Triple Threat

Colm Feore is one of the finest classical actors working today. Though he rarely comes to New York, he was riveting as Claudius in Andrei Serban’s 1999 production of Hamlet at The Public Theater; and he received accolades for his Cassius in last year’s Broadway production of Julius Caesar, which starred Denzel Washington as Brutus. “The play was served up very simply,” says Feore of Dan Sullivan’s staging. “We were in suits, the set looked like something you might see on CNN, and audiences responded. They thought, ‘My God I get this play. Four or five guys want to assassinate a head of state but they don’t have an exit strategy? Whoa!’ I found there was an appetite for a rigorous kind of theater that takes a classic play and lets it speak to us today in ways that are much clearer than you can imagine.”

The actor first established his reputation at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, where he now lives with his wife and three children. His decades-long association with the festival has included a stint as its associate artistic director in the early 1980s. Among the roles he’s played there are Hamlet, Romeo, Richard III, and Iago. “I essentially did my apprenticeship at Stratford,” he remarks. “It’s become part of my blood. I go away and miss it after a while, so I have to come back and renew my focus.” This year, Feore, who is back for his 15th (non-consecutive) season at Stratford, is performing three roles that couldn’t be more different from one another.

The first of these is the title role in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which opens officially on May 29. “It was during Caesar that I got the notion that I still have enough energy and interest in these plays to do them,” says Feore. “I don’t want to sound like I’m whining about it, but there is a moment in life when you simply get too old to play Coriolanus; either the armor’s going to fit funny on you or you’re not going to want to lift the sword and do the fighting and running and dying.” In discussing the play, Feore notes: “Coriolanus is about a military hero who says, what the hell’s the problem with having higher standards? What the hell’s the problem with not bowing to the lowest common denominator, being true to yourself on a level that the general population can barely understand? What’s wrong with elitism if it guides our world to a better place? These are really dangerous questions; Coriolanus asks them all and attempts to find answers.”

Additionally, Feore is tackling the role of Fagin in the classic musical Oliver!, set to open on May 30. This is not the actor’s first foray into musical theater, although he acknowledges that previous efforts haven’t always gone well. “The Boys from Syracuse was a stretch and we made some colossal mistakes,” he says. “George Abbot came, and I think we might have killed him. He was like, 99 and still golfing — but, after our show, I think he was wheelchair-bound.” Feore met with greater success when he played Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady and the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, and he is quite confident about his Fagin. “I felt I had at least three musical performances in me,” he says, “and now I’ve done them!” The show is being directed and choreographed by his wife, Donna. While this is the first time she has officially directed him, the actor is quick to point out that “there’s nothing I’ve done for the last 14 years that she hasn’t had a hand in.”

Feore’s final role at Stratford this summer may also be his most challenging: He will play the title character in Molière’s Don Juan, in both English and French. (The English-language version will begin performances on August 1, the French version on October 12.) While the actor speaks a little French, he’s by no means fluent in the language. “I’m faking it,” he readily admits. “But one of the brilliant things about doing this is that it will allow our English-speaking audiences who come to the French version to say, ‘That’s what it really sounds like. That’s the way it should be.'”

However, the company isn’t going to be doing the play exactly as written. “There’s a lot of Old French in it that would be difficult even for French people to get,” Feore explains. “Parts of it are set in the countryside, with peasants who speak in a particular way, so we’re going to have to make decisions about how to accurately represent that. In the main, the French is pretty straightforward; there are a few arcane things here and there but, to my ear, it’s not artificial. Then again, I spend a lot of time doing Shakespeare, and I don’t think that’s artificial either.”

While some actors might be daunted by taking on so many roles at once, Feore sees the upside of the task. “One of the great benefits of repertory is that if you embarrass yourself horribly at the matinee, you have a ghost of a chance of recuperating in the evening,” he says. “It also allows the actors to put in more thinking time between performances. Because you’re not reinventing the wheel for eight shows a week, things have a way of aging in the bottle, which can allow for a greater depth. You can back away and do Fagin, then do Don Juan — and when you come back to Coriolanus, you’ve been percolating ideas and developing new notions. Frankly, it’s less boring for an actor. There’s always a certain amount of panic: ‘Oh my God, will I remember this?’ You’re a virgin again with the new moon, and I find that enormously useful.”