This Friday is Intermission’s first event! We are going to be at Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park Youth Night!
Dream in High Park is an annual event (this year is the 29th edition) produced by Canadian Stage. It takes place at the beautiful High Park amphitheatre, and is an extraordinary performance of outdoor Shakespearian art. This year’s production is A Winter’s Tale.
Youth Night emerged to welcome Toronto’s youth to the outdoor Shakespeare world. Complete with workshops, backstage tours, talkbacks, visual art, music, dance and more, it is a phenomenal way to meet other artistically minded youth, and to experience theatre.
I’m personally very excited to meet so many youth, artists and community groups. And I’m excited about our buttons. Intermission volunteers are going to be wandering the crowds during the workshops and pre-show performances clinking with the buttons on our shirts. Want a button? Just ask! They are very colourful.
The other big reason to be excited is the main attraction: A Winter’s Tale. The past several years have seen a bunch of different renditions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and traditionally at the Dream in High Park, the play choice has been comedy, with the addition of Romeo and Juliet. While Midsummer is the obvious and excellent choice for the outdoors, it’s a pity that tragedies get the brush. Romeo and Juliet is even easily seen has half comedy – it’s all giggles and adoration until Mercutio hits the deck with a stab wound. A Winter’s Tale is not a tragedy. It’s really quite hard to classify. The first half is anguish and the displeasure of the king, and the second half turns into a love story adventure and family reunions. As with several of Shakespeare’s plays, a small device, that is almost unbelievable in its speed and action, has incredible consequences that form the rest of the play. At the end of this play, we receive a happy ending, forgiveness and love.
A slightly less academic reason to see the play is it is one of the literary origins of the name “Hermione”, as well as the classic stage direction “Exit: pursued by a bear”. You’ve got to want to see a bear. I mean, really. It’s a bear. Eating someone.
But on the whole, producing A Winter’s Tale is more interesting and engaging for me, because it diverges from the traditional outdoor comedy. Just because we can feel the sunset on our necks as the stage lights take over, and smell the grass and the remains of the pizza dinner, and the birds (and hopefully not the crowds) twittering overhead – it does not mean that comedy is the only thing that will keep an audience focused.
A few years ago, I was in an outdoor production of Henry V, a perfect example of a non-comedy (a history) that is suited to the outdoors. The battlefields, the traveling, the campfires…all this is more readily experienced by the audience in a park than in a theatre. I await the day that they do Macbeth and recreate the moors of Scotland on the grassy hills of High Park. After all, the outdoors are chilling as well as playful.
Fortunately, the weather report has begun to shine on us; it will now rain itself out in time to be cheerful on Friday. We have spent the past week or so preparing some materials to help spread the word. Brochures and Buttons are at the ready. The fabulous Lauren has created a logo for us. Check out the preview of the logo below on our current button:
Intermission Toronto 