Can ‘Spamalot’s’ Lady of the Lake be pregnant? Yes, if it’s Jennifer Rider-Shaw and the Stratford Festival

Many a romance has been sparked in an artistic workplace. But it’s hard to imagine a couple who have marked more relationship milestones at a single theatre company than Jennifer Rider-Shaw and Robert Markus.

They met 11 years ago at a Stratford Festival audition and started dating a few months later while performing in the festival’s productions of “The Who’s Tommy” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Last year they were married in an art gallery in Stratford and had their wedding reception at the Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre.

And now, while starring in Stratford’s two big musicals, they’re awaiting the birth of their first child, having revealed the baby bump at the festival’s gala opening night in late May.

Their baby daughter is due on Oct. 29, a day after the closing of “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” in which Rider-Shaw plays the Lady of the Lake, and “Rent,” in which Markus plays Mark (he’s also Calvin in “A Wrinkle in Time” this season).

The pregnancy has been healthy and was welcomed by “Spamalot’s” creative team and the festival itself. But Rider-Shaw and Markus nonetheless felt stress when they realized they were expecting, and their story casts light on the choices performing artists face around pregnancy and parenting.

The couple bought a house in Stratford in 2017 and had been thinking about growing their family for some time. But even figuring out when to conceive was conditional on their theatre schedules.

(They wish they had tried for a baby during the pandemic, had they known how long it was going to last, “but hindsight is 20/20,” said Rider-Shaw.)

They had both been cast in “Chicago” in the cancelled 2020 season. Once that musical was rescheduled for 2022, getting pregnant was off the cards because Rider-Shaw’s leading role as Velma Kelly was extremely physically taxing. As that show was coming to an end last summer, they glimpsed a window.

“I kind of went, ‘OK, (playing Velma) was kind of a bucket list,’” recalled Rider-Shaw. “I had just turned 36. And so we thought, ‘OK, well, maybe we’ll try next year.’”

The fact that she was cast in the physically undemanding role of the Lady of the Lake in “Spamalot” fed into their thinking. Their plan was to get pregnant in early summer so that “I’d be able to finish out the season with just maybe a slight alteration in the costumes and then off we would go having a baby the next winter,” she said. But then came a positive pregnancy test on Feb. 19.

“The first conversation that we had was like, ‘Well, I think that the Lady of the Lake could be pregnant, couldn’t she?’” said Rider-Shaw. Because the show is a farcical meta-musical, they figured it could add to the humour that the Knights of the Round Table idealize a pregnant Lady of the Lake as a romantic heroine.

Rider-Shaw’s next step was to call her union, the Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, to ask some hypothetical questions about what would happen if someone got pregnant mid-Stratford-season.

The Canadian Theatre Agreement, which is negotiated between the union and the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy, which is also protected under Ontario Human Rights legislation. But it is possible for theatres to challenge the employment of a pregnant actor if it would compromise the artistic integrity of the show; that is, if it would not make sense for a character to be visibly pregnant

“‘Romeo and Juliet,’ it’d be odd,” Rider-Shaw noted.

She and Markus were fairly confident that, on artistic grounds, they were going to be OK. But they were still not ready to talk about her condition.

“It’s really not smart to be sharing that news until you hit a certain point and, because of my age, I had to take some extra precautionary testing,” she said. “So I’m looking ahead going, ‘Well, by the time it’s safe to tell people we’re going to be in previews … if the decision is made that perhaps it’s not right to have a pregnant Lady of the Lake, they’re going to have to rehearse a whole new person in.’ And then what does that mean?

“It was stressful,” she said.

It was her character’s costuming that drove her decision to start sharing the news. Her first fitting happened before she was pregnant and the next one was coming up when she was nine or 10 weeks along. “Everything is built within a millimetre here … I went, ‘Nothing is going to fit. Even my own jeans don’t fit now’ … So I hauled (designer) David Boechler into my dressing room and told him.”

At that point, Rider-Shaw and Markus hadn’t even told their parents, because the pregnancy was still early and “we didn’t want to get their hopes up,” she said.

Boechler agreed to alter some of his designs and got Rider-Shaw’s permission to tell members of the wardrobe team who were building the costumes. In the place of “a skin-tight, sexy little catsuit thing” for one of her character’s outfits, Boechler designed a “sort of onesie with a big ruffle and they built in this accommodation under the ruffle for my belly to grow into.”

But the circle of knowledge had to be expanded again when Boechler pointed out, right before the show’s first dress rehearsal, that director Lezlie Wade would be seeing Rider-Shaw in a costume she didn’t know about. So Rider-Shaw told Wade and the stage management team, “and there was lots of tears and lots of joy, and ‘I think it’s wonderful, Jen,’” she recalled.

“Once those milestones were done, we were like, ‘Oh, OK, good. OK. There’s a level of support here,’ which is pretty amazing,” said Markus.

They captured the moments on video when they finally FaceTimed their parents and surprised them with the sonogram image. There were “projectile tears,” said Markus.

Rider-Shaw plans to stay in “Spamalot” as long as she can and the festival has welcomed this.

Margaret Thompson, a manager for theatre agreements at the Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, is pleased with how it turned out.

“There’s been too much emphasis in this industry on not allowing family life and work/life balance, and all of those facets of being a human being,” Thompson said. “Historically, a lot of women in theatre have had to make other choices for their careers.”

Once the baby comes, Rider-Shaw and Markus’s ideal scenario is that she’ll be cast in the 2024 Stratford season while he will stay at home.

This parenting arrangement “was part of our conversations long before we were pregnant,” said Rider-Shaw. “I’ve always said I want to be able to go back to work soon. And Robert has said that he’d like to be home with the baby. We both have dads that were very involved in our lives and we’re very close with.”

Whether or not she ends up in the next season, Rider-Shaw and Markus are looking forward to raising their daughter in Stratford. “Getting to work at the festival is icing on the cake of getting to live in a beautiful community of people that we love,” she said.

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