not forgetting the Ontario Pork Congress

Found town of Stratford much as I had left it. Am booked into single room in B&B, to be honest only slightly larger than the room I grew up in - which tells you how small my room is at my parents' house, really.

Two plays today. In the afternoon it was The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which I'd never seen, in the Studio Theatre, where I'd never been. I liked them both very much. The older I get (I think that's the variable), the more I like the small, cozy productions. Not that the big expensive splashy ones aren't well done (and not that the tiny ones aren't expensive, come to that), because they are, but it doesn't seem to matter as much. There's even a degree - and this is completely unfair, just let me say that up front - to which I can occasionally suppose the casts of the bigger marquee shows don't care as much. Like I said: totally unfair! Last year's Cyrano de Bergerac was enormous and stupid expensive (I haven't seen the balance sheet, but knowing what I know about the production values* up here, you know what I'm saying?) Anyway, Two Gents pleased me greatly. There was a bit in it where one of the servants had a speech that I remember almost word for word from the Comedy of Errors; I'll have to look it up and see if it was these guys borrowing material from another play, or if Shakespeare himself reused some of his own stuff.

This evening was Peter Pan, and it was pretty good. The audience was full of kids, which is as it should be. (For all productions of Peter Pan, that is, except the one I saw at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake a number of years ago, in which Peter - as played by Tom McCamus, who you will agree is not and cannot pass for a little boy, and who didn't try - rather than being a boy who refuses to grow up, was a man who has refused to grow up. Put a whole different spin on the thing, which I'm a little sorry I can only remember in vague snatches of detail and what my parents remember more clearly, because I was only about twelve at the time. I remember that the scene where Mrs. Darling comes into the nursery and finds the children's beds empty was not charming at all; she screamed, and ever since then I've really been much more on her side than anyone else's from that point in the story onwards - a nice moment in the most recent Peter Pan movie, incidentally, for values of "nice", I suppose, remember?, when the children are flying away and the voice-over is talking about how wonderful it would be if the parents could get there in time, and the film cuts to a slow-motion shot of the parents running hell-for-leather down the corridor because Nana has told them Something Is Happening, and the looks on their faces are, if you ask me, exactly right - anyway. I also remember this broad-shouldered, deep-voiced Peter Pan, and how strange that was. And I remember the scene at the end, when Peter comes back to the house and finds Wendy's daughter in the nursery instead of Wendy; Wendy says "I grew up, Peter," and he says "You promised you wouldn't," and I can still hear him saying it. And when Wendy is gone he pulls a knife and only just stops himself from killing the daughter in her bed! This was a dark play.) This one - tonight, not the Niagara-on-the-Lake one - seems to have been the Barrie original? With a Barrie-character narrator, as well, who doubled as Hook, which I liked fine. (A nice moment, for many more values of "nice", when the action returns to the nursery and Mrs. Darling is waiting for the children to come home, and Barrie-the-narrator says "Some people like Peter best, and some people like Wendy best." [nods toward Mrs. Darling] "I like her best." I mean, on the one hand, of course you did, J.M.; on another hand, did you really?, now, be honest; but the point is, see above re: my being on her side.) It was kid-friendly and hammy as all get-out, and while there was singing, it was not the musical, which is just as well.

A thing I always wish about Peter Pan, and probably always will, is this: I wish we didn't actually know the family name. I really wish the kids only thought their name was Darling, because that's what they were always called - "Wendy, darling", don't you see? It even works with the parents, because of course they'd call each other George, darling and Mary, darling. But, alas, the (more or less omniscient?) narrator calls them Mr. and Mrs. Darling, and I think George is called George Darling in some work-related capacity, so I'll have to live with the fact that this really is their name and not further evidence of how young these kids really are and how they're confused. Too bad. (I know it's my inner child getting confused between Peter Pan and 101 Dalmatians, where - isn't that the one? - the humans are named Darling and John Dear. Maybe it's Lady and the Tramp? Anyway, some other Disney movie with a dog. I'd still like it if it were true.)

*Method costuming, for example, which is to say authenticity is essential and money is little if any object. (When they did The Mikado they sent their costume buyers to Japan to buy silk which they then had hand-painted. And then a guy danced and sweated and got greasepaint all on it for thirty-nine weeks (or however long). Could the audience tell it was real hand-painted Japanese silk? Of course not. But, darling, guess what? Balenciaga it was. [Extra points for getting that reference.]) Fortunately, this attitude - toward props and sets and decoration as well as costumes, by the way - that everything is better if you throw more money at it does not lead them to neglect things like blocking, pacing, and other performance elements that can't be as tangibly improved by a bigger budget. Put another way: of course one would much rather see excellent performances in a show with insufficient funds than mediocre performances in a show with unlimited funds. Around here, nine times in ten you get excellent or at any rate very good performances in shows with more or less unlimited funds; it's just that the more of those I see, the less sure I am how I feel about the unlimited funds, no matter how good the performances are.