City of Interest

Need a great girlfriend getaway? In four hours you can be in Stratford, Ontario, where the Stratford Shakespeare Festival is now in full swing for 2009.
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival is North America’s largest repertory theater. In 2009, the company will perform 14 plays, rotating among four stages. Any season offers something for everyone; you could travel with a spouse, parent or child and find mutually appealing choices on the playbill. This year, the Shakespeare includes “Macbeth,” ” A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Julius Caesar,” while the popular musicals are “West Side Story” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” The swashbuckler is “Cyrano de Bergerac.” The Web site www.stratfordfestival.ca offers details on these and other 2009 productions.
For several years, my friends Barb Hagan, Cathy Podvin, Cheryl Shewach and I have ordered our Stratford tickets in November, five months before the season opens. That’s when my membership privileges allow me to order tickets ahead of the general public. A modest donation to the festival is all that’s required to be a member, and the great seats we get by ordering early make it well worth the donation.
Stratford has about 30,000 residents, and a disproportionate number of good restaurants, quaint shops, and charming bed and breakfasts. Podvin, who’s responsible for planning our lodging, picks a bed and breakfast that’s within walking distance of our activities; Hagan makes the dinner reservations (necessary for pre-theater weekend nights); and Shewach picks the wine. We have no worries about drinking and driving, since we will walk everywhere (comfortable shoes are a must).
We arrive on a Friday and pace ourselves. We visit some favorite shops, followed by a nice dinner. My favorite shop is Village Studios; my friends favor Distinctly Tea and The Theatre Store. On Saturday, we can’t miss Art in the Park, near the Festival Theater. The Quilt is another impressive exhibit in town. It’s comprised of more than 50 intricate quilts, most of them made and donated in honor of someone who has battled cancer. In November, these and 350 other quilts (on exhibit elsewhere in Canada) will be auctioned off as a fundraiser.
By 2 p.m., tourists will have disappeared from downtown Stratford. It’s time for matinee performances in the four theaters. The shows are nearly always magnificent, and it’s fascinating to see actors play one character in an afternoon performance, then take on an entirely different role in another show that evening. That’s the nature of repertory theater, and I wonder if it’s as entertaining for the performers as it is for the audience.
After the matinee, all theater-goers (including us) rush to dinner reservations, While we’re dining, crews in all four theaters are changing sets for a different performance in each venue that evening, while most performers prepare for a different role in their second show of the day.
At 8 p.m., we’re back in seats, waiting to be awed again.
We’re never disappointed.
On Sunday morning, we join other visitors at the B&B for an exquisite breakfast. (It doesn’t matter where you stay, the B&B breakfasts are always exquisite.) Everyone offers critiques of the shows they saw the day before, along with stories of past visits and performances. My favorite stories are when my mother and I saw “King Lear” on opening night with Christopher Plummer in the leading role, the enthusiastic audience applause when the lights came up on the elegant costumes in “My Fair Lady,” and a stunning performance of “Medea,” the last Greek tragedy I will ever attend without knowing the plot in advance.
There are many ways to entertain ourselves after we check out of the B&B. Last year, we toured the costume warehouse, where thousands of elaborate costumes from past Stratford performances are housed.
The tour guides provided fascinating insider information about how the costumes are made and used, and we were thrilled to try some on. This year, we will tour the Festival Theatre.
At 2 p.m., we’ll attend another matinee performance, our third play of the weekend. It’s a lot of activity, but it’s always a joyful weekend. We’ll drive back to Michigan singing “Comedy Tonight” from our afternoon show, and planning our 2010 weekend.

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