Christopher Newton turned down repeated offers to run the Shaw Festival before finally accepting in 1979, because he thought it was the only serious rival to Canada’s pre-eminent repertory acting company, the Stratford Festival.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
At the dawn of the 1980s, a band of theatre rowdies, many of them from Western Canada, came rolling into quaint, sleepy Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., and started to shake up the place. Their pied piper was a devilishly handsome, fiendishly intelligent British expat who’d come to Canada by way of the U.S. and had already left his indelible mark on the theatre scenes in Calgary and Vancouver.
Perhaps most troubling to the good citizens of the little town by Lake Ontario, Christopher Newton, who had been hired to run their summertime Shaw Festival, showed little respect for its namesake – that long-bearded, long-winded Irish playwright best known for the comedy Pygmalion and the tragedy Saint Joan.
“I hadn’t really liked Bernard Shaw very much,” the late Mr. Newton admitted in a 2011 interview with The Globe and Mail. In fact, he’d turned down repeated offers to run the festival before finally accepting in 1979. Even then, it was mainly because he thought it the only serious rival to Canada’s pre-eminent repertory acting company, the Stratford Festival.
Up to that point, Mr. Newton had devoted himself to building acting companies in the Canadian West first, as the founding artistic director of Theatre Calgary, and then as the head of the Vancouver Playhouse. An actor himself, he believed an in-house ensemble was the key to theatrical excellence.
To the Shaw, he brought his collaborators from Vancouver and Calgary as well as a reputation for daring productions, which he quickly lived up to with his bold, irreverent approach to the Shavian canon.
“It was a heady time to be there,” recalled director Glynis Leyshon, one of his Vancouver protégées, still exhilarated by the memory 40 years on.
“Christopher brought an absolute sense of adventure to the place,” added actress Fiona Reid, one of the stars who burned brightly during the Newtonian reign.
The festival, founded in 1962 as a playful riposte to nearby Stratford, had become known for light summer entertainment. It was a casual place where the artistic director would knock off for cocktails in the afternoon and the actors were allowed to keep their costumes at the end of the season. “I soon put an end to that!” chuckled Cameron Porteous, another Playhouse alum, whom Mr. Newton lured to the festival as head of design.
The productions, meanwhile, were as charming and old-fashioned as the town itself.
Mr. Newton swiftly changed that. He was determined to treat Shaw’s plays not as museum theatre, but as work with something to say to a contemporary audience. Not everyone was happy. A faction on the festival’s board of directors wanted to fire him after his second season, but Mr. Newton and his producer, Paul Reynolds, pushed back. His detractors changed their tune when the Shaw Festival began ringing up a string of critical and box-office hits, wiped out the sizable deficit Mr. Newton had inherited and began to give Stratford a run for its money.
When Mr. Newton finally retired from the festival in 2002, after two remarkable decades at the wheel, he’d reshaped the Shaw into a theatrical powerhouse with one of the finest acting ensembles in North America.
Oh, yes – and he had come to embrace Bernard Shaw. More than that, he’d transformed the festival into a deep, often rewarding exploration of plays and musicals created during Shaw’s 94-year lifespan, from 1856 to 1950 – a century-straddling era that encompassed everything from the works of Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde to those of Bertolt Brecht and Noël Coward. With his infinite curiosity, he also dug up little-known and forgotten plays from that time – some of them surprising gems – and audiences shared in his delighted discovery.
Although as robust as Shaw, Mr. Newton didn’t quite make it to his 90s. He died on Dec. 20 at 85, after a six-year battle with leukemia. Before then, he’d continued to direct theatre and opera throughout Canada, as well as at the Shaw during his successor Jackie Maxwell’s tenure. His last two decades saw a steady accumulation of awards and honours in recognition of his profound impact on Canadian theatre. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2019, won the Governor-General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement in 2000, and received five honorary doctorates, among many other accolades.
Not bad for the son of a petrol-station owner in southeast England that Canada almost lost to Hollywood or academe.
When Mr. Newton finally retired from directing the Shaw Festival in 2002, after two remarkable decades at the wheel, he’d reshaped it into a theatrical powerhouse with one of the finest acting ensembles in North America.David Cooper/The Canadian Press
Christopher Newton was born on June 11, 1936, in the seaside town of Deal, not far from Dover. His father, Albert Newton, was from Yorkshire and his mother Gwladys, née Emes, was Welsh. He was a three-year-old at the start of the Second World War, and retained vivid memories of living through the Blitz. “It was a highly formative experience for him, the fear of the bombs falling and the sound of them,” said Nicholas MacMartin, Mr. Newton’s husband. “The memory of that trauma stayed with him all his life.”
As a teenager he surveyed Britain’s postwar drabness, saw the glamour of Hollywood on the cinema screen, and aspired to make films himself. After graduating from the University of Leeds with an arts degree, he went to the U.S., but, receiving no encouragement, opted instead for an academic route. He took his master’s at the University of Illinois and, in a quirky foreshadowing of his future career, landed a job running the theatre department at Pennsylvania’s private Bucknell University – despite a complete lack of theatrical training. He had, however, begun to act, spending his summers out west, performing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It ultimately led him not to Hollywood, but to Vancouver.
Mr. Newton fell in love with the city and, soon after, with Canada itself. It was almost a blank slate, its national theatre still in its formative stages. As he later said, “I discovered where I wanted to be.” Although he failed his first audition for the Stratford Festival, he got in with the touring Canadian Players, which took him across the country. He also performed at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg and did a spell in New York, acting in the off-Broadway production of Anne Jellicoe’s The Knack, directed by soon-to-be-filmmaker Mike Nichols. (Mr. Nichols later asked Mr. Newton to read for what became Dustin Hoffman’s role in The Graduate, but Mr. Newton demurred, claiming he couldn’t do a convincing American accent.)
Mr. Newton was eventually hired by Stratford, where he spent three seasons, 1966-68, and played such Shakespearean roles as Orsino in Twelfth Night and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (opposite the late Martha Henry as Titania), as well as the crafty Aramis in a dramatization of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.
“He was a wonderful actor, and so varied,” said veteran Broadway actress Dana Ivey, who performed extensively in Canada early in her career. “He could do anything.” She first encountered Mr. Newton at Stratford and the two were part of the festival’s Centennial-year tour across Canada in 1967.
Coming off that exciting experience, Mr. Newton grudgingly agreed to spend the off-season starring in an amateur revival of Charley’s Aunt in Calgary. His reluctance quickly changed to enthusiasm during the show’s run, when he became caught up in talks about creating the city’s first professional theatre company. In 1968, despite his inexperience, he was asked to be the first artistic director of the newly minted Theatre Calgary. He got the company off to a roaring start, bringing in Stratford pals such as Ms. Ivey and the great William Hutt to act and direct the classics, but also writing and composing an original musical based on local history, You Two Stay Here, The Rest Come with Me, that toured to Ottawa’s National Arts Centre. Its young cast included Michael Ball and Neil Munro, who would later make their marks as a leading actor and virtuoso director, respectively, during Mr. Newton’s Shaw tenure.
Mr. Newton discovered that he liked to direct – and to run theatres. In 1973, he returned to B.C. to take over the Vancouver Playhouse. In retrospect, his six seasons there would be regarded as a golden age for that (now defunct) company. He turned the Playhouse into a hotbed of fresh talent and thrilling, often provocative productions. His opening salvo was a staging of Julius Caesar inspired by the decadence of Fellini’s Satyricon, which included semi-naked Roman soldiers retreating across the stage.
Mr. Newton also enabled the wild visions of others, setting loose such mad geniuses as director Derek Goldby and comic actor Heath Lamberts on the Playhouse mainstage. He imported international directors (Mr. Goldby from the U.K., Romania’s Liviu Cielei), but also built a core ensemble of Canadian actors. To feed it, he and the revered actor-teacher Powys Thomas launched the Vancouver Playhouse Acting School, whose graduates would include such future Shaw stars as Jim Mezon, Martha Burns and Corrine Koslo.
His successful formula in Vancouver was a foretaste of Mr. Newton’s later triumphs at Niagara-on-the-Lake. His first smash hit at the festival was a Goldby-directed Cyrano de Bergerac starring Mr. Lamberts in 1982, which was revived the following season and then played Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in 1985.
Mr. Newton, meanwhile, had begun to reconsider his dismissal of Bernard Shaw’s plays as just witty arguments. As he would later explain to theatre historian Keith Garebian in the latter’s 1993 book, George Bernard Shaw & Christopher Newton: Explorations of Shavian Theatre, “there was more to Shaw than I ever dreamed of: surreal, resonant, troubling.”
He plumbed the surreal and metatheatrical sides of Shaw in such memorable productions as his 1985 Heartbreak House and 1989 Man and Superman. He made Shaw sexy, too. “He always used to say to directors who were doing Shaw for the first time, ‘When in doubt, look for the sex,’ ” Mr. MacMartin said. “Shaw can be wordy, but if you can work out the sexual motivations of the characters, you’ll get tons of insight.”
Mr. Newton was an actor’s director who prized spontaneity and invention in the rehearsal hall. Ms. Koslo said nothing thrilled him more than watching an actor discover new things about a role. “You’d find him wide-eyed in the chair, moving closer and closer to you,” she said, laughing. “That’s when you knew you were on to something!”
Mr. Newton himself remained an actor at heart. He continued to perform at the festival and backstage he always sat in the “chorus” dressing room, hanging out with the novice actors. “He felt that was the centre of the universe in the theatre,” Mr. Porteous said.
He was famous for spotting promising young talent, but he also loved the old pros. “His devotion to actors who were getting on in years was a beautiful thing,” actor Neil Barclay said. In the 1992 season, festival elder Tony Van Bridge was forced to withdraw from a show because of health issues and was heartbroken that he couldn’t fulfill his long-cherished goal of performing on his 75th birthday. “Christopher suggested to director Neil Munro that it would be lovely to have an extra client in the waiting room of the lawyer’s office in his production of Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-at-Law,” Mr. Barclay said. As a result, Mr. Van Bridge celebrated his birthday onstage in a sly cameo role.
“His sense of decency was the ethos of the company,” added Ms. Reid, who first met Mr. Newton in 1983 when he asked her to play opposite him in the Coward comedy Private Lives. “Everyone felt valued and valuable.”
The esprit des corps extended beyond the theatre. “He and Nick threw a great party,” Ms. Koslo said.
Mr. Newton and Mr. MacMartin had gotten together in 1985, after they hit it off at a New Year’s Eve party at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Although Mr. MacMartin was 26 years younger, they proved the perfect couple. Their house in Niagara-on-the-Lake, just around the corner from the festival’s Royal George Theatre, included a fabulous garden lovingly tended by Mr. Newton. When not planting and pruning, he filled his off-hours with books, films, classical music and marijuana. “Chris was a total stoner,” Mr. MacMartin revealed, “but an intellectual one. We’d get stoned in the evenings and discuss the show he was working on.”
Mr. Newton last directed at the Shaw Festival in 2014, when he staged one of those obscure plays he specialized in rediscovering, St. John Hankin’s The Charity that Began at Home. Tim Carroll, Ms. Maxwell’s successor, had hoped he would direct another show there, but Mr. Newton declined. By then, he had been diagnosed with myelofibrosis, a form of leukemia. His final theatre production would be The Audience in 2016 for Toronto’s Mirvish Productions and the Manitoba Theatre Centre, starring Ms. Reid as Queen Elizabeth II.
Mr. Newton will be remembered for nurturing and inspiring a generation of Canadian theatre artists, Ms. Leyshon said. And it was under his watch that the Shaw Festival became the esteemed theatrical institution that it is today. As Ms. Koslo puts it: “He set the bar for artistic directorship in this country.”
Mr. Newton is survived by his spouse, Mr. MacMartin, and his sisters Josephine Dempster and Marguerite Beard-Gould.