Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stratford's fifty-first season exemplified what has been gained in the last decade of conservative management. The investment in both infrastructure and new directing, design, and acting talent is now paying off artistically. Whatever its detractors may say about its commercial success, Stratford offers splendid design and highly competent acting. As Richard Monette's artistic directorship (recently extended to 2007) enters its eleventh year, the imperatives that shape his playbills are clear: in addition to the three to seven Shakespeares (which must include a comedy and a play from the school curriculum), can expect some Canadian content, at least two money-makers, something new or experimental for the Studio, a nod to the non-Shakespearean classical repertoire, a family experience to bring in younger audiences, and a broad theme to unite the disparate parts. Shakespeare thus occurs in a context where it is possible to see in one day two radically different plays about retraining (The Taming of the Shrew and The King and I) or two perspectives on women being rescued from prostitution by marriage (Pericles and Gigi). Given the complex and often conflicting demands on the playbill, the annual theme is, at best, applicable to half the plays. The ostensible theme was Tales Told and Retold, but its core was the comprising in the Festival Theatre, Troilus and Cressida and The Birds at the Patterson, and the House of Atreus trilogy at the Studio. While 2003 celebrated the development of theatrical traditions, there were some disturbing moments that seemed to emerge from a largely ill-considered, or, worse, unconsidered, notion of the purpose of playing. Watching thirteen productions (1)--most of several times-over a three-week period in August, I was struck by the illuminating juxtapositions created by casting and design decisions. These contrasts revealed the priorities and politics of Stratford, in particular its stance towards women and visible minorities. The demands of a large playbill on three stages mean that actors tend to travel in three packs each season. (The Studio actors were almost a company in themselves this year, with little traffic between the Studio and the other stages.) The casts of Shrew, Gigi, and The Birds; of and Troilus; and of Antony and Cleopatra, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were mutually exclusive. On the other hand, Antony and Troilus could share a cast, as could and The King and I. Indeed, the latter was chosen as the money-making musical precisely because director Leon Rubin wanted actors of Asian descent for Pericles. Monette explained that could take the [...] singers and dancers from The King and I and put into Pericles (2003 Festival Website). The pronouns we and them rather unfortunately identified the Festival administration as white and the actors hired just for the extraordinary needs of this season as other. Stratford has been slow to adopt color-blind casting, thus far limiting it to the experimental space of the Studio, yet this demonstrated why Stratford needs it. Rubin set Tyre in Greece, Antioch in North Africa, Tarsus in India, Pentapolis in Japan, Ephesus in Thailand, and Mytilene in Bali. The casting, largely beyond Rubin's control, was color-conscious to the point of making and his Greek entourage exclusively white, yet color-blind in that any non-white actor (or white actor in brown make-up) could be Moroccan, Indian, Japanese, Thai, and/or Balinese. With three Shakespeares on the main stage, 2003 offered a good opportunity to reflect upon the legacy of the late Tanya Moiseiwitsch's fifty-year-old revolutionary thrust stage. Pericles, undoubtedly the most exciting and innovative production of the season, replaced the balcony with a tall shadow box and swathed the floor in silks, disguising Moiseiwitch's wooden structure but deploying all its exits and entrances. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".