Christopher Plummer is an impossibly jocular old rascal. He dances jigs in his one-man shows. He guzzles stiff martinis. And even though he’s the best classical actor this country has produced, he loves to play the ham. In short, the octogenarian is having a blast. In last year’s movie Beginners, he played Ewan McGregor’s newly out dad with the winsome exuberance of a delighted child, partying at gay clubs and smooching Goran Visnjic with abandon. In February, he accepted his Oscar for the role with a mix of leonine majesty and avuncular charm. (He memorably thanked his “band of agents provocateurs,” including Toronto’s Perry Zimel, for keeping him out of jail.) This summer, he returns to his Stratford stomping grounds to star in A Word or Two, an autobiographical one-man show directed by Des McAnuff. We’re thrilled, because as much as we love him in his various roles—his dementia-afflicted Lear, Star Trek’s villainous General Chang, a reclusive Swedish tycoon in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo—the character we most love to see Plummer play is himself.
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It took an old chestnut—a raisin, actually—for Toronto theatregoers to appreciate Cara Ricketts’ ability to breathe new life into familiar roles. In Soulpepper’s A Raisin in the Sun (2008), she embodied both the all-American youthful ambition and sexuality of Beneatha, a young medical school–bound woman in 1950s Chicago, and the aching realities of the mid-century black middle class. It was a breakthrough performance for the North York native, who had already made an impression on the fringe. In 2005, after graduating from the theatre performance program at Humber College, she brought poetry to the role of Peggy Sue, an embattled woman caught between two men in Joseph Jomo Pierre’s Born Ready, a lyrical look at Toronto ghetto life. This summer, after two years in essential-to-the-plot but non-leading roles at Stratford, the 28-year-old takes centre stage alongside such heavyweights as Stephen Ouimette and Brian Dennehy in Jennifer Tarver’s production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. She plays Ruth, the American wife of a British academic, whose visit to her husband’s male-dominated homestead awakens the horny beast among siblings and father alike. Though Ruth switches emotional and sexual alliances throughout the play, the balance of power remains firmly in her hands—she is both an object of desire and, in a characteristically Pinteresque gesture, a mythical female figure in a world of men. It’s ideal material for the wide-ranging Ricketts, whose emotional intelligence as a performer conjures up so much more than the physical world of her characters.
Colm Feore is a master of the double life. The country’s supreme leading man has tackled theatre’s most demanding roles at Stratford (Hamlet, Cyrano, Macbeth) and some of our most iconic national figures onscreen: in 1993, he broke out as neurotic, ecstatic Glenn Gould in François Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould; a decade later, he won a Gemini for playing our playboy PM in the CBC miniseries Trudeau. But he has also graced deliciously campy productions with his supporting characters, from Lord Marshal in The Chronicles of Riddick to Assistant District Attorney Harrison in Chicago. This spring, Feore stars in The Borgias, a big-budget historical soap opera so sumptuous that its decadence rivals that of the famously corrupt Renaissance clan. Feore is Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere, the nemesis of the profligate patriarch Rodrigo Borgia (played by Jeremy Irons)—who, through a masterful web of bribery, is elected to the papacy. As the austere cleric, Feore is all steel and self-possession—his eyes are cold and his shoulders stiff—the perfect picture of melodramatic restraint against Borgia’s excess. Through the actor, piety becomes zealotry; morality, menace. Channelling Ymir, the King of the Frost Giants, in the new comic book adaptation Thor (directed by a fellow Shakespearean-who’s-slumming-it, Kenneth Branagh) requires significantly less nuance: the only thing the blue colossus wants is to cause destruction with a frozen club. Juggling a 15th-century ecclesiastic and a hopped-up super-villain? No sweat—four hours in the makeup chair aside.
