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Culture Theatre

Lady Windermere’s Fan

LADY WINDERMERES FAN by Oscar Wilde (Shaw). At the Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake. Runs in rep to October 19. $35-$110, stu/srs mats $24-$55. 1-800-511-7429. See listing. Rating: NNNN

I’m pretty sure a Katy Perry song has never before blared at the end of a play at the Shaw Festival. But when Firework, her rousing anthem about self-confidence, is cranked out during the final moments of Lady Windermere’s Fan, it’s a fitting capper to a novel production that has lots of flash, sizzle and smoke beneath its deceptively controlled surface.

Director Peter Hinton has transformed Oscar Wilde’s witty comedy of Victorian manners into something thrillingly contemporary. The plot – about the eponymous young woman (Marla McLean) who believes her husband may be having an affair – could seem quaint to today’s jaded sensibilities. But Hinton and his talented ensemble breathe fresh life into it.

That all begins in the production’s opening moments, when the play’s women emerge onstage in all their pretty outfits, coyly fanning themselves. Nice touch.

Also effective is an important scene in the first act in which Hinton has some patrons at a ball freeze in tableaux while others speak their dialogue. This underlines the artificiality of the situation and creates intimacy, something that’s difficult to do on the large Festival Theatre stage. The occasional use of forced perspective in Teresa Przybylski’s elegant set also accomplishes this.

Other stylistic touches don’t succeed as well, like projecting lines of the play’s text onto a scrim. These feel too much like “important quotes” you have to discuss in an English essay.

The leads, with one exception, are superb. Martin Happer is a sympathetic Lord Windermere, Tara Rosling a glamorous and passionate Mrs. Erlynne (the other woman), and Gray Powell, as Lady Windermere’s friend and frustrated suitor Lord Darlington, makes Wilde’s cleverest lines pop.

Only McLean seems out of her element here, less a firework than a slightly soggy match.

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