Stage:

...No such thing with Heath Lamberts, the Shaw's Cyrano...

...Although the actor has played a wide variety of roles, comic and serious, he is usually described as Canada's most accomplished farceur...

...I passed on G & S, but I did see the Cyrano, which proved an excellent production, elegantly efficient in general, remarkable in its leading performer...

...Now, with three busy theaters at both festivals, the best one can do during a quick visit is to sample the wares...

...As You Like It and The Country Wife at Stratford), but in Cyrano, where the actors have presumably been given individual business, they work together to establish the milieu and then properly fade into the background to give the stage to the central characters and the main action...

...In any case, these are small blemishes on a first-rate Simpleton...

...There is an excellent Pinchwife (Graeme Campbell), an attractive Margery (Domini Blythe) and a Lady Fidget (Patricia Conolly) who might serve for anyone who has not seen Pamela Brown in that role, but I distrust a production in which what one best remembers is Sparkish's wedding suit...

...It is understandable, then, that he should be so good at Cyrano's invective, vigorously rendered by Anthony Burgess in this adaptation, but Lamberts is just as impressive in the romantic speeches, and whatever body control he has learned in farce is so well translated into the derring-do of swordplay that one quite forgets that there is hardly an actor on stage who would not have had the reach on him in a sword fight...

...I was told that it was Gilbert and Sullivan I should see at Stratford, Cyrano de Bergerac at the Shaw...

...Neither festival is wedded to the playwright it was founded to celebrate...

...Although Cyrano was as good as it was touted, I was even more pleased with The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles because it is a good Shaw play one seldom has a chance to see and because, although it is played broadly, particularly by Douglas Rain as the somewhat bedraggled angel who comes to announce the judgment, Shaw's ideas are not sacrificed to the comedy as they so often are in Shaw productions today...

...Except for Mary Haney's charmingly knowing Phebe, the performances range from acceptable to impossible and the whole production is flaccid...

...An oddly static production in which the characters simply stand while the verbal play goes forward, it is a proper context for the slow development of Brian Bedford's Richard...

...Cedric Smith's Bolingbroke, unlike his Horner, is forceful, if only by contrast to Bedford's Richard, and there is one supremely funny scene in which a distraught and persistent Duchess of York (Pat Galloway as Edna May Oliver) pleads for her son's life...

...Richard Cottrell's The Country Wife is more consistently lively, although it lacks both the bite and the fun that the Wycherley play provides, largely because the Horner is so nondescript...

...Not so histrionic as the customary Richard, this is a quiet, ironic king, cold in his amiability as in his malevolence, giving the impression of intelligence while allowing the country to collapse around him...

...I could have done without some of the mannerisms (poor Nora McLellan was asked to cock her head, open-mouthed, after each line as though she were Martha Raye selling tooth cleanser) and Tom Wood, as Iddy, did not need to milk every line for laughs, although he is so funny a performer that I forgave the excess...

...Jacques is no longer a comic railer...

...Contrariwise, at Stratford one tended to find occasional choice bits amid generally indifferent work...

...The play opens with a Dickensian street scene, marked by images of cruelty, which modulates into Duke Frederick's court, tyranny of the blackest sort as the lush costumes testify...

...Unfortunately, the leaden implications of the opening settle over the whole play and Arden, although more lightly dressed, is almost as forlorn as the outside world...

...There is a misleading slide show at the end of the play, a gallery of post- Simpleton world leaders and a shot of the mushroom cloud, which contradicts the main thrust of the play reflected in Praia's final speeches...

...If the tacked-on ending suggests that the director was afraid the audience might miss the contemporaneousness of Shaw's play, for the most part Denise Coffey let Shaw's sensible lines do their work and his cartoon-like comedy blossom amid the significance...

...Stratford is the senior institution, the more affluent, and, judging by the plays I saw, the less interesting of the two...

...Lamberts is well supported by the other leading players and the ensemble work under Derek Goldby's direction is busy, particularly in the theater scene and at Arras, without being intrusive...

...John Hirsch, the festival's new artistic director, has crippled As You Like It with an interesting idea about the conflict of Good and Evil...

...But then Stratford is famous for its costumes...

...GERALD weales...

...Stage CLASSICS IN CANADA FROM 'CYRANO' TO 'SIMPLETON' ONCE IT WAS possible to visit Canada's celebrated summer theaters-the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake-and see most of what was available during a brief stay...

...Although failure and disaster are acknowledged by Praia, as in so much of Shaw's work of the 1930s, her words are rich with hope and promise, convincingly so in Frances Hyland's attractively commanding performance...

...For consistency of tone, however, I'll stick with the Shaw, with Cyrano and Simpleton...

...There is an unwritten rule in large-cast productions these days that all supernumeraries are either eccentric or deformed (v...

...The most interesting of the three plays I saw at Stratford was Richard II, also directed by Cottrell...

...A short, stout man, physically at odds with the familiar idea of Edmond Rostand's hero, at rest Lamberts resembles a teapot, the immense nose he wears extending like a spout...

...It is customary to cast a matinee-idol type as Cyrano (Jose Ferrer is the happy exception I remember) and to use the make-up nose as a purposely unconvincing disguise for a visually romantic hero...

...he is tearful in his distress...