Arts & Culture

THIS YEAR AT at Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Shaw Festival, two unabashedly commercial scripts are receiving knife-sharp productions. One Man, Two Guvnors, the British farce that won James Corden his Tony, concocts glorious mayhem out of lucid physical comedy and a fragile fourth wall. And a grounded take on My Fair Lady gets at why the musical is one of the most popular in existence. The productions don’t do anything radical — but neither are they trying to. If Americans journeying up from Buffalo for a winery tour and a play happen to take these two shows as representatives of Ontario theatre, I imagine they’ll drive away with positive impressions.

What: One Man, Two Guvnors
Where: Shaw Festival Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade
When: Now, until Sun., Oct. 13
Highlight: Bouts of bold physical comedy imbue the show with cartoon-strip vibrancy
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Director Chris Abraham executes rambunctious British farce with a high degree of technical precision.

Who needs a summer of love when a summer of relocating classic comedies to the 1960s is on the table? Not southern Ontario, it seems.

While at the Stratford Festival director Seana McKenna picked the decade, using costume design and the occasional song to bring Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night into 1967, English playwright Richard Bean does the updating at Shaw. His tangly farce One Man, Two Guvnors, a success on Broadway in 2012, adapts Carlo Goldoni’s commedia dell’arte staple The Servant of Two Masters, lifting to 1963 Brighton its 18th-century plot of mistaken identities.

Although the particulars of the dramatic situation prove a touch dizzying, the key, titular conceit involves the bumbling Francis (Peter Fernandes) weaselling his way into the employ of two different bosses, the crafty Rachel (Fiona Byrne) and the nervy but pragmatic Stanley (Martin Happer). Francis fights to keep the guvnors as separate as possible — a tricky course of action, since the two are lovers in town for the express purpose of reuniting.

Crow’s Theatre artistic director Chris Abraham’s two-hour-and-40-minute production overcomes the lopsided nature of the script, which sails through Act I with ease but comes close to sinking when the hour for conflict resolution arrives. Even as bold physical comedy imbues the production’s climaxes with cartoon-strip vibrancy, evincing a superlative level of technical achievement, Abraham refrains from winding the cast up too tightly — Fernandes, in particular, incessantly hammers at the fourth wall, releasing tension via sometimes scripted audience banter.

Abraham’s design team consists of frequent collaborators Julie Fox (set/costumes), Kimberly Purtell (lighting) and Thomas Ryder Payne (sound). Over at Crow’s, the team’s projects tend toward immersion, with a profusion of visual and aural details serving to engulf audiences usually seated in the round. Overactive projection design aside, the Festival Theatre’s proscenium stage facilitates a result more focused but less sensuous, an adjustment suitable to this often funny Rube Goldberg machine of a play.

What: My Fair Lady
Where: Shaw Festival Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade
When: Now, until Sun., Dec. 22
Highlight: Tom Rooney and Kristi Frank, the show’s reliable leads
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Grounded production makes the classic musical’s appeal obvious.

If I had to guess why the Shaw Festival had only done My Fair Lady once before this year, I’d suppose that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical adaptation of Pygmalion (by the festival’s eponymous playwright) has simply felt too predictable a programming decision, having set numerous commercial records during its original Broadway run from 1956 to 1962, with several highly publicized revivals following in the decades since.

But now the show rests under a thick layer of dust in many people’s minds, transforming a 2024 production into a challenge: how to freshen this sturdy crowd-pleaser?

Casting Tom Rooney and Kristi Frank certainly helps. As phonetics professor Henry Higgins (until Oct. 17) and Cockney-accented flower-seller Eliza Dolittle respectively, the reliable pair add a great deal of texture to the show’s gusty, ever-shifting central relationship. As one might expect at the Shaw, Pygmalion’s weighty dramatic skeleton constantly asserts its presence, doing something to complicate the musical’s initially light tone.

This nurturing of detail anchors Tim Carroll and Kimberley Rampersad’s three-hour-long production, allowing for a sparser visual world than is typical for a large-scale staging of a golden-age musical comedy. While Lorenzo Savoini’s set grants each location its own assembly of furniture, four towering bone-white arches, one behind the other, remain on stage throughout, offering a psychological tinge to the production’s esthetic. Costume designer Joyce Padua finds a moment to diverge from verisimilitude, too: She dresses the aristocratic clientele of a racetrack in a monotonous array of grey-blue outfits topped with fancifully silhouetted hats, generating a surreal aura.

Carroll and Rampersad may not have turned me into as big a My Fair Lady fan as the woman seated behind me, who sang along with every familiar melody (and there are many) — but this cutting, no-frills production makes the material’s appeal obvious.