Much ado about … something big! Freewill Shakespeare Festival is (finally) back in Hawrelak Park, with two shows

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

They’re back! Finally. In the park where they belong….

When Benedick and Beatrice, the witty sparring partners of Much Ado About Nothing, take their “merry war” to the Heritage Amphitheatre in newly re-opened Hawrelak Park Wednesday, it will be a homecoming celebration, long-awaited and hard-won, for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival. It’s much ado about something, something big for a company that’s been buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

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Our beloved summer Shakespeareans have been around — scrambling to make do, open to the elements in assorted city parks (last year Louise McKinney Riverfront Park), community hockey rinks, patios, people’s backyards. Freewill even took a pair of chamber-sized Shakespeares to the Fringe in 2021, and tried a spiegeltent in the Expo Centre parking lot in 2023. The Heritage Amphitheatre, though, under the big top in The Park, is their signature home, from their inaugural production (A Comedy of Errors) in 1989. And it’s a stage that the Freewill players and their illustrious playwright-in-residence haven’t occupied since 2019 (with a pair of the strangest Shakespeares in the canon, The Winter’s Tale and Two Gentlemen of Verona).

In this 37th edition, Edmonton’s summer outdoor Shakespeare, a bona fide civic institution, pairs Shakespeare’s joyful, mirth-filled mid-period romantic comedy (with a tricky thorn at its centre), and a larky contemporary musical comedy, Something Rotten, a 2015 Broadway hit in which Will (this is a festival on a first-name basis with the guy) actually shows up, takes some shtick from a couple of upstarts, and sings.

Long-time company member Ian Leung directs the 10-actor Much Ado About Nothing that runs June 17 through 28. Following that run, Dave Horak, the company’s artistic director, directs a 20-member cast of non-Equity singer/dancer/actors in Something Rotten, opening July 1 on the same set in the park, with a cast of 12 and an orchestra of a dozen.

Call the play and the musical — separate shows which run one after the other, not in rep — step-siblings, with rapport. Set in 1595 when two brothers, Nigel and Nick Bottom, are struggling to write a hit in the shadow of uppity local star playwright Shakespeare, Something Rotten has, says Horak, “a lot of Shakespeare jokes and a lot of musical theatre jokes too…. There’s even a ‘Shakespeare in the park’ joke.” And Much Ado, a funny, knotted comedy with two intertwined love stories, was the play that Freewill had to cancel (along with its rep partner Macbeth) when COVID hit in 2020.

While the three-year Hawrelak Park renos include “a lot of things underground” — electrical, heating, plumbing, dressing rooms that aren’t bigger just nicer — invisible to the audience eye, there are some changes we’ll notice next week when we come to see the sparks between a couple made for each other who resist romance until resistance is futile.

Shakespeare in the Park: Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

There are more seats in front, which addresses the gap between the audience and the stage; Freewill won’t need to use the $100,000 stage extension they installed a few summers ago. The wide open entrance passage at the centre, a spacious grass-lined alley heading downward, has been filled in with seats. There’s “more grass seating,” which Horak thinks we’ll find inviting. “It’s tiered; you don’t even necessarily need a chair, just a picnic blanket.” And if you’ve frozen your butt off in the Heritage Amphitheatre washrooms (and who hasn’t?), rejoice: they’re heated, and they look less ugly, he assures. Wine, beer, Freewill popcorn … it’ll all be there, as per our genial summer tradition.    

The pandemic, and then a city-imposed three-YEAR (!) exile from Hawrelak Park for renos there … it’s been a rocky road back home for Freewill. As he said when Freewill launched an urgent fund-raising campaign a year ago (it netted them a third of their $150,000 ask), “we know how to go small if we need to.” But “I wanted to go back (to the park) bigger than we’ve been doing lately…. It was going to be expensive; it was going to be hard to go back, and fill that big space,” the thousand-seat raked venue under the Heritage Amphitheatre canopy. “But I didn’t want to slink back into the park with one show and a reduced cast….”

True, a cast of 10 for Much Ado plus crew is somewhat less than Freewill casts of yore, which have run optimally to 16 plus crew in the past. But Leung’s production, which stars Jesse Gervais and Vanessa Sabourin as Benedick and Beatrice, with Rochelle Laplante and Braydon Dowler-Coltman as Hero and Claudio — is a bigger show than Freewill on the move, and unprotected from the elements, has been able to do in exile.

Dave Horak, artistic director of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

And as for the big musical, Horak is experimenting with a different producing model altogether. With Something Rotten “we’re presenting, I’m directing, and two other companies are doing the work,” a first for the festival.

The artistic director of Edmonton Pops Orchestra, Michael Clark, is perhaps best known to Edmonton audiences for musical direction of such Straight Edge Theatre originals as Krampus, Final Girl and Conjoined. Shelley’s Dance Company is a venerable 37-year-old arts group led by Shelley Tookey, whose expertise is especially welcome in a musical that Horak describes as “primarily a tap show.”   

“They’re producing it,” he says of the partner companies, who bring dancers, musicians, and their own funding to the festival. “They’re paying for the rights and lot of the expenses. We’re presenting it, under our festival umbrella…. It was the only way to bring back two shows.”

Originally he’d looked for a Much Ado cast who could handle both the musical and physical demands of a Broadway musical, and do the shows in rep. And indeed, among the top-drawer comic actors of the Shakespeare ensemble are such triple-threats as John Ullyatt, Ron Pederson, and Jesse Gervais. “But funding shortfalls, difficulties with Equity” among other cost factors, have made doing two Equity shows in rep (requiring a longer rehearsal and run), un-workable for Freewill, times (and Heritage Amphitheatre rent) being what they are.

“Doing a musical with a lot of people from the community, with all their skills and resources,” is a venture in expanding the audience demographic, Horak hopes. His Something Rotten cast, age range 20something to 50something, includes a fair complement of recent MacEwan University musical theatre grads, some of Horak’s former students, and an assortment of stage veterans. Many have extensive stage experience, like Martin Galba (now the manager of Workshop West) and Stephen Allred of Straight Edge Theatre.

Revived this season at the Stratford Festival, Something Rotten is “classic musical theatre … with a lot of Shakespeare in it.” Ah, and a lot of tap. “Currently I think people see me as the Shakespeare guy,” Horak laughs. “But I’ve had my hands on a lot of musicals”: 20 years teaching at MacEwan, Sondheim, Fun Home .… “I grew up in a musical theatre family, and I’ve come to love musicals….” Actor/director Leung, he says of his old U of A theatre school class-mate, “has a chance to dig into some of the deeper themes of Much Ado, a very funny comedy with depth, with with a great cast of comic actors…. A lot of former Freewill players reached out  when we were going back to the park.”

Horak admits to festival opening night stress: “I had a choice of being risky or trying to play it safe…. One thing I realized was how much the venue has attached itself to Freewill. A lot of our audience didn’t follow us out of the park. With this media ecosystem it’s really hard. Which is another reason to go back.”

In the end, he embraced the risk. This is the year Freewill goes big AND goes home.

PREVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Much Ado About Nothing and Something Rotten

Directed by: Ian Leung, Dave Horak

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Running: Much Ado About Nothing June 17 to 28; Something Rotten July 1 to 12

Tickets and performance schedule: freewillshakespeare.com