Credit: Emily Cooper
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Bard on the Beach to September 29, 2026
Ticket from $30 at 604-739-0559 or www.bardonthebeach.org
Posted June 20, 2026
I love Bard on the Beach. I do. I really do. And I appreciate how hard it must be to come up with a fresh take on Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old plays. But this Merry Wives, adapted by Bruce Horak with Rebecca Northan and directed by Northan, is beyond the pale.
Before I get into my Whine List, let me say there are remarkable performances in this production. Craig Erickson, one of the most gentlemanly actors I know, is absolutely hilarious as the not-actually-cuckolded Mr. Ford. Standing in a spa with steam belching all around him, almost obliterating him, Erickson delivers a rant-to-end-all-rants concerning what he thinks is the infidelity of his wife Mrs. Ford (the voluptuous, bosomy Melissa Oei and I’m allowed to say “bosomy” because physical comedy is made of it.) And what Erickson does with his yoga mat – yes, there’s a yoga studio as well as a spa in this production – is beyond funny. I might say it’s worth seeing this Merry Wives just to watch Erickson. But I won’t.
Melissa Oei and Jennifer Lines (as the Mrs. Ford and Page) make a great comedic pair of wicked schemers out to humiliate the debauched John Falstaff (Ashley Wright) and teach their husbands (portrayed by Erickson and Munish Sharma) a lesson in trust. Steffanie Davis, as the go-between Ms. Quickly, quickly establishes herself as a dynamo in the vocal department – she of the amazing pipes – while Zahf Paroo makes Evans a weed-stoned dude although I’m not sure that’s all that funny; it feels like yesterday’s joke.
Nice to see Sara Vickruck as Slender; lots of talent there. And in a small role, Jacob Leonard makes Rugby a quivering mess of insecurity; delightfully done. Small role, big impact. Sebastian Kroon bravely bares his buns in an art class; yes, there’s an art class as well as a yoga class and spa in this Windsor Rec Centre setting.
Ashley Wright, reprising the role from the 2016 Bard production of this play, is – ten years on – even more lusty. When he breaks into The Impossible Dream, he shows he can still kill a song from a Broadway musical. The question is – why?
Credit: Emily Cooper
And that’s my big question. Do we not already have enough FIFA in this town, this country, this continent, that we have to dress up an already very witty, very funny Shakespeare play in a soccer jersey? That’s where Horak and Northan take us with goal posts and soccer balls and green men in stretchy bodysuits. Shakespeare is almost completely lost in this production. Laugh? I couldn’t start – Erickson’s performance excluded. I feel FIFA-ed (past tense of the verb ‘to FIFA’) and it has only just started.
In all fairness I confess: I have never watched a soccer game and, although I’m tempted to watch the Canadian/Switzerland match, it’s my book club afternoon that day and I’d rather spend time with my seven or eight witty, intelligent friends discussing an (admittedly) not great book, than brave the crowds at a ‘watch party’, sit at home watching the game on tv or spend thousands of dollars on an actual ticket to watch grown men put a ball in a net.
But it worries me that I raved about the 2016 Bard production of The Merry Wives of Windsor that was, also, an over-the-top send-up. I called it a “foot-stomping hoot’. Have I really become this cranky in the last ten years or am I simply hungering for some unembellished bard at Bard on the Beach?
Macbeth is next. Please, let it not be funny.
Go, Canada, go. I’m not completely curmudgeonly. Just mostly.