Return of the Mac

Des McAnuff has taken over as the sole artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. (Stratford Shakespeare Festival)

One snowy Friday last month, I sat down for some face time with Des McAnuff. At that point, he was one of the three new artistic directors of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. To replace Richard Monette, who was retiring after a record 14 seasons at the helm, the festival had installed McAnuff and colleagues Marti Maraden and Don Shipley as a much-ballyhooed artistic “triumvirate” — a trio of well-connected theatre vets who would choose Stratford’s programming and direct some of its productions.

McAnuff seemed the flashiest and least likely candidate to help run Canada’s biggest classical theatre. Sure, he grew up in southern Ontario and began his directing career in Toronto in the 1970s. But his reputation was built in the U.S. and founded largely on a series of Tony Award-winning Broadway musicals: Big River, The Who’s Tommy and, most recently, Jersey Boys. And here he was, at a festival where he’d last directed in 1983, staging a huge production of Romeo and Juliet to help kick off the 2008 season.

A dapper, ginger-haired man who bears a passing resemblance to Tony Blair, the 55-year-old McAnuff has divided much of the last 25 years between San Diego, where he ran the La Jolla Playhouse, and New York. In his time at La Jolla, he turned the once-moribund theatre into a national launch pad for Broadway shows, attracting and collaborating with such celebrity artists as Pete Townshend, Billy Crystal, Matthew Broderick and The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. McAnuff pulled up stakes in California to move to Stratford, but kept his New York place — a sign that he’s still keeping one foot on the Great White Way.

We met during McAnuff’s lunch break, in the administrative offices at Stratford’s Festival Theatre. He’d brought along a meal of spaghetti, meatballs and Caesar salad. It remained largely uneaten as he spoke enthusiastically about his return to Stratford, his passion for classical theatre and his plans for the festival’s future.

“We’re all very different people and I think we bring different things to the table,” he said of the Stratford triumvirate. “It will take some time to find an equilibrium to get a completely coherent, united artistic policy. But I think it’s worth doing.”

Later that day, after I had left, the proverbial excrement hit the fan.

McAnuff, Maraden and Shipley apparently met that afternoon with general director Antoni Cimolino, the festival’s chief administrator. Shipley and Maraden felt the attempt to make decisions by consensus wasn’t working, and they were being shafted. By the following week, Shipley and Maraden had formally resigned, and Cimolino and his staff were in damage-control mode. McAnuff, meanwhile, emerged as the sole artistic director, the “last man standing” in the words of both the New York Times and the Globe and Mail.

We won’t know exactly what went down until we hear all sides of the story. So far, Maraden has issued a statement citing creative interference from Cimolino as the reason for her departure. Shipley has declined to comment. McAnuff and Cimolino, having done a round of explanatory interviews, want to move on.

Gareth Potter, right, and Nikki M. James take the title roles in Stratford's multi-racial version of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Des McAnuff. (David Hou/Canadian Press)

Despite the shake-up, the festival is going forward with the ambitious 17-play season that McAnuff, Maraden and Shipley planned. (Maraden is still directing All’s Well That Ends Well and The Trojan Women; Shipley’s assignment, a double bill starring Brian Dennehy, has been given to other directors.) Performances get under way April 23 with the first preview of Hamlet, starring Ben Carlson and directed by Adrian Noble. McAnuff, meanwhile, is deep into final rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet, which starts May 7.

McAnuff claims the strife hasn’t affected his work. “It would be so indulgent and presumptuous of me to let anything interfere with that,” he says, this time in a phone interview from his festival office. “You know, if you have a fight with your aunt Phyllis, you have to check it at the door of the rehearsal hall.”

Besides, he says his job so far hasn’t changed all that much. Cimolino is still handling a lot of the administrative work, as he did when there were three artistic directors. “But I will definitely be looking to increase the support staff,” McAnuff adds. “There will definitely be changes in the way we organize the artistic department.”

Still, to paraphrase Twelfth Night, McAnuff has had the Stratford directorship thrust upon him. He bought into the triumvirate idea because it would allow him to direct at Stratford without being tied down to the place. A globe-trotting director with a finger in many pies, he’s still overseeing various productions of Jersey Boys — including one premiering in Toronto in August — and developing other projects. Among them is a theatrical adaptation of the Flaming Lips album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which he’s working on with Aaron Sorkin and the Lips’ resident genius, Wayne Coyne.

“We have an understanding here that I do have a creative life outside of Stratford,” says McAnuff. “And I have contractual obligations that I’m not free to renege on. I’m hoping we can achieve a balance. I’ve done this most of my career, so I don’t foresee a huge problem, or I wouldn’t be accepting the responsibility.”

What brought him to the festival was the desire to direct Shakespeare and other classic plays on a scale comparable to the musicals that have made his name. “The classics have definitely always been part of my menu as an artist,” he says, “but it’s become more difficult to do large-canvas works at many theatres. That was one of my struggles at La Jolla. When we did do a classic, it would tend to be a smaller one, just due to resources. The chief reason that I’m here is to work with a company of actors on the classical repertory.”

His multi-racial Romeo and Juliet pairs Canadian classical actor Gareth Potter as Romeo with a Juliet played by one of his musical-theatre protégées — U.S. singer-actress Nikki M. James. McAnuff directed James in a revival of The Wiz a couple of years ago, but he says he’s known her since she was a stage-struck kid.

“She was actually a Stage Door Janie for a show I did on Broadway,” he recalls fondly, referring to his 1995 production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, starring Matthew Broderick and Megan Mullally. “Nikki used to show up at the theatre as a fan. Megan took a real shine to her, and Nikki and her friend used to perform show tunes for the cast backstage.”

McAnuff’s second production this season, opening in August, will be one of Stratford’s rare forays into Shaw country: a staging of George Bernard Shaw’s historical comedy Caesar and Cleopatra, starring Christopher Plummer. McAnuff says the play was Plummer’s idea. “We wanted to do a project together and [Julius Caesar] was a role he really wanted to play. Chris is really an exceptional actor who has a great sense of himself and what he should be doing. He was brilliant in Inherit the Wind on Broadway last year, as was Brian Dennehy.”

Cast members of Jersey Boys perform at the 2007 Tony Awards in New York. With a string of past hits, McAnuff is unlikely to abandon Broadway. (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

Dennehy is also part of this year’s unusually starry season. Other notables making their Stratford debuts include Hamlet director Adrian Noble, the former head of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, and British actor-author Simon Callow, who will be premiering a new solo show based on Shakespeare’s sonnets. McAnuff hopes to bring more star power to Stratford in the future.

“From the Alec Guinness days, there’s been a history of that here,” he points out. “I definitely embrace that tradition. And when you talk of stars,” he adds, “I’m hoping the projects themselves are going to be stars as well. That’s going to be extremely important.”

Does McAnuff see Stratford as a potential springboard for commercial productions — perhaps the way the Royal Shakespeare Company under Trevor Nunn spawned West End-Broadway hits like Les Misérables and Nicholas Nickleby?

“I’d love to do something like that at Stratford,” McAnuff replies. “There are skills and talents here that could be brought to bear on projects like that, which have a classical association. And I would love to see that happen to the festival in terms of [providing] income streams, too. Royalty income is an awfully nice thing to have.”

McAnuff doesn’t rule out Stratford as a home for more offbeat efforts, too. Like, say, that Flaming Lips musical. “It certainly would be unusual,” he admits. But it would fit in with his belief that the festival should be doing more new work. “I feel it’s critically important, when you’re doing the great plays in the history of theatre, that you put living writers and their works side by side with them,” he says. “The new work informs the old plays, and keeps them from turning into relics.”

A future Stratford season with, say, King Lear and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots? That would be something to see.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival runs April 23-Nov. 9 in Stratford, Ont.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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