Julia Nish-Lapidus & James Wallis of Shakespeare BASH’d

JULIA NISH-LAPIDUS
Julia is an actor, director, and producer, as well as a Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Shakespeare BASH’d, where she has produced all of the company’s productions. She has worked as the Managing Director of Common Boots Theatre and is now part of the team at The Theatre Centre. For Shakespeare BASH’d, Julia has directed The Comedy of Errors, and assistant directed The Changeling. She has also performed in many BASH’d productions, including The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Volpone (staged reading).

Selected Additional Credits: Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen and This Property is Condemned (Director, The Playwright Project), Modern Love (Co-Creator, Next Stage), As You Like It (Text Coach, Theatre By the Bay), and as an actor OVER, See Bob Run (Theatre Caravel), reasons to the pretty (The Labute Cycle), The Forest (Red One Theatre Collective), Dublin Carol (Fly on the Wall).​ Julia is a member of the Advisory Board for the Canadian Stage GYM program and a graduate of the joint acting program at UofT and Sheridan College.

JAMES WALLIS
James has been a Shakespeare fan all his life, having performed with Resurgence Theatre Company as a teenager and again as a professional later in his career.

After graduating from Ryerson Theatre School, James jumped right into the big bad world of commercial work and film & television acting. He has been seen in a number of national commercials, including spots for Boston Pizza, Honda, and Expedia. Also, he has appeared on The Jon Dore Show, XIII: The Series and in a number of feature films including: And Now A Word From Our Sponsors and The Movie Out Here.

In 2010, James co-founded Shakespeare BASH’d with his wife, Julia. For the company, James has directed staged readings of Romeo and Juliet (2010), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2011), Edward II (2015), and Volpone (2017), as well as the full productions of Romeo & Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night. He played Petruchio in the company’s Best of Fringe winning production of The Taming of the Shrew in 2012 and the remount in 2015, and played Benedick in their sold-out production of Much Ado About Nothing in the 2013 Toronto Fringe. In addition, here are some of James’ selected theatre credits: A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, Shakespeare’s Magic, and The Taming of the Shrew (Theatre by the Bay), Danny, King of the Basement (Roseneath Theatre, US Tour), Sleeping Beauty (Sudbury Theatre Centre), Paradise by the River (Shadowpath Theatre).

James just completed his second season at the Stratford Festival as part of the Michael Langham Workshop for Classical Directing. There he has assistant directed Macbeth, Bunny, and Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare BASH’d presents
Richard III
by William Shakespeare

February 6-11, 2018
at the Monarch Tavern (12 Clinton St)

Shakespeare’s epic drama about a powerful villain manipulating his way to the crown is given a barroom staging by Shakespeare BASH’d.
You don’t want to miss this bare-bones, visceral, and all too relevant production.

Tickets on sale now at www.shakespearebashd.com
$20 online
$25 at the door (pending availability)

SHOWTIMES:
Tuesday, February 6 – 7:30pm
Wednesday, February 7 – 7:30pm
Thursday, February 8 – 7:30pm
Friday, February 9 – 7:30pm
Saturday, February 10 – 2:00pm
Saturday, February 10 – 7:30pm
Sunday, February 11 – 2:00pm

Directed by Julia Nish-Lapidus

Featuring: Cosette Derome, Jade Douris, Jennifer Dzialoszynski, Suzette McCanny, Shalyn McFaul, Drew O’Hara, Trevor Pease, Catherine Rainville, James Wallis, Kelly Wong, Joseph Zita

Associate Director: Megan Miles
Stage Manager: Christopher Brackett
Fight Director: Nate Bitton
Movement Coach: Brad Cook
Marketing Design: Kyle Purcell

Website: www.shakespearebashd.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShakespeareBASHd/
Twitter: @ShakesBASHd
Instagram: @ShakesBASHd

Stageworthy:
http://www.stageworthypodcast.com
Twitter @stageworthyPod
Facebook: http://facebook.com/stageworthyPod

Transcript

Welcome to episode 111 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about Canadian theatre makers, featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

If you’re a first-time listener and you like what you hear, I hope you’ll subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please consider leaving a comment or rating. Your ratings help new people find the show.

If you want to drop me a line, you can find Stageworthy on Facebook and Twitter at StageWorthyPod, and you can find the website at StageWorthyPodcast.com. And you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at PhilRickaby, and my website is PhilRickaby.com. My guests this week are Julia Nish-Lapidus and James Wallace of Shakespeare BASH’d. Shakespeare BASH’d is presenting Richard III from February 6th to 11th at the Monarch Tavern in Toronto. So I know Shakespeare BASH’d from Fringe.

Okay. And I know my familiarity is with shows at the Victory Café. First off, how did you start doing Shakespeare as part of Fringe at the Victory Café? Where did that come from? It all goes back to our first date.

That’s a good way to start a story. Yeah. I mean, we were on our first date.

We’re both Shakespeare lovers. We talked about that a lot. And at a certain point, James said to me, kind of like a line, he was like, Oh, you know, I’ve always wanted to do Taming of the Shrew in a bar, and you should play Kate and I’ll play Petruchio.

And I was like, that’s not a complimentary character to offer someone on a first date. You should play a shrew. But we did.

That was our first full production was Taming of the Shrew in a bar at the Fringe. And it was the summer before our wedding. Was that at the Victory? Taming of the Shrew was at the Victory.

Yeah, it was our first Fringe show. It was our first before that we had done some staged readings, but we had never done a full production. So Taming of the Shrew was our first full production, which was great.

And it won Best of Fringe. Yeah. It kind of like kickstarted us.

Yeah, that’s great. And you sort of went back to the Victory like a set like, to me, it feels like you were there every year. We were.

We were five straight years. That is a lot of fringing. Yeah, it was something that we were very happy to do, but also quite exhausted by the final year.

And it was part of what we wanted to do, which was find ways to bring Shakespeare to great venues, more social kind of fun. Casual. Casual.

Sure. And that’s sort of where it started. So we always felt very loyal to the Fringe and they were always very good to us.

We had a great following and we always knew that we could have a great time at the Victory Cafe. Plus it made sense to us. I think that there was something when the venue was there, when it was, you know.

When the Fringe tent was right outside the Victory. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That sort of real big spark that came from that central area.

It was kind of magical being there for five years. And our last year was the last year the tent was there. It was the last year that the Victory Cafe was around.

Yeah. So it was kind of like a nice run and a nice time to end it. Yeah.

It’s interesting because I was up in the annex area and the Victory Cafe is reestablishing itself in a new location. But looking at it, I’m like, can it be the Victory Cafe if it’s not in that building? Not in that building. It’ll be interesting.

Very different. Nick who runs it, he also runs the Crafty Coyote across the street. So now he’s going to have two places like kitty corner to each other.

And I think the plan is to get the vibe of the Victory back. Okay. But we’ll see.

Nick’s smart. He’ll do it. Yeah.

He knows what his patrons want. It was a really special place, the Victory Cafe. We had so much fun there.

It was always a challenge, whether it be space or air conditioning or any number of things. That first summer there doing Taming of the Shrew, it was deadly in that hot space. Yeah, we were shocked people kept coming to be in that hot, hot room with us.

It was fun. It’s funny that when a show catches like that, that it doesn’t really matter if there’s no air conditioning in the room. People will just keep coming.

It was crazy. We were like, this is something we really want to do. We’re excited about it.

We found other artists who were excited about it too. So we were like, great, let’s do this. Let’s just give it a try.

No one really does Shakespeare on the Fringe, which is funny to say now because now lots of people do. But at the time, it was like a weird thing that we were doing. And no one did Shakespeare on bars.

But we were like, well, let’s give it a try. And all of a sudden, our first show sold out. And we had no idea how or why.

And we just discovered we had hit on something. We figured it out now, I think. Now we figured it out.

Not completely. It was kind of magical. The audience came to us.

It seemed to be something they were looking for. It’s a very controversial play, obviously. So having it happen in such a social and fun atmosphere where you could have a beer and sort of see the play in that context, I think it added a new experience.

And that’s what we were going after. And we had a really good show. The director, Art Double, he’s such a good clown.

And he really brought that spirit to the space. And so many old friends, thinking back on it now, it’s like some of our closest friends were in that show, that first show together. So it was very special to us, for sure.

It’s interesting you talking about bringing Shakespeare to, number one, the fringe, but also to putting it in places that people don’t expect it. A lot of times we find, like I know, I sometimes get frustrated with Shakespeare and the way it’s done. That it’s costumes and this, and Stratford this, and Varys stayed.

And combine that with the fact that a lot of people grew up or came through school with a negative feeling about Shakespeare because of how we teach it in schools. Because we teach it in schools to begin with. Was that something that you guys were thinking about when you started thinking about putting Shakespeare in a bar? Yeah.

I mean, we love it so much, but we’re very used to the responses to people when they first hear about Shakespeare. And kind of go, oh, yeah, well, I don’t really understand it. It’s hard to understand.

Oh, it’s no fun. I like to go and enjoy myself at something. I don’t want to sit and be proper.

And we’re like, yeah, but that’s not what Shakespeare intended with these plays. They were written for the masses. They were written for a group of people standing in a pit to cheer and boo and laugh.

And we were like, that’s what it should be, and people could enjoy it and understand it. And we found that they do. Sometimes your dad came to see one of our shows.

Yeah, my father, who’s quite intelligent, but he’s not certainly a Shakespeare buff by any means. Maybe he is now. But he said, you know, we did King John in this little punk rock venue called Junction City Musical.

It was really fun. And I came up to him at intermission, and I said, how are you doing? He handed me the beer. I said, do you enjoy yourself? And he said, well, it’s salsa.

Where are you? And I said, okay. He’s like, I don’t think I understand what’s happening. Well, what do you think is going on? And he told me this, this, and this person’s this.

And I was like, yeah, that’s basically what’s going on. He understood everything. He just assumed he couldn’t.

Right. Which I find, that’s a lot of it. People are like, no, I’m not going to understand Shakespeare.

And it’s like, no, no, no. You can. Just stop assuming you can’t.

Yeah. I think it comes from they make us read it in school. It’s not meant to be read.

Not just read it, like sit down with it open. But then they turn to people who don’t know what the text says and says, read this passage. And nobody, because you have to interpret it.

And once you know what it means, you can make other people understand what it means. It’s meant to be performed. Yeah.

And read aloud and have so much else going on with it that it brings it to life in a way that you can’t when you’re just like looking at it on a piece of paper. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, you identified it really well about interpretation. I mean, that’s the sort of great amount of impact that it can have from if it is at Stratford on these sort of lavish and beautiful and at times very intimate productions that I’ve seen and been a part of, been very fortunate to be a part of there. And, you know, versus us, who’s in a 50 seat theatre, bar, thank you.

Theatre, I’m doing air quotes right now. You know, and so like, I think Shakespeare can be big, it can be small, it can be intimate, it can be grand. I think it’s just what kind of interpretation are you trying to bring to it? Is it part of what the text is telling you? Is it true in that way to you? So that’s what Shakespeare can do.

I mean, high school is, you know, tough for a lot of things. I certainly enjoyed it, but I think I’m not the best test subject for enjoying Shakespeare in high school. But I agree with you.

It’s hard to read. It takes a long time to really understand how to do that. And it’s hard to teach.

It’s hard to read plays in general. Yeah. It’s not a skill that I think we learn easily.

No. And so reading a play that’s 400 years old in iambic pentameter, that’s not an easy thing. We’re not, I mean, interestingly, we’re not used to reading scripts.

And that was, to me, that was made apparent when the Harry Potter play was published and Indigo was advertising it like the new Harry Potter. People were like, it’s a new Harry Potter book. And they got it.

And they were like, what is this? This is, what is this? And people don’t know how to interpret a script. The online reviews were hilarious. I can imagine.

I can imagine. People were so angry that it was a play. Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, I think I agree with you. It’s hard to, it’s, we don’t, we don’t learn that skill right away.

Yeah. I remember being in school and I liked Shakespeare. Like, I had seen it.

Like, I think, I mean, the first play I saw, and it’s probably why it’s still, why I still have a soft spot for it, was As You Like It. People were like, it’s a problematic play. But I’m like, I just love it.

We love it. Because like the first one I saw, it’s like my first love. A play everybody loves to hate.

That’s right. So I had like, and that was my first exposure. And then I went into school and everybody was hating.

And I was like, what’s wrong with you guys? And then as I watched other people struggle with it, I really understood why they didn’t. Yeah. Because they were faced with reading it before seeing it.

Yeah. Makes a big difference. What is your theatre background? Like, why did you guys decide that this was a thing you were going to do? That’s a great question.

Why did we? Well, we fell in love and mutual love was of Shakespeare. And I think that was something that we did. But we both.

But your mom, you’re for that. Yeah, yeah. I was always drawn to Shakespeare since I was very young.

And I think you were too. I mean, that’s one of those things. I remember distinctly being sick when I was 11 years old and reading The Merchant of Venice.

And not really completely understanding it. My sister had a copy of The Complete Works and I picked it up and I read it. But being intrigued by it.

And I think it became more interesting to me. It became more of a… Like, I think for me, what I love about Shakespeare from then until now is that you can investigate. It’s so much.

It’s bottomless. It’s completely and utterly, unfathomably big and huge. And you can always dive into it and find something new.

So, I think I’ve always been that curious about it. Sure. I mean, my parents have always loved theatre and always exposed me to a lot of theatre, which was great.

And, I mean, from when I was very little, I had this little box full of those tiny little books that you have as a kid. Like, Little Robert Munch. But they were all, like, tiny little versions.

And in that little box was also a book of sonnets. All of Shakespeare’s sonnets in this tiny little book that I would read and have my parents read to me from a very young age. So, I always loved it.

I loved the words, the rhythm of it, the poetry. I just got really into it. So, when I turned 10, my birthday present was a complete works.

And I just started reading my way through it. My mom always laughed because James also, as a kid, had some Shakespeare books. And when she found that out, she said, Well, it was meant to be the only two children who read Shakespeare found each other.

Yeah, my grandmother used to take me to shows in Stratford. And also, like, you know, shows at the park, in my park, which I remember very distinctly, you know. So, I think it was, we were very, very, very, very fortunate to have that influence early on in our life.

And I think professionally was more of a sense of, I find Shakespeare such a very great equalizer for actors. And we’re both actors. We both were actors first before we became producers and directors.

And I always found it to be a great equalizer in the world of theatre and acting. And so, I always really loved being a part of any Shakespeare play. You know, working with Resurgence and New Market or Theatre by the Bay and Barry.

Like, when I was very young, getting out of school, like, I was always so mesmerized by what an ensemble can do with these plays. And how it challenged these actors. There are so many different things you can do with it.

It’s so much full of choices. The text gives you opportunities to make these really, really important, interesting choices in the moment. I also just also find it baffling how relevant the plays can still be.

And I sometimes like and sometimes am saddened by that fact. But it’s really interesting to think that something that was worth writing about hundreds of years ago is still something so relevant. Like, right now, we’re working on Richard III.

Couldn’t be more topical. Absolutely. And after this, we’re doing Measure for Measure.

And that’s why I say, like, sadly relevant. No, absolutely. But I find it exciting to think about these words that were said so long ago that can still have such resonance and relevance to us now.

I like that history. And I like the opportunity to reinvent it and figure out what it is for us now in 2017. The words, too, right? The words are so… That, to me, is always what I am absolutely excited by, is the words and what they can do in the moment.

I’ve been in the audience or on stage when I felt that energy of words and other actors and story. And that’s really what I go to, I gravitate towards. So, you know, I get really fortunate.

I remember, you know, talking about the words, I remember being in theatre school and the acting teacher and we got to our Shakespeare module in first year. And people were trying to work so hard to emote and things. And you’d just be like, it’s in there.

You don’t have to work at it. Just say the words and it works. And people were like, what do you mean? I just have to say the words.

But it’s so true. You don’t have to work really hard at it. I found actually emotion sometimes in Shakespeare is always tied to words.

I mean, emotion is almost always tied to a question sometimes or a metaphor, an image. So it’s a type of theatre that maybe we don’t produce as much now in terms of the way we write plays now. It’s a whole other conversation.

But Shakespeare is about what the text is resonating in that moment. You need Hamlet needs, you know, oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I? You know, he needs that outburst of and he needs rogue and peasant slave in order to express what he’s in that moment. Yeah.

To to sullied flesh. Like he’s so emotional. Yeah.

That play. And it’s all tied to it. It’s all tied to metaphor.

So I agree with you. And, you know, I’ve had some of the best teachers I can I can ever hope for. Ian Watson is was my teacher, school teacher.

And he was he’s a genius, in my opinion. So and also a high school teacher, Michael Halfon from Newmarket. He was really into Shakespeare.

And he brought that to us in our drama team. He made it he made it essential to us as we went through the drama years into OAC, which is an old thing. They don’t do that anymore.

I didn’t have OAC. Did you miss it? No, I was the double. I was the younger.

Oh, you were in the double cohort. We were both in the double cohort. But James was the OAC year and I was the grade 12 year.

Oh, that’s spooky. The double cohort. Oh, yes.

Yeah. It’s interesting thinking about the way that people you can because you can interpret Shakespeare in so many different ways. You can put it in different settings.

And I’ve done a few productions where or been involved in some productions where the interpretations were interesting, but they kind of get in the way. You can be so high concept that you keep butting up against Shakespeare telling the story. It’s almost like you can be too clever.

Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. It’s true. I mean, you can be very clever with the stuff and it can work.

Yeah, but it can also get in the way. I think we tend to go in the opposite direction of trying to not put too much concept. We like a nice bare bones sort of feel focusing on the words and the incredible actors who we get to work with.

Yeah, I mean, I believe this is a Shakespeare quote. I should know this, but it’s Saturday night. The truth will out.

I think that’s very true. I would say that in any form of cutting in Shakespeare’s adaptation, right? In any kind of interpretation, conceptualization, it is a form of adaptation. And I always find that I do cut the scripts because you have to.

You have to. They’re long or some stuff is not useful in that moment. So I find that.

But you always lose something. It’s never something of a subtraction into a better situation. Well, maybe not better is the right word.

A subtraction that becomes an addition. You always lose something and you always have to reckon with that. Yes.

I find that fascinating because when we look at these scripts, they are not finite. That’s not what they have to be. Frankly, some of them are still disputed to this day about whether what they are.

But we’re finding that in Richard right now working through the text. It’s a long play and we want to make sure people have a nice evening, but maybe not a four-hour evening. So the cuts that Julia has made are wonderful, but we do run up to things and we go, okay.

Like I cut this, so now this doesn’t make sense. You just have to be smart. Clever is a great thing.

It’s about being thoughtful about it. Sure. Because I did a production where they decided they were going to do Romeo and Juliet.

They were transplanting it into a Lord of the Flies situation, kids on an island. But then you start losing the parental relationships. Suddenly you’re butting up against what Shakespeare is trying to do and it’s difficult to get around it.

You’re dodging Shakespeare’s story in order to serve your concept. Where your concept should serve Shakespeare. Exactly.

You need to think about what the story is of that play and how something else can serve that. And make that clearer or more relatable for an audience in a present day or something like that. But you want to be careful not to take it somewhere where it makes no sense what the play is doing.

Unless you’re totally changing the play. You can do it, but you have to really… You can call it Shakespeare, but you can’t try to pretend that it’s the thing. Because you can cut around it and adapt it.

There are companies who do incredible adaptations. The Walking Shadows production of Macbeth that Shakespeare and the Rock did a few years ago was beautiful. It wasn’t Macbeth the play.

It was a beautiful adaptation of that story, those characters, the feeling of it. And they used the text. They did.

It was a different approach to it. I think it’s always about focus. What are you focusing on? You’re going to set Romeo and Juliet in the Lord of the Flies situation.

I necessarily wouldn’t do that. Okay, so why? That’s my question. I think the important question is when you’re going to do that, why? What does that do? Why did you make this choice? What does it bring to it? And you know what? There’s really smart directors out there that can make… Or companies, frankly.

It’s not just one person. It’s many people that can always make really smart decisions and really clever decisions or really streamline an idea, which I think is great. I’m more interested for me, and I don’t want to speak for Julia, but I assume.

I’m interested in what the play… How it’s written and what we can do with that. Adaptation for us is usually in either moving things, changing a couple of things, cutting things. Or just focusing the story.

Focusing the idea. Sometimes, like when we did Hamlet, Kathryn Rainville, the director, got rid of the external world. No Fortinbras and just really made it kind of more of a family drama.

Yeah. And it worked really well. Yeah.

I mean, the interesting thing… There’s so much in Hamlet. Have you seen the Brenna Hamlet? Yeah. All four hours.

The one thing that always strikes me about that four-hour marathon is… I left thinking, that’s why people cut. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s a beautiful piece of filmmaking.

It’s absolutely beautiful, but it does illustrate at points the necessity of cutting. There’s a lot in that play. It’s constantly… Again, anytime you do a play, whether it be by Shakespeare or not, why? Yes.

What are we doing with this play in this moment in time, right? Looking at something like Richard III, I think you have to reckon with the fact that it’s English history, interpreted English history, that there’s certain things that this audience in Canada may not understand, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to… They’re not going to hook onto it, right? They’re not going to find that interest level. It’s a fun play, I must say. Yeah.

And so there’s that sort of charismatic middle to it in Richard that you sort of always have that benchmark to go back to. But, I mean, I see everything. Anything that has Shakespeare attached to it, I see it, and sometimes I’m very impressed by what people can do, especially with some works that are taken of more sort of, I guess, collages of ideas that bring it in.

I find that stuff really interesting theatrically as well as Shakespeare-wise. Yeah. It’s interesting because you’re talking about how in Richard III we’re making reference to history that everybody in Shakespeare’s audience knew by heart and that we don’t, and yet still the play resonates because, I think, situations… Yeah, and because it was historical fiction still.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he pulled it from the actual history that everyone knew but then created these characters and these relationships and little details of what was happening with them and conversations they had and things like that and really made it real. So it’s the same way we are all watching The Crown right now on Netflix.

Yes, yeah. We’re so into it, and I’m not necessarily so into it because I care about that history so much, but I’m getting into the characters of it, and I think that’s where he succeeded with stuff like that. I’m glad you pointed that out because for a while there I was watching The Crown and people were like, what are you watching on Netflix? I’m watching The Crown and I can’t explain why.

Because it’s good and because the characters are interesting and not because I care what happened to any of them necessarily, but at least I haven’t really watched the second season yet. No spoilers, no spoilers. But in the first season, watching someone deal with these changes in her life is incredible, something that I can’t even imagine because I will never be a queen.

So it’s very cool to see that in a personal way with a character who you get to know. And I think that’s what the history plays do too, whether you can relate to becoming royal or not. That’s about good government too, right? The politics of those times were different.

Obviously they had different specificities or details, but in the end it resonates in a different, more I guess allegorical or archetypical way, and we’re seeing that now. Government is so hard not to read modern interpretation into something like Richard III. The number of times in your rehearsal someone’s like, well that’s Trump.

Yeah, exactly. It’s happening constantly. And we picked this show way before really this was the political climate.

And measure for measure too. And measure for measure as well. In the final show of our season, the whole Me Too movement and everything that’s going on now, this play is about this.

It’s about sexual assault and the ability, he literally says, who will believe thee, Isabel? I know! It’s like this one question. Again, there’s so much attached to that. To those four words? Yeah.

Five words, pardon me. It’s unfathomable how much that can still be with us today, this day, this moment. And Richard is an exaggeration of a tyrant because that’s what they were trying to find.

We’re living with a real exaggeration of a tyrant. That’s what’s amazing about it. It feels so strange.

Richard seems almost like a little more lovable than the guy we’ve gotten in real life. Well, that’s because Richard talks to you and tells you. Richard has this charm that just sort of like, because he’s building a relationship with the audience.

The audience is his closest friend in the show, which is one of my favorite things about the show. Yeah, it’s so cool. It’s also terrifying because he makes you complicit in it.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. As people are dying, the audience, as Richard’s best friend, are slowly realizing, oh, I’m kind of part of this.

He kept telling me what he was going to do, and I laughed at his jokes. And he said, is this okay? And I said, yeah, this is great. Yeah.

And I love that. Yeah. He makes everyone part of it.

Yeah. It’s great. Now that you’re not doing this at the Victory Cafe, first off, where is Richard happening? The Monarch Tavern.

Okay. Which we’ve done a number of shows at. A lot of our not-friend shows have been at the Monarch.

They’re amazing there. It’s like our second home now. Oh, yeah.

It’s such a cool place. Yeah. It’s one of our favorites.

Evan and Michael, who run the joiner, are so great. Yeah. But we’ve been working to kind of find bars throughout the city to not kind of just stick with one place.

Sure. But spread ourselves out a little bit. We have four.

We did two stage readings earlier this year, and we have two full productions coming up. And each one is at a different bar, which is a lot of fun. Yeah.

Where’s Measure for Measure happening? It’s the Junction City Music Hall again for the first time since King John. Since King John, yeah. So we’ll be going back to there.

And it’s really cool. I mean, we love the Junction itself. It’s a great place to be.

It’s really an interesting area of Toronto. And it’s this basement, like really small, intimate space. Music venue.

Yeah. And it just really spoke to us the first time we did it. Yeah.

I think we’re really excited about Measure for Measure because it’s an incredible group of people. Catherine Rainville, who’s our Associate Artistic Director, is going to be directing it. And I think that she’s really tapping into the now of it all.

And, yeah, I mean, venues are one of those things that are hard to find in this city. So we’re very fortunate to have so many great people that want to work with us. We’re finding that bars are excited about this idea, too, though, when we talk to people about it.

And I think it helps that we have a bit of a track record. But they’re really excited to have something different and to see what happens. And then to see that people come into this, yeah, they’re actually going to buy a lot of drinks and hang out.

And it’s going to be a really good time. And then at some point, everyone’s going to sit down and watch a play from 400 years ago. Yeah.

I mean, our parameters for a show at any venue is it’s an empty space with really good beer. Yeah. That’s what we’re hoping for.

So we’ve been very, very fortunate with that over the years. So, yeah. I really like that.

I mean, you’re naming a lot of plays that people don’t often do. Like, Who Does King John? Yeah. So it’s such a great play.

It really is a character drama. It’s about individuals in a world that is impressing upon this sort of government or this sort of community that no one wants to be a part of, which is really interesting. So, yeah.

And also because now we started doing the stage readings of plays that are written by his contemporaries. So we just did Volpone by Ben Johnson. I mean, talk about a play that’s about our time now.

It’s about greed and avarice and all these. Yeah. Manipulation.

And it’s about a person faking who they are in order to manipulate people to get what he wants. It’s a great study. Again, not chosen for any other reason, but it just spoke to us that we like that play.

I mean, that’s essentially when we sit down and say, what should we do? We say we like this play. What are we excited about? And as a Shakespeare company, I think that’s in the name, what is it about this moment in our history? When we did King John and now with Richard, the history plays are incredibly hard to produce. Because as Julia found out working through the play, there’s 100 characters or how many characters in Richard? Yeah, there were like 70-something characters.

I was like, what? They’re epic. We all have 70 actors. And I think rather than like a Twelfth Night, where it’s like 12 to 14, the comedies or even some of the tragedies.

Julia Caesar is a large play, but it’s not a huge play like Richard. But it’s fun. Also, like doing these plays now in a bare bones staging, there’s lots of opportunity to think outside the box, cast differently.

Where we, from really the beginning, have been really all about gender parity. Our King John was a woman. I played the male lead in Volpone.

Not Volpone, but Mosca, who is a great part traditionally male. And we read it and we were like, this is so good as a woman. It just gives you, there’s so many opportunities to kind of change things up and make it more relevant and interesting, I think.

Yeah, and I think the beginning of this company when we started it was about actors. And it was all about getting the best actors that we can find and the best actors to work with in the moment. And throw a script at them and say, what are we going to do together? What is this going to be? This is about ensemble.

This is about company. This is about story and play. And we have to challenge ourselves with difficult plays.

The difficult plays are what make us better. So even plays like, we did Love’s Labour’s Lost. That’s an incredibly hard play.

It’s deceptively. I think Comedy of Errors, which you directed a couple years ago, is a very hard play. I think of, we haven’t hit Lear yet, but when you look at plays like King Lear or Pericles or these really strong but vast plays, how do you interpret them? And who do you need to interpret that with? And we’re only as good as the people that we have the privilege of working with.

Yeah, I think we’re very keen on trying as much as we can to be into our own moment at this time as a company and also the moment in time as a world. And choosing in that realm. Yeah, so that people feel like watching these plays in 2017 or 2018 is, they’re getting something out of it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’re watching Shakespeare and don’t get anything out of it, then it’s almost like you’re back when you were forced to go see it in school. Yeah, exactly.

And it happens, and that’s unfortunate. But I don’t think it’s necessary. I think there’s a way to do it that can take you out of that and can maybe take that stigma off of Shakespeare if we can start moving more in this direction.

Because there are so many great indie companies, and the larger companies are doing it too, of doing these more thoughtful productions instead of just saying, well, this is how it’s always been done. That’s one of my least favorite things, is that this is how it’s always been done. I’m actually bored if they come out and they’re in pumpkin pants and whatever.

I don’t want to see Shakespeare in period anymore. I actually think those costumes get in the way now. You can get lost in those costumes as an actor.

It’s something to fight through. You’ve got to be smart. I think I’ve seen it and enjoyed that aspect of the design or the world.

We’re looking at it from a point of view of, that’s the times naturalism. I guess that’s what I’ve always seen. But if it becomes about the costumes, it becomes about that.

Not against costuming, that’s very important, but the words have to speak to us, to an actor now. In the theatre, you’re hearing it in the moment. It’s that sense of, it’s never going to be the same.

It’s always at that time. Again, as long as it’s why. It’s the why.

If you are answering that question for me and I can see that, then I’m into it. I think modern productions are fantastic. They’re hard.

If I see a cell phone on stage, I always worry. I’m like, okay, these are great. But a lot of Shakespeare is miscommunication.

There’s certain plays and certain things where if you could just call somebody up and ask them, it doesn’t work. If Othello can call Iago or call Desdemona and say, hey, is this a thing? The play’s over. Or he can just talk to her in general.

Well, there’s that. Romeo and Juliet, it was a couple years ago they did a social media experiment with it. I was like, well, social media would have made this play completely irrelevant.

She would have texted him, we’re meeting at the thing. Where are you? I’m not saying it can’t be done, because I’ve seen it being done well. It’s difficult to do well.

I always kind of go, hmm. I get worried. I think worry would be the one thing.

It’s interesting, though. Again, we also work bare bones and out of sheer necessity for the story and the text and the actors. We tend to keep things very simple.

We did Twelfth Night back in February. As a director, I was really inspired by this play is about rejuvenation. Life has been so horrible.

Now it’s going to get better. We sort of loosely based it in the early 20th century. After the First World War, the lost generation was gone, and now there’s going to be a rejuvenation.

Everybody’s just so happy to be alive, and that’s what’s going to be something that they can cling to. Whether or not it worked, it’s not for me to know. But again, we have to approximate that, because we’re working in small budget land.

We’re always in a bar. There’s something freeing about a limitation. If you know that you’re always going to be in a bar, I think you decide whether or not, is this play in a bar? Is the audience separate from it? But this is our space, and we have to live within it.

I think it opens you up to new opportunities, and forces you to be even more creative sometimes. We always talk about innovation by necessity. Because we don’t necessarily have money for things, or huge resources, or things like that.

We really have to be creative about how things are done. Sometimes that can create such lovely theatrical magic. I love that about theatre, when you have to get creative because of limitations.

And it works so much better than if you could afford all of the things. Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. There are times where we do a show, and I’m like, you know, if someone handed me tons of money, I’d want to put it in everyone’s pockets.

But I don’t know if I’d change the way we’re doing this play. Just by having some help. Yeah, just maybe pay some people to help me with some of the things.

Some of the other stuff. As producers of this, is your season two shows? How many shows do you do in a season? We’re doing four this year, which we’ve done for the last… Well, it varies. It varies, yeah.

Three to four. But this year was two staged readings, and two full productions. As a producer, there’s two of you.

And do you find that producing is your full-time job? Or as much as a full-time job? It’s a lot. I’ve worked as a producer for a while, so luckily I know a fair amount. I’m not kind of figuring it out as I go.

I have a good knowledge base. A great knowledge base. Which we’ve worked with.

She’s an amazing producer. Because I know a lot of producing, especially self-producing, comes from someone just starting. And I did plenty of that.

And then kind of made it my job for a while. So we’re lucky that we have kind of figured out what we want to do, and how we want to do it. It doesn’t mean it’s any less work.

It’s so much work. It’s a huge amount of work. I wouldn’t call it a full-time job, because we do have moments where we can focus on other things.

But it is constantly thinking about… It’s constant. We go on vacations and spend the whole time planning and talking and imagining and dreaming. And we love it.

So it doesn’t feel horrible to be constantly thinking about it. No. It’s a lot of work.

But it’s a lot of work, but it’s exciting work, and we love it. And we get to work with such amazing people, and often give opportunities and parts to people who we think are incredible and we’re not seeing out there doing the things that we think the world should see them do. So that’s exciting, and we get to do it all together.

Yeah, it’s nice to work together, which we’ve kind of worked hard at maintaining that relationship personally and professionally. There’s just certain things that Julia is better at than I am, or maybe not better, more equipped, let’s say. Or I’m more equipped, too.

Or I’m just more interested in… When it comes to the stage readings, I’m trying more and more to understand the contemporaries and what those plays resonate with, and reading all that I can about that period. So then I’ll say, Okay, well, I think we should do this play. And Julia will be like, Okay, so now we have to find a venue.

And she’ll make it all logistics. And then she’ll say, Okay, what is the play about? And she’ll read it, and she’ll interpret it her way, and it’s a give and take. And then Catherine, who’s our associate, who is also a great middle ground, a great third voice, maybe third vote, is always a great person to say, Well, what about this? And then we have amazing support from so many people.

Jade Duras, who is constantly helping you, and Drew O’Hara, her fiancé, who are two of our best friends, and they’re always just like, So it’s always about community, and we work very hard, but we could not do it on our own, and we could not do it without each other, I don’t believe. That’s true. And we love it.

You have to love it. You have to want to do it. Absolutely.

I mean, with the amount of work that it has to be to do these shows, the stage readings, the performances, and all of that, if you didn’t love it, you would be torturing yourself. Yeah. You shouldn’t do it.

Yeah, absolutely. You shouldn’t do it. But it’s exciting.

I mean, our first full production was in 2012, so it’s been five years that we’ve had seasons and done full shows and things like that, and every year it gets bigger, and we hit new milestones, and that’s exciting to see, too, to think about it and be like, it was only five years ago when we were like, maybe this will work? Maybe someone will want to come see this? Yeah. So to think what’s happened in that time is actually a great motivation to continue putting in the work and the effort, because a lot is possible, and a lot has changed since then, and it’s exciting to see that. I agree.

During the readings of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, are there particular contemporaries that you’re most excited to investigate? That’s a good question. Well, I mean, when we started, I love stage readings. I think they’re such, especially with Shakespeare, because the poetry is so, you can, you can, I’m not saying it’s the best way to do it, you can just take in the play that way through actors speaking it and then sort of visualizing it for yourself in the audience.

I mean, we’re very staged with our readings. We keep it moving. We have some things.

And we rehearse them. And we do rehearse them. It’s a different kind of rehearsal period, but we’ve gotten very good at it.

So we started that way. We did Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream just because really we both wanted to do it and said, okay, but this is the way it’s going to work for now. Sure.

And then when it came down to continuing the tradition of that, I thought it was best, and Julia agreed, that we move towards more different plays. Like I don’t, I think having, you know, our first stage reading of them was Edward II by Christopher Marlowe. So Marlowe is probably one of Shakespeare’s most important contemporaries.

And his work is so different, but so similar in a way. And he, in that play especially, it’s, you know, whether or not it’s, it was the influencer of Richard II, whether or not it was influenced by Richard II, and also the fact that it is about a homosexual king in the world of that time when it was, that was never going to be spoken of on the surface. So, and it became, it became something that we were really excited about.

It’s fun to explore a similar style and find the differences. Like we just worked on a Ben Johnson play, and I realized that he’s, there’s this great similarity and you’re using the same skill set to explore the text, but he’s just like a cruder version of Shakespeare. Like it’s just, and like I mean that in the best way possible because I love it, but he’s, my favorite phrase that he uses is wind fucker.

And it’s for someone with gas. They are a wind fucker. And I was like, of course that’s how Ben Johnson, Shakespeare would find this like beautiful, eloquent way of saying it.

Sure. Not Johnson. Well, I mean, Ben Johnson is a satirist through and through.

He was always looking at his contemporary world and saying, this is how I’m going to turn it on its head. He was also like, he was also kind of this angry egotist. His biography is absolutely fascinating.

He’s one of the most fascinating people to listen and to read about. So, I mean, he was, he was on the high on the list and Thomas Middleton and what, in conjunction with William Raleigh, we did The Changeling. I just love that play.

I think Thomas Middleton is, is slowly becoming one of the more important contemporaries in our modern critical history. There’s so many, you know, John Webster is probably the best writer other than Shakespeare. John Ford is a unique writer.

You know, I’m sure my overly scholarly friends like A.J. Richardson will now want to throw in a few on the talk when we talk. But I mean, there is a, there is a, there is a vast resource of great plays and a lot of crappy plays, but they’re, they’re interesting, you know, so that’s what we always say. I guess when we come together and we say, what are we going to choose for this? We go, what’s interesting? And, you know, I think for Valpone, it’s probably one of the, one of the most grossly funny plays I’ve ever worked on.

So funny and horrible. It’s a horrible play. Like it’s mean.

It’s nasty. But it’s incredible. But what’s really cool is to watch an audience hear a play for the first time.

Yeah. Because you don’t get that so much with Shakespeare. No.

Sometimes you do. King John, we had a lot of people who had never seen it before. you know, Richard III, most people know what’s going to happen when they come to see it.

But Valpone, I’m going to say 90% of our audience that night had no clue what was going to happen. yeah. That’s pretty cool with these plays.

That’s exciting. It’s a play that’s like 500, 600 years old and people are like, we’ll be discovering it for the first time. And discovering Johnson.

Yeah. You know, as a writer. we don’t produce Johnson very often.

Unless it’s at Stratford or it’s at a university. And I’m not saying that we, I’m not, I would never say that we have to produce any play more, especially 400 year old plays. But, I do think that he is, he is a writer that is of this time, sometimes slightly more than Shakespeare.

Yeah. Because we live in such a harsh world right now, it’s not even the right word for it, that he takes on that harshness. Yeah.

You know, I always said he really, he was a moralist in the fact that he turned it on your face to say, to look, to make you look at it and say, this is what’s wrong with the world. And then he’d have this little smile on the side of his face. Johnson was always like, you know, I’m not, not a part of this at all.

So, you know, he, he was very apparently trying to go after the morals of the time, satirize these people. Well, Shakespeare is a bit, is, is far more ambiguous. And reading through the plays, you just get that, you know, what is Hamlet really all about? You know, what is Twelfth Night really all about? I think Shakespeare is asking questions, not really giving answers.

Sure. Not to say that Johnson isn’t doing the same thing, but he’s more forthcoming with his answers, I would say, than most people. Or his opinion.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, The Changeling is a beautiful play.

It’s one of the best plays, I think, written in that time. It is like, it’s a, it’s a thrill ride. You know, it’s, it should be produced all the time.

It was just done at Stratford, and I think it should, it’s, it’s a great play. You know, there’s, you know, Marlow’s plays are controversial, as much as Shakespeare’s plays are controversial. yeah, yeah.

I mean, doing the Jew of Malta now would be a very big feat, even though I really like that. No, You can almost, you can, but you can’t even do Merchant of Venice these days. No, that’s a, yeah, that’s, that’s a tough one.

I’m Jewish. Yeah. And it’s one that I’ve struggled a lot with.

I’m sure. I, I have trouble sometimes sitting in an audience and watching that play, and watching people laugh at things that I think, like, are you laughing at the wit of the writing? Or are you laughing at this character? It’s a tough, yeah. and some things that I would find offensive.

Sure. But, it’s also one of those things that more and more, and the more we keep talking about it, I keep thinking, maybe it’s something I would like to direct at some point. Hmm.

I think I don’t want someone else to direct it. Yeah. For our company.

That would make me uncomfortable, but maybe there’s something in there for me. that I want to explore. Because it’s also still a really interesting and beautiful play.

Yeah. But I think you just need to be very careful about how it’s presented. Sure.

And everybody has their Merchant of Venice, right? You know, for some, the Taming of the Shrew is a play that they just cannot buy. Yeah. And I understand that.

Othello is another play that it just has a, a very difficult racial dynamic that is hard for people to stomach, and I understand that. There’s so much of that in these plays. Hmm.

You know, like Two Gentlemen of Roma is a really hard play. It is really. That was a really good one.

I like that. Again, I’m that kind of person that I like, I like everything. Either everything’s interesting or nothing’s interesting.

Sure. So, I mean, and looking at the contemporaries, there’s so much in those plays that are, that time’s even worse than what, you know, Shakespeare’s putting out there. I mean, if you hold up The Jew of Malta versus The Merchant of Venice, they’re very different plays, first of all.

The way that that dynamic of Judaism is, is treated in those plays is much different. It’s night and day. Well, it’s why I can consider doing The Merchant of Venice, but I have no interest in touching The Jew of Malta.

Well, let’s talk about it. We won’t do Marlowe for a while. In, in, in doing the contemporaries, does that make, you know, there are those people who are like, Shakespeare didn’t write those plays, that whole thing.

Does actually looking at some of those people that, that those guys say, well, obviously Ben Johnson wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Does that sort of give you like, perspective on, there is no fucking way that Johnson wrote Shakespeare. This is something, James has gotten into fights with people at bars.

Sure. About this, like people who are sitting at another table, and he overhears them talking, and he gets angry. No, come on.

They come over to us, you make me sound like a monster. I go over to them, they’re just talking, I’m like, wait a minute, you know? It is, it is a touchy subject because, in my opinion, 150% Shakespeare wrote the plays by William Shakespeare. There’s interesting ideas, like recently, there’s new evidence that suggests maybe Henry VI is a collaborative play.

I haven’t read that evidence, so I don’t know what it is. When I read that play, most of it speaks to Shakespeare. Right now, I’m preparing to direct Titus Andronicus for Hart House Theatre.

I’m very excited. Hello, everybody there. It’s a play that is thought to be extremely collaborative.

If not the first part written by a writer by the name of George Peel, which he’s a very novice writer considering who Shakespeare was. Did Shakespeare collaborate with him? Did Shakespeare take an old play that was written by Peel and then spruce it up? I don’t know. My gut tells me that Shakespeare wrote the entire play, and there’s a lot of reasons, and I could go into in-depth, but no one’s that interested about it other than me.

So, in my mind, 150% Shakespeare wrote these plays. Sure. People can believe whatever they want.

I will have conversations with them, and that will be what that is. I find that when I’m looking at the plays by other people, that to me, there’s no way. No, they’re so different.

They write in such different ways. That was one of the things we really liked about our first stage reading with Christopher Marlowe, is we found a lot of the actors going, it’s what you were saying, Jules. It’s similar, but it’s different.

Marlowe is so, it’s forward moving beyond belief. You’ve got to keep up with that train. It’s going down that hill.

You’ve got to catch the argument where you can. Shakespeare will have those moments where he’ll go off on tangents, and he’ll come back to the point, and the metaphor is much more extended in Shakespeare. It’s the same type of work.

As an actor, you’re approaching it in the same way, but there’s just no way reading those words aloud that you would confuse one for the other. Sure. They are so drastically different.

Ben Johnson is, to me, probably the most important contemporary of Shakespeare, because they’re night and day. They’re absolutely different. They write differently.

The way they look at things are different. It’s not proof, but it’s pretty good evidence that I’m not. I’m with you there.

There’s never been a question in my mind. One of those interesting things when, because I feel like a lot of the people who go into that, they either look at the plays in such an academic way that they don’t think about how they’re read and how they feel. I think that once you start reading them out loud, it’s so obvious.

But even academics in England, the United States, and Canada, so many academics have proved through close reading and historical evidence that it’s most likely, without being certain, that Shakespeare wrote these plays. If you read a book called William Shakespeare, A Documentary of Life by Samuel Schoenenbaum. I hope I got that name right, because if I don’t, I’m going to hear about it.

It is a beautiful portrait of who Shakespeare was by using simple facts, documented facts. One of the things that sometimes, it’s because it’s a very emotional, it’s a personal, it’s the way we look at writers now. We know so much about writers, but back then we didn’t.

If you look at writers like Thomas Decker, who was another playwright at the time, and a pamphletist, pamphletist, I don’t know how to say the word. We don’t know much about his life. We don’t know a ton about Marlowe.

We have more conjecture about Marlowe than we have about Shakespeare. Or as much, he was thought to be a spy, he was killed because of a reckoning at a bar. We understand all this, this is all history.

I just say the evidence to me closely and pretty convincingly points to this, so I’m just not even going to get into that other emotional argument. I can’t get into it. It’s just going to be me spouting out.

That is another podcast episode. When is Richard III happening? It is in February, the 6th to the 11th. Nice.

Yeah, starring James as Richard III. Yes. And my friend Suzette McCanny.

And Suzette McCanny, she’s playing Margaret and Prince Edward and a whole bunch of characters. Everyone other than James plays a whole bunch of characters. Well, they kind of have to.

They have to. I mean, I’ve cut it down a lot in terms of the number of characters, kind of combining people or cutting people entirely, but no, everyone still has to play a lot of people. Where can we find you guys and Shakespeare Bashed online? We are Shakespeare Bashed on Facebook, at Shakespeare Bashed on Twitter and Instagram and Shakespeare BASH’d.com. And it’s spelled S-H-A-K-E-S-P-E-A-R-E-B-A-S-H-D.com. Did I get that right? I hope that was right.

If it’s not, it’s going to be in the show notes. Don’t worry. I’m going to make sure that it’s there.

Bashed is without an E is what he’s trying to say. No E in Bashed is the important part. And all our social media is the two of us and we don’t have any of our own personal social media.

That works out. Our Instagram and Twitter is just us posting pictures of beers we drink and plays we see. Well, that’s legit.

Yeah, these are the things we do. Those are the two things I like in this world. Thanks a lot, you guys.

This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.