Ontario Re-Visited ~ History’s a Play!

For several year’s, we visited Prescott and the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival. The plays we like most are the ones especially written about the War of 1812, our “history in a play”!

Trouble on Dibble Street (by John Lazarus)

Sir John Falstaff, formerly of the Prescott Troop of Cavalry, Dragoons, returns to the riverside town of Prescott, to retire, make trouble, and enjoy plenty of the town’s legendary Wiser’s Whiskey. He plans to seduce housewives Meg Page and Alice Ford, but they get wind of his scheme and decide to teach him a lesson. Complications and subplots abound, in Shakespeare’s The Merrie Wives of Windsor, transported to Ontario, as a comic celebration of early-20th-century Canadian life.

Maid for a Musket (by Lucia Frangione)

Set in Prescott, ON, during the war of 1812, this play very loosely echoes Love’s Labour’s Lost. Fred, Brown and Mac are three soldiers stuck in the wilds of Upper Canada: the only corner of the world that seemingly isn’t at war. They decide to swear off whiskey, women and other distractions, and to focus on higher learning. Then the Americans show up: A few of them in skirts.

Original historic “Art Sketch” by Susan ‘Shadow’ Caron