“I’m not quite sure what to expect,” a polished, fifty-something woman with a soft blonde ponytail said to her friend as she took her seat. Many in attendance last night at Koerner Hall thought the same thing. We knew that the Stratford Festival had gathered three remarkable Canadian talents–lead singer of Stars Torquil Campbell, The New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik, and singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright. Bur what these three would be doing exactly was as murky as Macbeth.

The audience assembled under the Hall’s undulating wooden ceiling was a mixture of graying theatre regulars and hip gay guys in glasses (I noted a similar combination when I saw Liza Minnelli a couple years ago with my mom). CBC personalities both present (Jian Ghomeshi) and past (former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson) were in attendance. Wainwright sat in a theatre box at the side of the stage with a friend, who I first mistakenly thought was his husband. In my whimsical imagination I pictured them cracking one-liners like Statler and Waldorf on The Muppet Show.

The night was to celebrate the start of the Festival’s 2013 season, but what did the program mean by the terms “Shakespeare Slam” and “Pop Culture vs Classic Culture”? Stratford’s energetic Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino bounded on stage to help clear things up.

“Tonight we’re celebrating the birthday of someone very special to me,” he announced. Shakespeare, who would be 449 years old, helped shape the language we speak but remains a “profound enigma.” What is beyond dispute is his success as an entertainer. “He was the Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Kathryn Bigelow, and Quentin Tarantino of his day!” Cimolino said that the narrative twists and turns of his plays keep us coming back “despite 400 years of spoilers!”

Last evening was the beginning of a new initiative named ‘The Forum,’ a series of events designed to open up the works of Shakespeare to a new audience. They include concerts, debates, stand up comedy, and a mock trial titled “Shylock Appeals.” Not before inserting a plug for Stratford’s new shuttle bus (“It even has Wifi!”) Cimolino voiced the resolution up for debate: “William Shakespeare was a pop artist.”

When introducing the two panelists, Cimolino confused which sides of the stage the two men entered from as if they were as interchangeable as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They certainly are not. Campbell has the relaxed manner of a radio broadcaster, able to launch into personal anecdotes (with only a passing connection to the topic) at the drop of a hat.

“I feel a bit out of place,” Campbell announced. “But feeling out of place was always my plan in life.” He said that the only thing more fun than being in a rock band was being in a Shakespearean play. (Torquil, the son of Stratford legend Douglas Campbell, went into the family business before transitioning to music.) Shakespeare, he argued, was the original and best pop artist–he wanted to put bums in the seats and make money. Why else would he include such crowd-pleasing tropes as bears, ghosts, witches, and penis jokes? Falstaff, in Campbell’s mind, is an Elizabethan Homer Simpson and could only have been created by a writer who desired popularity. Campbell boils down the appeal of pop to ‘the hook,’ the little sound or turn of phrase that’s addictive like a drug.

“’To be or not to be’ has to be the most hookiest moment in Western art,” he declared.

Gopnik paused before responding. The more academic of the two, he listens intently when not speaking, his palms pressed against each other forming a church steeple in front of his mouth. When he does speak, he eases you into his general point before his arguments build on each other like an avalanche. I should admit that he is one of my favourite writers. I read Paris to the Moon, his collection of essays about living in France, while getting over mono at the end of high school. (I did not get the ‘kissing disease’ from kissing, I’ll have you know.) His writing style was the single biggest influence on my own.

“In the spirit of coming home, my first instinct is to compromise,” he said to hearty chuckles. “How else could a Canadian debate proceed?” Although he admitted to agreeing with 90% of what Campbell said, he cautioned that Shakespeare isn’t Spielberg. Shakespeare would never make a movie about the Holocaust like Schindler’s List, in which no one you like dies.

“With Shakespeare, everyone you like dies. Shakespeare is demanding.” He removes neat moments and inserts ambiguities. While great pop can also be demanding, modern audiences are reminded all the time that Shakespeare is from a world not our own. The Elizabethan audience was rowdy, reactive, and demanding. “The real question,” Gopnik said. “Is whether we can be more than a pop audience and demand greatness from what we see.”

Campbell shot back that Shakespeare made his plays demanding in order to make them good, a point I don’t agree with. In one of my many past lives I worked briefly as an usher at a theatre that performed Shakespeare for high school students. Mostly, the job required wearing black clothes and telling teenagers to turn off their phones. Although I loved the company’s film noir-influenced production of Hamlet, I find that particular tragedy continuingly frustrating. No one has a clear understanding of the protagonist’s motivations. While I acknowledge that that’s what makes it a great play, I don’t think the plots’ many ambiguities are there to make it popular.

“What’s the difference between pop and kitsch?” Cimolino asked.

“Don’t feel guilty about the art you like,” Campbell said. “Feel guilty about not calling your Mom more.” He argued that if Justin Bieber made you happy, if his music moved you in some way, no one had the right to say you were wrong.

“I admire anyone who has the balls to criticize Justin Bieber in a room full of people from Stratford,” Gopnik interjected. “Kitsch is pop with a guilty conscious.” Kitsch cynically mocks the genuine emotions people feel for pop. Gopnik warned that we have to be careful about watering down the appeal of Shakespeare. “Art is hard and that’s what’s good about it. Anyone who’s worked on a screenplay knows that studio notes are all about taking out everything Shakespearean and replacing it with everything Sorkin.”

Campbell latched onto this implication and asked how is the best way to spread the love of Shakespeare to people weary of elitism. “How do we find people who have felt alienated by snobbishness? How can we get them to go to the Stratford festival?”

“Continue with this ‘The Stratford Festival isn’t hip thing,’” Gopnik said. “Antony is loving it.”

Though he was kidding, Antony probably did love that the topic shifted from ‘Is Shakespeare pop?’ to ‘Is the Festival popular?’

“I can tell you one thing you’re doing right,” Campbell said. “The bus.” We need to open up the theatre to everyone and create new star system so audiences want to come out and see the shows, he continued. “If I called an album ‘Indie record by Unknown Band’, who’s going to buy that?”

“My 18-year-old son would,” Gopnik said.

After declaring both the panelists “awesome”, Cimolino announced a draw. The consensus seemed to be that Shakespeare is a pop artist, but a difficult one. If he was a simple one, like a certain teenaged singing sensation, we probably wouldn’t be debating his work 400 years later.

Post-intermission, Campbell performed a few of his songs including “Among the Thugs,” a love story about two soccer hooligans. Shakespeare, he said, demonstrates that there’s something relatable in villains and something dark in good guys. Actress Lucy Peacock, a Stratford player for 26 seasons, said Shakespeare is great because he shows human’s potential–for love, violence, heroism, and despair. She introduced Rufus Wainwright with yet another Shakespeare quote: “Oh brave new world that has such people in it.”

Rufus, who wore a black suit with a sparkly vest, performed a few sonnets in his quintessential cabaret style. I have trouble understanding Shakespearean language when it’s not acted, so right away my mind drifted from listening to the words to letting Wainwright’s beautiful, rasping voice pour over me. “They’re pretty good these…pieces of stuff,” he said about the sonnets afterwards.

The evening ended with an audience sing along of “Happy Birthday to You.” Can it get more more pop than that?