TRAVIS WEAGANT
<Editor-in-Chief>
I thought I was becoming an elitist when I booked the tickets. How does this read: third-year law student takes a trip on Thanksgiving weekend to a world-class Shakespeare festival, sees two productions, enjoys a dinner at a restaurant that requires reservations weeks in advance, and spends an afternoon perusing boutique chocolate and book shops. “Shit,” I thought, “this is going to make me look really bad with all those social justice types.” I took stock of my assets and liabilities to reassure myself that I was still poor. I ate some ramen to atone for my financial sins. But the truth is that my weekend in Stratford was anything but elitist, and wasn’t even that expensive.
Let’s start with transportation. The Stratford Festival operates a daily bus service between the Intercontinental Hotel and Front and Simcoe Streets in Toronto and the Festival’s three theatres. It departs at 10AM on performance days, and returns at 5PM, after the matinée show. A round trip ticket costs $20. The fare is so low (less than a third of VIA Rail’s lowest economy class fare to Stratford) that the denizens of Stratford have joined festival-goers as a secondary market for the service. My girlfriend and I shared the coach with people of all ages, including postsecondary students heading back to Bieberville for Thanksgiving (we can confirm that Justin was not among them).
We took the Saturday morning coach to Stratford. On Saturday evening, we enjoyed dinner at René’s Bistro. Normally, a town of 30 000 could barely sustain a fine-dining establishment (coming from comparably-sized St. Thomas, I can vouch for this assertion), but Stratford’s theatre festival brings thousands of tourists every year, all of whom are hungry, without a kitchen, and want something decent to eat. The sheer volume of customers, who all want to eat just before or after a show, creates insatiable demand for the best places in town, including Renés, around 5PM. This, not artificial exclusivity, necessitated my September phone call to make the reservation.
In a clash between my elitist and populist tendencies, I enjoyed seafood mac and cheese. The combination of lobster, shrimp, scallops, gruyère, and enough cream to cause me digestive distress was delectable. My date had fresh basa with a pesto-based crust. Both cost less than $20. In fact, for such stellar cuisine, the prices were very reasonable. Including the entrées, half a litre of wine, dessert, tax, and tip, it came to less than $50/person. Not quite Jurisfoodence cheap, I know, but the place definitely gets 5 sossbosses out of 5.
We attended the matinée performance of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers before dinner. The humour-laden tale of 17th century French political intrigue is simultaneously fluffy – full of skilfully staged combat, bumbling, drunkenness, and dick jokes – and cerebral. After all, until the last few scenes, it isn’t clear which of the dastardly, scheming villains is truly behind the misfortune of the eponymous musketeers. It was 150 minutes of fun. Unfortunately, it was also billed as the “family performance,” which placed two young children behind us, one of whom had a recurring (and audible) flatulence problem, and the other of whom engaged in spirited discussion with his mother throughout the entire performance about the subtleties of who was “good” and who was merely “pretending to be good.” I congratulate the child on succinctly establishing a theme of the play. His mother should have known better.
After dinner, we returned to the Festival Theatre to find the stage entirely redressed for the evening performance of Fiddler on the Roof. Several members of my family had already seen the performance, to their great pleasure. I was completely unfamiliar with the story, having never seen the film. I had moderate expectations. After all, at its core, the Stratford Festival’s company is not a musical theatre company; it is a Shakespeare company. Or so I thought.
Fiddler takes place in the village of Anatevka, located in present-day Ukraine, around the turn of the 20th century in Tsarist Russia. The plot is inspired by a series of stories by Jewish folklorist Sholem Aleichem. In more ways than this, however, Fiddler is a quintessentially Jewish story. In the beginning, the Jewish community in Anatevka is insular, living in a courteous but uneasy peace with their Russian neighbours.
Tevye, the main character, devout father of five daughters, and a good-natured but perpetually downtrodden schlemiel, holds fast to the traditions of his faith to make his difficult existence bearable. One by one, three of his five daughters leave the family home. The first, against the recommendation of the village matchmaker, marries for love. The second marries a revolutionary socialist. The camel’s back breaks when Tevye’s third daughter marries a Russian Gentile. At the same time, by order of the Tsar, Jewish communities all over the Empire, including the one in Anatevka, are progressively intimidated and eventually deported. Despondent over his daughters and his deportation, Tevye and what is left of his family drag their belongings from their home and set off to join a cousin in the United States.
It’s not a very happy ending, yet the audience cannot help feeling hopeful. The reasons are twofold. First because, after three hours spent getting to know the characters, the audience is convinced of Tevye and his community’s resiliency in the face of discrimination. The script is chock full of typically Jewish humour, including several asides in which Tevye speaks to an unseen G-d, asking why the chosen people couldn’t sometimes be chosen for something better. As his family trudges out of Anatevka in the cold, Tevye speculates that the repeated deportation of Jews is “why we always wear our hats.”
Second, Fiddler debuted in 1964, which means that any audience who has ever seen the play knows how the story really ends. Indeed, Tevye and his family are fortunate in a way. Leaving the Russian Empire at the turn of the century meant that the protagonists avoided the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews living in German-occupied Ukraine during the Second World War. Tevye’s children would grow up in a prosperous era, and his grandchildren would either become part of the first truly affluent Jewish generation in American history, or travel to settle in a new Jewish homeland.
It was a remarkable performance. Scott Wentworth was stellar as the consummate Jewish hero Tevye, a performance perhaps informed by his simultaneous portrayal of Jewish anti-hero Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. I certainly felt sheepish about my earlier assumptions about the Festival. The production was world-class, certainly on par with, if not surpassing, the Festival’s Shakespearean efforts. I later discovered that Wentworth has previously been nominated for a Tony Award and this production, had it taken place in New York, may have earned him a second.
The best part: through a program that allows people under age 29 to purchase affordable tickets for certain performances, we were able to obtain our tickets for Musketeers and Fiddler for $25 each.
The one sticking point about visiting Stratford is accommodation. The municipality has written its zoning bylaw to deliberately exclude tall buildings, including hotel chains. This leaves few options: expensive B&Bs, awkward morning meal included; overpriced (but clean) small hotels, or run-down motels. Even the motels were relatively expensive, so we splurged, stayed in a hotel, and chalked it up as a necessary evil.
We also spent the day in Stratford on Sunday, which gave us a chance to have brunch and a beer at Mercer Hall, another reasonably priced purveyor of delicious things. After the meal, we perused the wares at independent bookstores and chocolate shops, both of which were also surprisingly affordable (in fact, I purchased a hardcover book by Malcolm Gladwell that explained why Tevye’s grandchildren would have been so lucky to live in the United States in the 1930s for $6.99, which is better than the Amazon price).
I could have spent a great deal more money to have a less relaxing experience here in Toronto. Two days of top-notch entertainment, food, accommodation, shopping, and transportation came in at under $170 per person. It’s not free, but the value is incredible, and I no longer feel like a poor pretender to the posh. If I were a rich man, I would have had exactly the same weekend.