For the past few seasons, my favourite programming at the Shaw Festival has been Outdoors at the Shaw, a somewhat informal series of concerts and variety shows the bulk out the mainstage programming. These performances would take place across the festival grounds, at the outdoor BMO stage, and, starting last season, at the fun and fantastical circus-like Spiegeltent that serves as an impermanent but definitively indoors auxiliary theatre.
As the Spiegeltent entered its second official season and the BMO stage disappeared, this type of programming evolved away from its earlier informality and towards a sort of standardized second tier of programming. The shows in the Spiegeltent this year don’t capture that magical “there’s art everywhere!” feeling of earlier Outdoors at the Shaw shows and the slimmed down list of offerings presented in longer, more standard runs takes away from the spontaneity and genuine variety of the former supplementary programming strategy.
The best Spiegeltent shows this year are the concerts Kabarett and Cotton Club which feature some of the company’s musical performers in a slightly more conversational but still pretty expected cabaret format. Cotton Club is particularly well executed despite odd pacing and the worrisome tremble of the tent coping with the audience’s out of time foot stomping.
The less conventional pieces are the problem. These shows take the place of ambitious improv work like last season’s thrilling Game of Love and Chance and charming passion projects like 2022’s Shawground & Fairground that showcased the wide range of hidden talents within the company from magic to puppetry to aerial ballet. The latter were perfect examples of casual and fun variety shows but this year’s stiff Shaw Variety Show attempts to formalize the concept and takes all the spontaneity and fun out of it. The quirky D&D-inspired Roll of Shaw captures at least some of the goofy magic I associate with the outdoor programming but its success is so completely dependent on which company members happen to be playing at the performance you attend (I wouldn’t say I lucked out on great improvisers).
The supplementary programming that makes the season feel full, immersive, and constantly fresh is one of the Shaw’s best features but with a somewhat slimmed down mainstage slate and staid options in the Spigeltent, this season ended up feeling a little light.