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Feed2 Plays + 1 Winery = Mini-Vacation
Courtesy of the Shaw Festival
A matinee, a lovely dinner and an evening’s entertainment provide a great 10-hour mini-vacation for me and my husband—and it’s only a 45 minute drive away.
I’d never been to the Studio Theatre, which is one of the Shaw’s rawest spaces. It’s actually within the Festival’s Production Centre. Caryl Churchill’s Serious Moneyplays there through September 12.
The play falls outside of the Shaw’s written mandate, to “produce and present the work of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and playwrights writing anywhere in the world during, or about, the era of Shaw’s lifetime.”
Money is set in the 1980s London financial market, focusing on a wealthy family, their business, and the people with whom they work and deal. To capture the intense rhythm and pace of the language and lifestyle of the time, Churchill wrote the play in verse—but not pretty, flowery verse. There’s some nasty stuff, lots of adult language, and no punches pulled in satirizing the greedy, callous behavior of those who manipulated economic boom times with no thought for the consequences on anyone else but themselves. Makes you think about how little has changed.
The production is exciting and daring; Churchill captures the cacophony and frenzy of the trading floor, the threat of dangerous business, and, for satiric effect, has the company break into song and dance on several occasions.
Standouts in the cast include the tiny Marla McLean, as the vicious and grasping Scilla Todd, seeking not just to avenge but to cash in on her brother’s mysterious death. Graeme Somerville, playing several venal characters, does his job well in making your skin crawl.
As for dinner.
The Hillebrand Winery is simply lovely. An 8-minute drive from Niagara-on-the-lake’s theater district, its respite from the focus on art to refocus on food and nature were welcome. The service was gracious from start to finish, both friendly and professional. We chose to sit on the patio, which, with its views of the vineyards, plus the day’s warm breeze and lovely light, was just the ticket to decompress from Serious Money's intensity.
We were going to see another play after dinner, so I didn’t want to drink too much wine. But it's a shame to go to a vineyard restaurant and not at least try the wine.
The restaurant makes a serious point of using only local ingredients. For example, since olives don’t grow in the region, they don’t use olive oil. Locally pressed soy-bean oil is used instead, said the knowledgeable server. And wine makes its presence known in almost every dish.
I started with the icewine-cured and smoked salmon balik. It came with a Cro Farm quail egg (hardboiled), asparagus, Forbe’s wild cattails, and a Eweda sheep's milk croquette. The suggested pairing was Hillebrand’s showcase Riesling 2009. In a word, yum.
The lamb rack was next. It was incredibly delectable. And the recommended red with it was equally delicious. Dessert was sublime. My husband and I went to our comfort zones: his, blueberry; mine, chocolate. Each plate was its own mini-tasting menu, including an ice, a soft custard and a cake. Then it was again time for the theater.
Age of Arousal is thought-provoking and lovely to look at. The play, written in this decade by Linda Griffiths, and set in 1885, takes a stab at several incendiary ideas, including the revolutionary notion that women did not need to marry, and that they could (and needed to) earn their own living. Griffiths uses myriad devices, both subtle and not, to get her points across.
For example, the typewriter is seen by the main characters, who run a school for women, as a way for women to free themselves from the shackles of previous limiting societal paradigms.
Another device, similar to the Shakespearean “aside,” is the playwright’s “thoughtspeak,” where a character voices aloud what she or he is really thinking, as though to themselves, and then goes back into the conversation being enacted with another. It’s a delightfully revealing and entertaining way to increase the audience’s understanding of the characters in “real time.”
Drama, humor and plenty of confused sex and sexuality pervade. Arousal runs through October 10. I can firmly say it’s another triumph for the Shaw.
And, with the lights of the QEW to guide us, we were home by midnight.
