HomeMy WebLinkAboutVillage Squire, 1980-01, Page 24UPDATE
School Scandal
goes on tour
With a new round of teacher
negotiations and bitter teachers' strikes in
Ontario's school system the time is righk
for a revival of Ted Johns' popular
examination of the school- system: The
School Scandal.
Johns will take his characters on tour in
late February and early March in the first
major tour planned by the Blyth Summer
Festival. Johns, a native of the Clinton area
who grew up in Mitchell wrote the play for
the 1978 Blyth Summer Festival. It was
based on the bitter 1977-78 teachers' strike
in Huron county but it had a universal
approach that made it popular with people
from all across the country. It was revived
in the fall of 1978 during the International
Plowing Match at Wingham and now will
tour southern Ontario before going to
Toronto for a run at Theatre Passe
Muraille.
Johns plays many characters both men
and women in the one-man show that
examines the problems of the educational
system from the side of the teachers, the
board and the parents who are perplexed at
what has happened to education since their
days of the little red school house. It is
hilarious at times, touching at others.
The tour begins with a return
engagement at Blyth on Feb. 25 and 26
before visiting locations such as Listowel,
Petrolia, St. Catharines and other spots
around the province on a three week tow.
STRATFORD DROPS A BOMBSHELL
One sometimes gets the idea that
officials at the Stratford Festival are taking
lessons from Harold Ballard.
The owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs
has a habit of dropping a bombshell to stir
things up every time hockey drops from the
sports pages of the Toronto media. With
the various rumours centreing the
Stratford Festival in recent years the
Stratford theatre has also given plenty of
grist for the entertainment writers of the
nation.
But the news out of the Festival's annual
meeting in December did more than give
the entertainment writers something for
their news schedule, it kept front page and
editorial page writers busy as well. Festival
president Robert Hicks said that the
Festival may close after the 1980 season
unless more government aid is forthcom-
ing. He reported the Festival had a loss of
$647.000 in 1979 which was offset to a
certain extent by a surplus left over from
last year of $250,000 to leave an overall
deficit of $400,000. The government bodies
simply had to do something or the Festival
would close, Hicks said.
22 Village Squire. January 1980
The cry for help came at a bad time, a
time when governments are cutting back in
all directions. The Festival's Canada
Council grant last year actually declined as
the Council tried to stretch its limited
dollars as far as it could in these
inflationary times. Stratford officials said
that this showed that the agency penalized
well-run organizations. But as a Turonto
commentator suggested, large increases in
government aid to Stratford would put the
arts councils in a tough situation because it
would mean taking money away from many
smaller theatres in the country, theatres
that make more use of Canadian scripts
and actors than the internationally oriented
Festival. Word out of the December
meeting of the Canada Council was that the
Festival would get more money but not
nearly the kind of financial infusion the
Festival wanted.
While smaller theatres often look at the.
Festival which gets about $750,000 in
government aid a year as a gigantic hand
taking all the money theyfeel they
deserve, Stratford has its own target of
criticism: The National Arts Centre. The
Ottawa centre is government owned and is
not subject to Canada Council funding but
gets its money directly from the federal
government. The huge complex with three
theatres, two theatre companies, a
symphony orchestra, restaurants and other
ancilliary facilities has been heavily
subsidized. It received a special $I million
grant to help it launch its own national
theatre company last year. Stratford
officials claim it gets more than $10 million
in government funding and they'd like a
share of that pot.
The city of Stratford has promised to do
something to help reduce the burden of
property tax on the Festival's buildings.
The Festival like many non-profit arts
organizations pays a lot more than it ge"Is
from governments. Its Ontario Arts
Council budget for instance amounts to
$250.000 a year yet the Festival pays the
government $2.2 million in retail sales tax
on ticket sales. Likewise it pays more than
4.5 times to the federal government what it
gets in return.
Still. sceptics find it hard to believe the
cry of wolf from the Festival completely
because the Festival continues to consider
expansion and refuses to admit that
increasing the length of -the season might
have been a mistake that could have
contributed to the fact the theatre went
from having a $250.000 surplus one year to
a $647,000 deficit the next year. Robin
Philips the controversial artistic director is
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