Osborne’s The Entertainer set to open in The Shaw’s Studio Theatre Media Release #25
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, August 14, 2009…The searing words of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, an exposé of 1950s postwar England as seen through the eyes of fading music hall performer Archie Rice, will open in the Shaw Festival’s new Studio Theatre on Saturday, August 15, 2009.
Interspersed with vaudeville performances tainted with an air of desperation and gin-soaked family arguments, The Entertainer uses the metaphor of the fading music hall tradition and its eclipse by the emergence of rock and roll to comment on an England teetering on a precipice, unable to find its place in the dawn of the new modern era.
Deliberately stepping outside of the Shaw Festival’s mandate, this presentation of The Entertainer represents a continuum of provocative playwrighting that includes Shaw, Noël Coward and now John Osborne and will be continued in future programming featuring other contemporary ‘Shavians’. As a reviewer once noted, "Mr. Osborne takes up the Twentieth- Century Blues from the point where Mr. Coward left off."
Directed by Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell, The Entertainer features Benedict Campbell as Archie Rice; David Schurmann as Billy Rice and Corrine Koslo as Phoebe Rice. Also appearing are Krista Colosimo, Ken James Stewart, Ric Reid, Graeme Sommerville, Reza Jacobs, Prince Amponsah, Billy Lake and Esther Maloney. Designed by Peter Hartwell, lighting design by Head of Lighting Design Kevin Lamotte, musical staging by Valerie Moore and musical direction by Reza Jacobs with original music by John Addison. The stage management team includes Stage Manager Beatrice Campbell and Apprentice Stage Manager Melissa Novecosky.
The Entertainer began preview performances on Saturday, August 1; opens Saturday, August 15; and plays in repertory until Sunday, September 20. The Entertainer is sponsored by Paradigm Capital Inc. -30-
The Shaw Festival produces and presents the work of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and playwrights writing anywhere in the world during, or about, the era of Shaw’s lifetime – plays about the beginning of the modern world. …/2
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