I'm speechless...

From this article by Richard Ouzounian in the May 30, 2006 Toronto Star.

The 2,000 who entered the doors of Stratford's Festival Theatre last night for the opening performance of the season first had to pass through a gantlet of demonstrators from a coalition of groups organized by the Perth County Coalition Against Poverty.

The protesting groups referred to the opening night crowd in their advance publicity as "a who's who of the rich and vile" and condemned the festival as "a playpen for the rich."

Despite vows by the groups to shut down the production, the show went on last night.

Observers saw anywhere from a few dozen to 60 protestors, who tried without success to storm a fence separating them from the theatre.

There was a heavy police presence at the theatre, no doubt prompted by the participation of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, a Toronto-based group that has rallied in large numbers on other occasions and had skirmishes with police.

The ironic part of the situation is that the play the protestors were trying to stop people from seeing was William Shakespeare's Coriolanus, an exploration of what happens to a country when an impoverished mob sets out to overthrow the well-fed establishment.

Stratford's artistic director, Richard Monette, addressed that irony and several others in a speech he made to the Stratford Board of Governors on Sunday night. "Tomorrow night's protestors," said Monette, "will be picketing a play that, at the very least, raises uncomfortable issues surrounding poverty, and forces us to think about them in an even-handed way. Here's another irony. The Stratford Festival, which one of the coalition websites describes as 'an annual playpen for the rich,' wasn't actually founded for that purpose. To be honest, it wasn't even founded to further the cause of art. It was founded (by Tom Patterson) to keep the citizens of Stratford out of Skid Row," Monette said.

"Even when he was in high school, Tom could see that the decline of the railway industry in Stratford was going to destroy the town's economy. Jobs were going to disappear. People were going to lose their homes. Lives were going to be ruined. There was going to be serious poverty. Tom used to talk about this with his classmates, and they'd toss ideas around, trying to come up with something that could be brought in to save Stratford from becoming a ghost town. An international hockey school was one idea that came up. But Tom thought that a better bet, for a town named Stratford, on a river called the Avon, would be a festival of Shakespearean theatre."

"The festival saved Stratford, and it is now a major economic engine not just for this city, but for the entire region, generating $125 million worth of economic activity each year. Its presence directly and indirectly provides more than 3,000 full-time jobs that otherwise wouldn't exist. It generates nearly $56 million in tax revenues for all levels of government each year -- nearly 25 times the amount, by the way, that it receives in federal and provincial funding. Tom had the vision. But it took the backing of some very well-heeled people to turn that vision into a reality. So when the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty says, on its website, that the supporters of the Stratford Festival are 'experts in keeping us in poverty,' that is indeed an irony. And a very sad one."

Technorati tags: Broadway Music Movie Musicals Musicals Blog Blogs Theater Theatre Entertainment