story also involves her friend and landlady, her sister-in-law and her estranged but now rediscovered father.

They have their stories, too, and it's too much for one play, with many of devices used to hammer home parallels or lessons that are already clear. In this way, the play seems aimed at a white audience, which, at Stratford, it mainly gets.

But within that burden of history and theory, there is a passionate story of emotional need. And there was nothing more powerful in my Stratford visits than when the black actor puts on blackface and does a famous speech from "Othello," dramatizing the point that the most famous black character in our language was created by a white author for a white audience. Even its blackness is white. Billie has much to be angry about.