No. You are much more versatile with the id. By calling toPages()
on the field that stores the ids, you get a collection of pages you can then loop through and you have access to every page property, not just the title:
$actors = $page->actors()->toPages(','); // when using the pages field, you would remove the comma attribute
foreach ($actors as $actor) {
echo $actor->title(); // or whatever else
}
Your filter could then look like this:
$productions = page('productions')->children()->listed()
->filter(fn ($prod) => $prod->actors()->toPages()->has($page)); // or with a comma passed to `toPages()` in your multiselect variant.