FFWD Weekly
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Theatre by Lori Montgomery The Hobbit Shakespeare in the Park July 20 - 30 The Banff Centre August 3 - 14 Prince’s Island Park As a longtime theatre professional, Kevin McKendrick is used to overcoming obstacles. He’s no doubt had to jump through his share of hoops to get where he is – creative guru of Shakespeare in the Park, in demand as a director – but he was almost stymied by Saul Zaentz. The Hollywood powerhouse and his production company, responsible for The English Patient, hold the worldwide rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, including the prelude The Hobbit, which McKendrick was trying to shepherd to the stage. "They weren’t very keen on stage productions," McKendrick says. "I think it was small potatoes for them." Eventually, a license agreement came to be, but not without a few concessions. "They’re just trying to keep everything sewn up pretty tightly," McKendrick says. "For example, every time we list The Hobbit in print, we have to put a little trademark sign behind it. And they’ve trademarked everything – Gandalf the wizard, Thorin the dwarf – all those names are copyrighted." While a film version of the literary series laboured in production in New Zealand, Winnipeg’s Manitoba Theatre for Young People went to bat for the stage version, using an adaptation by Kim Selody. McKendrick directed the Winnipeg staging, and it turned out to be a roaring success. "The production did so very well there," he says, "that based on the reviews and our commitment to using the same script and getting script approval, they licensed us to do it here." It was while working on the production in Winnipeg that McKendrick began to think that it was a perfect complement for Mount Royal’s annual Shakespeare in the Park. "I was amazed at (Tolkien’s) joy at working with language," the director reflects. "He was a scholar of old languages himself, before he did any of this writing. The way he would create characters’ names – the way you picture the character is so much summed up in the way the name sounds; the words that he created, and the kinds of worlds that he created, celebrate language the same way that Shakespeare did." There was also a paradoxical symmetry, he thought, to the way that Tolkien and Shakespeare are regarded by modern audiences. "Shakespeare is considered universal and relevant to contemporary audiences, and Tolkien seems to me to be a contemporary writer that kind of has a classical, old-fashioned approach to storytelling and character and values," he muses. "So there seemed to be a weird fit that made a lot of sense." As the millennium comes to a close, McKendrick thought that this summer was also a perfect opportunity to reflect on the festival’s past, as well. "We felt that we wanted to celebrate where we had come from with something very special," he explains, "and the best way to do that was to put on a production of The Hobbit, as it turned out, celebrating our alumni." And so the cast and crew of The Hobbit, which is a co-production with The Banff Centre (hence its run in Banff before heading down to Calgary), features such familiar faces as: Trevor Leigh, who was Orlando in As You Like It (1992); Carmen Grant, who played Kent in the 1996 King Lear; and Rebecca Northan, whose involvement with the festival started with the role of Cassia in 1995’s Julius Caesar. "We tried to provide some real stretches for people, giving them opportunities to do roles that they hadn’t done before," McKendrick says. "Trevor Leigh is a perfect example. He doesn’t get to play a low-status character like Bilbo Baggins very often, because Trevor is naturally quite a confident individual – just his posture and his attitude make Bilbo a stretch for him." The director says that the process of revisiting The Hobbit and helping bring to life characters like Bilbo Baggins, "who would rather be sitting at home eating eggs and bacon than taking on dragons and goblins," has been a rewarding one. While he’s in demand as a director after projects like last season’s Good at Theatre Junction and 1997’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid at ATP, much of his time is spent facilitating the work of other artists through Mount Royal’s annual festival at Prince’s Island. "This job has allowed me to find a balance in my own life that I’ve found very stimulating," he says. "If I can work on two or three projects a year that are much more creative, like The Hobbit or Good, in the capacity of a director, then I’m quite happy to be doing the rest of this to bring other projects off the ground."

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