stratford festival 2011

22 July: BWI-BUF

Should have realized vacation was off to inauspicious start when Long-Term Parking A was closed. Parked in B just as bus pulled up, but wouldn't stop for me - 'you have to go to the bus stop', said the driver, who then went to the bus stop but pulled away before I could get there. Waited 10 minutes for next bus to come to that stop, though two came & went without passing my way.

Then plane was delayed - which made it not so bad that relatively short line to check bags took forever to get through as only two people working at only one station. (You know who never has that kind of trouble? Airtran. You know who just acquired Airtran? Southwest. You know what airline I was flying? Yeah. I'm not filled with confidence for the future.)

Got good boarding # (grr, the cattle-call-ness of SWA) so got a window seat close to front of plane, but extreme crowding meant had middle-seat mate who fidgeted a lot. Managed to doze, thank god, as 10:05 didn't pull back until 11:15.

Got off plane quickly at BUF, but waited forever for luggage. Called hotel - no answer after 4 minutes of ringing, and would have told me no shuttles anyway, so on balance good that car rental guy was still closing up & willing to let me have tomorrow's car tonight, even though past closing time. Am driving Kia Sportage due to no-small-cars free upgrade, which is 3x more car than I need.

Staying at "charming" airport Red Roof Inn. Technically clean enough (I'm sure it is, but it is not conspicuously so as a more expensive (frankly) place would have been), presumably safe as am not on ground floor etc., and all I need is a door to lock & a place to lay my head, so. (And a shower in the morning.)

Still am feeling like am too old for all this crap, and next time may shell out for a real airline and a hotel that will come to the airport and get me.

Tomorrow will be better.


23 July: BUF-Stratford, Merry Wives, Richard III

Today indeed off to a better start - did lose like half an hour at the border crossing. As my friend Rhian would say: 'kinell. Anxious all the way up, and discovered I'd lost one of my capture beads somewhere. BUT made it to the place, and thanks to the miracles of plastic money, I had time for a glass of wine before the show. Thank god.

Merry Wives was good. Funny, fast-paced, Geraint Wyn Davies and his inexplicable Welsh accent not too insufferable, only v. slight enunciation issues - nothing like last year.

Would you rather have a full house with a lot of comps, or a sold-out house with a lot of no-shows? I'd choose (a), which may be how you know I'm a performer and not a manager.

Between shows got blisters from v. comfy shoes - that's how hot and sweaty it is, even here. :-(

Richard III was very good. Seana McKenna playing Richard - not as a woman, obviously, and it turned out the fact that she, a woman, was playing the part was uncommented upon in the program - which on reflection pleased me very much. She did a nice job. (She did curtsey in one of her curtain calls - the only nod, as far as I could tell, to her being a woman at all.) So did they all - esp notably Martha Henry (always reliable) as Queen Margaret, who, DAMN. (She got my standing ovation.)

Nice ghost stuff, too. The 'despair and die' dream sequence is always a bit much, but the ghosts stuck around, and the battle scene was quite well choreographed - one by one the ghosts (well - the grown-men ghosts) quietly diverted Richard's killing stroke on one or another of Richmond's (Henry Tudor's, of course) men; after two or three of these, Queen Anne took the crown off his head and gave it to the Prince of Wales (or whatever his name was - the older nephew, obviously), then the rest of the men kept blocking his killing blows, and the last thing was the Duke of York taking the sword out of Richard's hand - Tudor kills Richard - he falls back into the arms of the ghosts - and they spend Tudor's closing monologue staring down at Richard. But then after Tudor's speech about unity etc., he closes with "Amen", and then the ghosts snap to look at him and whisper "Aaamennn." (Whispering and loud exhaling had been used throughout the play, less effectively - in particular, the whole thing began with some people whispering "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" while they re-enacted a battle from the end of Henry VI with life-size dolls, which didn't work much for me - but it was all apparently just to set this up.) It was awesome. Goosiest goosebumps I've had since the blackout came down on the murderers advancing toward Macduff's little daughter.

Twelfth Night had better be good - I have every reason to believe it will be, so also I hope the Sunday matinee crowd doesn't piss me off.


24 July: Twelfth Night, Stratford-BUF

Well, Twelfth Night did not disappoint. We had the standby - somehow bigger than an understudy - as Viola, and she was v. good; also she was in the production stills, so maybe it was just that the other girl looked a shade more like the dude playing Sebastian? Probably not - that's a dumb way to cast Viola.

Anyway. Looked great - costumes approximately Edwardian, but who can tell? I'll have to look up Edwardian fashion to see what's what. Also a lot of extra-textual business - golf, tennis, a sauna - that McAnuff seems to have thrown in for fun. And a ton of music - Feste played electric bass and was the leader of a whole band. Lots of songs - including, at the beginning of the second act, a setting of "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love" and "The Nymph's Reply" to a tune that sure sounded to me like it owed a lot to "Radio Gaga", but then at one point Juan Chioran as Fabian, whose most prominent feature (other than a widow's peak that could probably cut glass) is his long, long legs, grabbed the microphone for a solo and did a whole Freddie Mercury lunge, so hey, at least they were owning it. Basically it sure seemed like this was a successful version of what last year's As You Like It was going for. (NB: One intermission! Just one!) (Feste was Touchstone last year, by the way.) You could understand everyone, and the more out-there choices weren't totally out there. (Okay, the mannequins in the ending tableau were inexplicable. But by then - who cared? The show was over & we were all happy. :-) )

Also: Brian Dennehy did get a round of applause on his first appearance, but the band had just finished playing a song, so the applause from one thing flowed seamlessly into the applause from another, and it wasn't disruptive at all. In fact this audience applauded at the end of every scene, which wasn't necessary, but which fails to annoy me as much as audiences who applaud at the end of every movement in a symphony, concert mass, etc.

Feste and the band kicked off the curtain call, and Feste was so awesome that the lot of them got a standing ovation - and then they started to play, so inevitably the audience started clapping on the beat.

You know what must be awesome? When your curtain call is when they stop clapping on the beat because they just have to whoop and holler and clap for real. Which is what happened to Malvolio. (Who also had a standing ovation as Frank Ford. Dude has been having a good year.) Brian Dennehy and Stephen Ouimette as Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (and Juan Chioran as Fabian, by association) got a big swell of cheers, and then Olivia and Sebastian behind them not so much - just plain enthusiasm. What can you do. (Well - get a better part, is what.)

Still, though, the best Twelfth Night I've seen was at the RSC when Feste was in love with Maria. That one was outstanding. This one was merely excellent. :-)

Then an easy drive back to Buffalo - no wait at all at the border, although yesterday the US-bound lanes were backed up for miles. Returned the car, and tonight's hotel has an airport shuttle and now I am in a real hotel with a lobby and indoor hallways, and everything! In a bizarro sunken room - ground floor but not wheelchair accessible, wtf? - with two king beds, an arrangement I have never seen before. Already checked in for tomorrow's flight. Must repack and then read until I sleep.

Glad this thing started out iffy and got better, instead of the other way around. :-)


25 July: BUF-BWI, eventually

Heh. Yeah. So the flight ahead of mine was delayed because they were waiting for a crew from another plane. Off they went, and our plane and crew was here, and we all boarded on time, and no sooner had the last person got on the plane for the 1:55 flight than - at 2pm ("on time" being an approximate measurement for the airlines, of course) the pilot got on the intercom and said Listen, there's weather between here and BWI, and there's about to be more, and nobody's allowed to land there at the moment, which means we're not even allowed to take off - so we're in a ground hold, and we'll know more at 2:30, but in the meantime, if you want to get off the plane, please take one of these reboarding cards.

Fine. I didn't get off the plane because half an hour isn't that long. But at 2:30, the update they had was, We'll have another update for you at 3:30, and we'd like everyone to disembark at the moment, please.

So they'd asked us not to make a huge line at the kiosk, but they'd let people know the status of their connections - on the bright side, since it was BWI that was socked in, that was why we couldn't get there, the connections also couldn't leave. Assuming they could even get there in the first place. So people were going to be late to where they were going, but it wasn't because they'd be stuck in Baltimore.

Except I was going to Baltimore. So I did stand in line, and I asked the girl what my options were, and she offered to rebook me on the 3:35 to BWI leaving from the same gate. "Okay," I said, "but do you seriously have any confidence that the 3:35 is going to leave at anything like 3:35? Given that they're not even going to give us another update about the 1:55 until 3:30? I know that's what your computer tells you to do, and it's sweet of you to offer, but let's think ahead a bit, is all I'm saying. I have no confidence at all." So her supervisor said they could refund my ticket (there was a brief moment of extreme confusion when she asked if I wanted her to refund my whole round trip - I was so stumped by the question that she had to look at her screen her own self to see that half the round trip had already been completed), but not pay for a rental car. Whatever - I'd have been happy with both, but really one or the other was fine.

Down I went to the rental car counter, where nobody would rent me a car without a reservation, and some places wouldn't rent me a one-way at all - but I stepped away from the counter, busted out my phone, made a reservation, and stepped back to the counter, and hey presto. I hit the road about 3:30.

It's a beautiful drive down through western and southern New York, through central Pennsylvania, along the Susquehanna (plus it's fun to say Susquehanna). I'd periodically check the status of my flight - at 5pm they were still "boarding". By 7pm they had arrived, so I concluded they'd actually got away in the sort of 6pm area; I didn't pull in to return the car at BWI until 10, and then I had to get back to the terminal and out to the parking lot and drive home. So if I'd stuck it out I'd have got home about three hours sooner - but I'd have paid for those three hours with three, maybe three and a half hours of frustration in the company of increasingly cranky people, in Buffalo. This was way better.

Until I woke up Tuesday with a migraine that was already making me queasy. :-P But that could have happened even if the flight had been on time. Still: it turns out my vacation was not so restful that I have been cured of the awful-headache-with-nausea-and-dizziness condition. Boo. Today I walked into a doorjamb - I've been misjudging angles on things more lately, or at least noticing it more. Ah well.