SiR’s 30th season offers Shakespeare plays written 400 years apart

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This article was published 21/04/2023 (1256 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SNOW was blowing outside his window Friday morning, but Shakespeare in the Ruins artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss was still dreaming about the company’s upcoming season of outdoor performances at Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park.

“Hopefully on opening night, we will be able to enjoy the weather,” he joked.

More than a century of meteorological record-keeping should give Beilfuss some peace of mind that when SiR’s season — the company’s 30th — kicks off June 1, only makeup, not snow, will powder the actors’ noses.

Beilfuss, who joined the company as artistic director in 2019, could hardly contain his excitement while discussing the season’s two shows: Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night (June 1-July 1) and playwright-performer Jessica B. Hill’s The Dark Lady (June 15-July 2).

“Twelfth Night hasn’t been done at the Ruins since 1997, which is bonkers, as it might be Shakespeare’s finest comedy,” Beilfuss says.

And while the show is centuries old, it’s safe to say it has not yet been done in the way director Christopher Brauer has planned: for one thing, Malvolio is being reimagined as a DJ.

Brauer, who directed this season’s well-received Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production of The Three Musketeers, has a knack for large-scale, fun productions, Beilfuss says.

“Brauer is a great educator: he was my teacher (at the University of Winnipeg) and I love that man,” says Beilfuss, who starred in Musketeers. “During The Three Musketeers, we were all so galvanized by his love of the material.”

Beilfuss is quite fond of Twelfth Night, a story of mistaken identity, self-discovery and character transformation. “We have a lovely crew of characters who begin the play believing they’re one thing, but by the end are transformed into another,” he says. “That’s really what we’re doing as a culture right now.”

The cast is filled with faces both familiar and new to the Ruins. Andrea del Campo will play Sir Toby and the Priest; Tom Keenan will play Malvolio and Valentine; Melissa Langdon will play Sir Andrew; Darren Martens will play Orsino and Fabian; Hera Nalam will play Feste, the Captain and Antonia; Elio Zarrillo will play Maria, Sebastian and the Officer; and Anaka Sandhu, a recent graduate of the National Theatre School and alumnus of the Shaw Festival, has been cast in the central role of Viola.

One interesting wrinkle to the show will be its score, composed by Matt Peters and Matt Schellenberg, members of the inventive Winnipeg band Royal Canoe who now produce music in Los Angeles under the name deadmen.

The duo has produced and remixed music for artists such as Begonia, Mouraine, and Dill The Giant.

“It will be a modern show, full of world-class music,” Beilfuss says.

Jessica B. Hill is no stranger to Winnipeg theatre audiences. In January, the Canadian writer and actor gave a remarkable performance of Pandora, a one-woman show about the universe, at Prairie Theatre Exchange, earning a five-star review from the Free Press. That show, directed by Beilfuss, was the first part of a collaboration with Shakespeare in the Ruins; The Dark Lady is the hotly anticipated spiritual sequel.

With her latest show, Hill focuses her attention on a character hidden in Shakespeare’s sonnets, the “dark lady” with whom the Bard allegedly had an affair. That character, to be played by Hill, is possibly the real-life writer, poet and musician Emilia Bassano, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s who was the first English woman to publish her own poetry, long overshadowed and unheralded within the overarching story of the literary canon.

Beilfuss, who will direct, calls the show “a fascinating new play about two real-life historical figures,” amplifying the voice of Bassano, a multiracial, trilingual artist, centuries after her death. The show also features an appearance by Shakespeare himself, as played by Eric Blais, with live musical accompaniment by classical guitarist George Bajer-Koulack.

“Jessica is one of the great minds I’ve encountered,” Beilfuss says. “We really wanted to nurture her playwriting.”

Tickets for the upcoming season go on sale Monday at shakespeareintheruins.com, with a 15 per cent discount for tickets purchased before May 15.

Fingers crossed for no snow by June, but if it rains, ponchos will be made available, Beilfuss says with a laugh.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com