Ross Stuart
The Festivals of Canada is a pleasant piece of puffery. This 'celebration of ... many Canadian festivals' is the perfect picnic table book, one to leaf through while visiting Stratford, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Charlottetown, Guelph, Ottawa, Lennoxville or Banff. More press relations than criticism, more anecdote than history, the book is 'journalistic', but in the best sense of that word -it is readable, informal and accessible to the casual reader. Although concise and very tactful, The Festivals of Canada manages to be surprisingly incisive and on the whole remarkably accurate.
Author Arnold Edinborough can see no clouds in the perfect skies over Canada's festivals. Perhaps because Edinborough was a member of the Stratford Board of Governors, there is no mention of Robin Phillips' clashes with that body which eventually led to the chaos of 1980. John Hirsch left the Festival in 1968 after only one unsuccessful season of attempting to share control with Jean Gascon. This fact is deliberately obscured. So is the part the Canada Council's dissatisfaction with Paxton Whitehead's leadership of the Shaw Festival played in his resignation. The Kronborg:1582 debacle is not mentioned in Edinborough's discussion of the Charlottetown Festival. Nor are Festival Lennoxville's chronic problems which forced the cancellation of the 1981 season. 'Now a school auditorium is not the place for opera,' Edinborough admits, but that is the only reference to the Guelph Spring Festival's deplorable playing conditions. Negative references may seem out of place in a celebration, but they are inherently interesting and help to humanize these seemingly perfect organizations. Edinborough's account polishes the festivals until they gleam, but in the process he removes the rough edges which give them sparkle.
The content of The Festivals of Canada may be acceptable, but the editing is not. For a book that is two-thirds pictorial, the illustrations are singularly uninteresting, consisting almost entirely of posed publicity shots in seemingly random order. The photographs are separated from the text, thus forcing the reader to search for pictures of the productions that Edinborough is describing. The words and the photographs are simply not related. For example, Edinborough dismisses Banff's ballet offerings and hardly mentions its musicals, yet for some reason the majority of the Banff photographs are of ballets and musicals.
He also emphasizes the high standards of design in the festivals. However, all the illustrations in the book are in black and white. Costume sketches reproduced in this fashion are particularly unsuccessful. Edinborough's text reads like the copy found in a good souvenir programme, but the book lacks the graphic design and colour of most visually exciting souvenir programmes. The Festivals of Canada looks drab. That does a disservice to Edinborough's writing and to the festivals it celebrates.