Summary 
Career-closing production features narcissistic echoes from previous shows and comes across onstage as an excess of relentless sight gags. Colorful and entertaining to a degree, with a small comedy of mistaken identity bloated with popular culture bits, chunks from the director's previous productions, and a sales pitch for a currently running show. Chaotic and exhausting, but never really very funny.
Design
Directed by Richard Monette. Set by Michael Gianfrancesco. Costumes by Dana Osborne. Lights by Kevin Fraser. Sound by Keith Handegord. Compositions by Keith Thomas. Fights by John Stead.
Cast
Ian Deakin (Duke), Brian Tree (Egeon), Bruce Dow (Dromio of Syracuse), David Snelgrove (Antipholus of Syracuse), Steve Ross (Dromio of Ephesus), Adriana (Allegra Fulton), Luciana (Sophia Walker), Eli Ham (Luce/Officer), Tom McCamus (Antipholus of Ephesus), Lawrence Haegert (Balthasar), Jean-Michel le Gal (Angelo), Brigit Wilson (Courtesan), Lisa Berry (Porcupine Chanteuse), Walter Borden (Dr. Pinch), Chick Reid (The Abbess).
Analysis
Richard Monette's tenure as artistic director of the Stratford Festival of Canada comes to an end with his retirement at the end of the season, and this production of The Comedy of Errors - the 200th production of a Shakespeare play in the Festival's illustrious history - marks one of Monette's final directorial efforts. The production, a colorful albeit awkward and ungainly paced version of the play, is stuffed overfull by Monette with elaborate in-jokes of recycled snippets from his previous productions, oddball references to popular culture, and a shameless - and unamusing - sales pitch for a concurrent show as well as personal allusions to his imminent retirement.
Monette, long accused by Canadian and American press of an increasing reliance on gimmickry and visual nonsense in his direction, seems to defy the critics with this Comedy of Errors, but at the expense of the current artistic effort. The fire curtain, adorned with a detailed map of the Mediterranean Sea - with Syracuse and Ephesus clearly marked - features a placard indicating authorship by Shakespeare, "or another Elizabethan by the same name." Monette's style is a Benny Hill-inspired fast paced romp - set to frantic canned music - of callow sexual references and a Laugh-In style series of joking remarks and asides made by characters popping out of the dozen or so doorways and shuttered windows across the two-leveled street-front set. The 1970s approach works well but only in small doses, and the overall production feels padded and bloated, stumbling from a little bit funny to mildly amusing to downright tiresome.
Monette's production begins with the request given in the Greek language to turn off cell phones, then a tragedy and comedy masked Greek chorus - clad in togas and strapped sandals - emotes loud oohs and aahs at Egeon's sad story of his family of identical twin boys sundered by a shipwreck. Brian Tree's sad-faced Egeon wanders the stage trailed by a headsman, seeking donations and carrying a sign that reads, "The End is Nigh," at one point turning the sign to reveal a portrait photograph head-shot of Monette and winking at the impending retirement. At other junctures, a large penguin waddles slowly across the stage, a sign on his black-and-white back reading "Just for the critics," and in a particularly favorite Monette device, a scurrying and barking hound bounds across the stage in pursuit of a stuffed black cat - the supposed Komedy Kat even gets mentioned in the cast list of the playbill - pulled ahead of him on a string, not once, not twice, but three times. Pop culture references don't quite suit the production - Scarlett O'Hara's comment, "as God is my witness, I will never go hungry again" or Dorothy's lament, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" particular head-scratchers - and when David Snelgrove as a bewildered Antipholus has his toga blown up around him by a breeze from a sewer grate to expose his bare legs a la Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s, the visual reference is even more obscure: Snelgrove's Lysander had a similar breeze embarrass him while also clad in a toga in Monette's 1999 A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Monette takes the opportunity within The Comedy of Errors to advertise another show playing at the Festival, the musical My One and Only. A veiled Arabic woman riding on a large stuffed Moroccan camel from the musical is paraded across the stage, with a sign urging patrons to purchase tickets. Beyond tacky, the touch adds color but not humor, and Monette's production is already a confusingly twisted rainbow of colors and hues. Even the smaller characterizations are primarily visual and bizarre, lacking in depth or a thread of continuity. For example: Balthasar is a completely incongruous drug hippie with an annoying habit of beginning his every remark with, "Dude!"; the Courtesan is a curvaceous but vacuous airhead with a headdress that lights up like a Christmas tree whenever she thinks; and the disturbingly peculiar Dr. Pinch is an Asian-looking witch doctor wielding a thick book of occult witchcraft, and is followed by a retinue of go-go dancers - the Pinchettes - and exotic strip-show lights.
The production, with its bevy of distractions and excesses and vanity moves, begins with a lot of fun but plays onstage like an enormous effort. The two Antipholi are strong stage actors, Snelgove playing the dim-witted starry-eyed twin, and the much older Tom McCamus a dissipated and weary-looking brother. The two do not resemble twins, unlike the Dromios, who provide the few - and perhaps only - highlights of the production. Their pratfalls and Three Stooges schtick are quickly-paced and funny, performed with a welcome exuberance, one twin revealing bright yellow underpants adorned with a smiley face. The overall production seems intended as a rollercoaster ride of a rapid-fire comedy, but becomes muddled with Monette's nose-thumbing approach. All of the elaborate inside jokes present a not-so private farewell, and the overall effect is partly chaotic and confused, but mostly bloated excess.