Heaven and hell at the 2022 Stratford Festival of Canada, with ‘Chicago,’ ‘Richard III’ and ‘Hamlet’

As heavenly as the return to strength of Canada’s Stratford Festival feels, hell is very much a thing in the Ontario farmland this year. And I speak neither of the delay to cross the Blue Water Bridge from Michigan into Ontario nor the Canadian border guard who struggled to understand how anyone could possibly be going to the theater alone.

In director Donna Feore’s splendiferous new production of the musical “Chicago,” the sleaze-bag attorney Billy Flynn descends there, complete with his ironic exit music. Down Dan Chameroy goes to Hades, courtesy of a trapdoor in the 1,800-seat Festival Theatre, the much-beloved mainstage of this venerable citadel of classically oriented theater since 1957.

His exit is all the more resonant for how it contrasts with Feore’s take on a show long associated now with Walter Bobbie’s sardonically minimalist Broadway production.

Feore’s highly detailed staging, filled with closely observed detail, acrobatic dancing, extra tricks and accouterments of all kinds, and bravura lead performances, especially from the leads Chelsea Preston and Jennifer Rider-Shaw, leans in the other direction. It embraces the cynicism of a piece that originated with a reporter at this newspaper by amping up the razzamatazz. It’s the only musical on the docket this year in Stratford and it’s a real, audience-pleasing doozie.

Meanwhile, in Stratford’s newest theater, named for its founder Tom Patterson, Colm Feore’s diabolic “Richard III” makes his first entrance by walking out of his own grave, as discovered under a parking lot in the English city of Leicester in 2012.

Once the villain has left his own bones behind, Richard, the “car park king,” as the British press dubbed him, is spun back from modern-day Leicester to his original 15th-century milieu, director Antoni Cimolino having made a couple of useful points: (1) villainy born of pain and insecurity knows no chronological limitation, and (2) even great kings end up as a stack of bones underneath where shoppers parks their Mini Coopers.

And while we’re on the meta track here, it’s worth noting that Colm Feore (Donna’s husband), best known to Canadians for playing Pierre Trudeau for the CBC and to Americans for appearing in “Spider-Man” movies, is also deconstructing the whole idea of superheroes, even as Cimolino’s production plays with notions of action movies through wild special effects, including a knock-out moment where Dicky 3 is ejected onto the ground, screaming hopelessly about his horse-less state.

Richard is, of course, one of that small but mighty crew of Shakespeare’s declared villains: people like Iago and Don John, who just walk out onto the stage and declare both their grievances and what nastiness they intend to do as a consequence of them. All these years of writing about them, I’ve felt these were inferior creations, so to speak, when compared with more nuanced figures like, say, Hamlet, whose doings are also on offer this year in Stratford in a new production by director Peter Pasyk starring the actress Amaka Umeh as the moody Dane.

But in this current moment, these infamous clutches of aggrieved humans, utterly assured of the moral rectitude of their outright hostility and disinclined to apologize for anything under the sun, are looking a whole lot more like everyone else.

I’ve always thought Richard an outlier; Colm Feore, who keeps him entirely recognizable, made me think otherwise. Cimolino’s production, which also stars the excellent Jessica B. Hill as Lady Anne, doesn’t so much focus on whether Richard is likable or not, but makes it clear that the people who surround him are appropriating his dastardly nature for their own ends. The only moral force for good is Ben Carlson’s Lord Hastings, a character who marvels constantly at the world in which he lives. Judging by all the sympathetic nods Carlson got from the audience, his efforts were appreciated.

Smart theater shoppers know to show up when a major destination theater opens a multi-million-dollar new building that comes complete with all the latest toys. Cimolino’s “Richard” is a showcase for the festival’s newest addition and I don’t doubt he was thinking about it throughout a lengthy pandemic delay that had the new theater ready and waiting but unable to house a show.

The new Tom Patterson Theatre truly is a low-slung venue of great beauty, filled as it is with natural wood, bronze beams, Danish brick, (for a future“Hamlet” perhaps?) Italian marble and light-spilling windows in the lobbies. It’s also embraced by expansive, verdant landscaping.

On the other hand, what will be most striking to festivalgoers is how much the theater resembles the old venue on whose site it was built. The surroundings most certainly are upgraded from before, but the relationship of the audience to the space largely remains the same. Those who fear change have not received too much of it. The tech capabilities, though, are something else entirely. Cimolino’s brilliant production is filled with sharp shafts of light, potent underscoring, sculpted images of cinematic intensity and, of course, a head-cocked bad guy talking to the audience as if he were posting on his Facebook wall.

That same intimacy starts off the contemporary “Hamlet” at the Festival Theatre: we see a family group sitting around a table under which lies the Ghost of King Hamlet. Or, at least, the corporeal form thereof, even as the more ghostly form walks abroad. Here, Hamlet often texts his sweet nothings to Andrea Rankin’s Ophelia, sending her spiraling into a crisis of uncertainty over his intentions.

That rich closeness, the unpretentious clarity of the spoken language and the energy and creativity of Amaka Umeh, are the show’s strengths. But the piece runs out of dramatic steam before the end, mostly because you don’t feel enough of a change in Hamlet, nor intuit that he finally is engaging with a level of thinking that matches the words coming out of his mouth. The show, in the end, doesn’t translate its moment-by-moment force into a viable dramatic arc. It does not grab hold of death, shake it, attack it nor succumb to it with enough heft for a tragedy.

Stratford has produced this play many times, of course. Never has it presented so sympathetic a Gertrude as Maev Beaty, whom the director not only seems to absolve of all blame for the goings on here but who kills herself most clearly and deliberately in Act 5, so as to save her child. Fascinating, like everything here.

One final note: For the first time ever, despite years of visits, I caught a show in Stratford not produced by the festival. The piece was Dennis Kelly’s “Boys & Girls,” a one-woman, monologic shocker about marriage, careers, kids and jealousy that is performed (Chicago-style) in a simple room inside the Falstaff School (this is Stratford, after all).

Directed by Lucy Jane Atkinson, it’s the work of the Here For Now Theatre Company and it contains a riveting and gut-wrenching performance by Fiona Mongillo that’s fully equal to anything in the big houses.

It made me think that Stratford, every bit as pleasant as Edinburgh, Scotland, needs a fringe.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com