Colm Before the Storm

A moment of reflection: Colm Feore plays the title character in Don Juan at the Stratford theatre festival this summer. Photo David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada.

Seinfeld fans will remember the episode where George Costanza gets fired from the New York Yankees with a big severance package; he decides to make the most of it by proclaiming “the Summer of George.” Well, at the Stratford Festival they seem to have proclaimed 2006 “the Summer of Colm” — and they’re certainly making the most of him.

Colm Feore, one of Canada’s busiest film and television actors, has returned to the Stratford fold to take on not one, not two, but three leading roles. No, wait: make that four. Not only is he playing Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and the pickpocket tutor Fagin in the musical Oliver!, he’s also performing the title role of Molière’s Don Juan, in English and the original French.

“I’m treating it as four [roles],” says a lively Feore backstage at the Festival Theatre, with the bring-it-on gusto of someone who loves a challenge. “As I’ve said to the director [Lorraine Pintal], I reserve the right to play Don Juan differently than Dom Juan [his French name]. Because it will be different in French; something is always lost in translation.”

Feore has squeezed our noon-hour interview into a typically hectic day that includes a matinee of Oliver! and a rehearsal for Don Juan in the evening. Between chatting with me and donning the wig, beard and bulky costume he needs to play Fagin, Feore has a window of about 30 minutes to play dutiful father and race home to check up on the kids. It’s all part of the ongoing juggling act that he signed on for when he agreed to do his first full season at Stratford in 12 years. “You hope, like the brothers Karamazov, you can keep the chainsaws and bowling balls and fiery torches in the air and it won’t all fall apart,” he says with a laugh.

Feore has been alternating between Coriolanus and Oliver! on the Stratford stage since May, and adds the English Don Juan to his repertoire in August. The latter opens Aug. 11 — on the same day, coincidentally, as his latest film, a bilingual buddy movie entitled Bon Cop, Bad Cop. The French Don Juan will be thrown into the mix in October.

I remind him that he’s pulled off this kind of feat before — back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when he first became a Stratford star.

“Yes,” agrees Feore, who turns 48 in August, “but I did it in my youth! I left [Stratford] in ’94 and that was the last time I did this much work. In fact, I probably didn’t work this hard then. Now I’m a bit more sensible about it, though. I’m trying to be very careful in order to remain fit enough to accomplish all this stuff in the style that I want to do it.”

Failed statesman: From left, Coriolanus (Feore), Cominius (Stephen Russell) and Menenius (Paul Soles) in the Shakespearian tragedy Coriolanus. Photo David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada.

To judge from his appearance, Feore isn’t having a problem staying in shape. His Trudeau-like fringe of hair may be going grey, but he still looks as lean and hungry as Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a role he’s played both at Stratford (in 1990) and more recently on Broadway, opposite Denzel Washington. However, apart from doing stretches to keep himself supple for Coriolanus’s sword fights and the dance numbers in Oliver!, Feore says he doesn’t have time to exercise. “Every moment of my day is spoken for. With a show like Coriolanus, I have to do the entire show out loud to myself before I come into the theatre, which takes a certain amount of time, and I’m trying to learn Don Juan at the same time. And as an extra challenge, I keep repeating as much of Julius Caesar as I can remember to keep the elasticity of [my memory].”

Is he ever worried he might accidentally speak some lines from that play while performing in Coriolanus? “I am,” he admits, “but I’m pretty convinced the audience will enjoy it almost as much. ‘Ah, this is a Shakespeare test — spot the other play!’”

Feore has been performing Shakespeare for most of his adult life. Born in Boston and raised in Windsor, Ont., he joined the Stratford company in 1981 fresh from Canada’s National Theatre School, and was quickly recognized as a gifted young classical actor. When he finally left Stratford, during the height of his popularity at the venerable Shakespearean festival, it was to gamble on a screen career, which has paid off handsomely. In Canada, he’s embodied a pair of national icons in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and the miniseries Trudeau. In Hollywood, he’s become a go-to guy when action directors need a suave villain to tangle with Ben Affleck or Vin Diesel. His theatre work, meanwhile, has been limited to occasional high-profile projects like last year’s Broadway Caesar. (Notoriously nasty New York theatre critic John Simon, who trashed the show, singled out Feore as its only virtue, dubbing him “terrific.”)

During Feore’s absence, Stratford often came calling, luring him back briefly for the 50th anniversary season in 2002, when he played Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. Apart from that, he had been reluctant to commit to the festival’s eight-month schedule unless he had a full slate of roles.

“I said to [artistic director] Richard Monette, ‘If I’m going to come, I’ve got to be completely immersed in it,’” he says.

Besides, Feore felt it was time for an acting workout. “Doing big, hard roles, I believe, makes you better. It’s stretching all the muscles.”

Playing Coriolanus, the brave Roman general whose pride leads to his downfall, is a huge undertaking. “It makes Hamlet look like Pinocchio in comparison,” jokes Feore. That said, for the longest time, he found Fagin in Oliver! to be more physically taxing. The Lionel Bart musical of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist calls on Feore to sing, dance and shepherd a ragtag gang of juvenile thieves, and do it all in a costume that Feore refers to as “upholstery.”

Deep pockets: Feore as the pickpocket Fagin in Oliver! Photo David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada.

“It’s like wearing a chesterfield,” he says of the multi-layered Victorian garb in which Fagin hides his ill-gotten gains. The outfit was created by the famed stage and film designer Santo Loquasto. “I think I’ve lost about 25 pounds sweating right through the two shirts, the vest, the 65 handkerchiefs and this big overcoat, which is 20 pounds to begin with.”

Now that he has those two roles nailed down, Feore is wrestling with Don Juan. In Molière’s comedy, the great lover doesn’t just seduce and abandon women; he’s also a philosopher who glibly justifies his heartless deeds. As with arrogant Coriolanus and the reprehensible Fagin, Feore finds his task is to make us understand the man. “Don Juan has got to be attractive, or we’re not going to care. He’s got to seduce us with the ideas that he presents.”

The production, co-presented with Montreal’s Théâtre du nouveau monde, marks the first time Stratford has done a play in French since the 1950s. Feore and most of the cast will play in both the English and French versions, and that’s when the actor’s prodigious memory will really be put to the test. Surprisingly, Feore reveals that he isn’t bilingual — although he may well be by the end of this year. He had to speak a lot of French for Bon Cop, Bad Cop, in which he co-stars with Quebec comic Patrick Huard as an odd-couple police duo. These days, he’s trying to use Canada’s other official language as much as possible. “I will only say I make every effort every day to get better,” he says, “as my daughter will attest. She says, ‘It’s all French at our house.’”

The daughter in question is nine-year-old Anna. She and her older brothers, Thomas and Jack, are getting a rare chance to spend quantity time with dad and mom this year. (Feore’s wife, director Donna Feore, staged and choreographed Oliver! and is also choreographing Don Juan.) Film and TV work has often kept Feore away from his Stratford home in the past, although he says he isn’t driven solely by the big paycheques. “My feeling has always been that if we break even and the family manages to stay together, then we win,” he says.

So far, the Summer of Colm looks like a winning season for Feore — certainly a whole lot better than the ill-fated Summer of George (which ended up with the luckless Costanza losing the use of his legs). Feore’s Coriolanus has garnered praise, Oliver! is a hit and, knock on stage wood, Don Juan will continue the streak. As for the actor himself, he’s feeling like an athlete at the top of his game.

“I was in my neighbour’s pool the other day,” he says. “I went to the bottom and when I came up, my daughter said, ‘Wow, you can stay down a long time, Daddy!’ I thought, ‘She’s right. I just took a breath that would be enough to say 25 lines of Shakespeare.’ Something’s happened. I’ve discovered that I can actually do more.”

Don Juan in English runs from Aug. 1 to Oct. 10, and in French from Oct. 12 to 20, at the Stratford Festival of Canada.

Martin Morrow is an author and critic based in London, Ont.

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