Kimberley Rampersad and Shaw Festival artistic director Tim Carroll. Rampersad is directing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella for the 2026 Shaw Festival, while Carroll is directing George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House and Peter Shaffer’s Mozart.David Cooper/Shaw Festival
The Shaw Festival has unveiled its slate of programming for 2026, including a production of the musical Funny Girl in the 854-seat Festival Theatre and an as-of-yet-untitled workshop presentation by American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
The 2026 season will mark the fest’s first since 1980 without the Royal George Theatre, which will undergo renovations starting at the end of this year until the end of 2028. In its place, the Shaw Festival will stage smaller productions at the newly renovated Niagara District Court House.
“This season celebrates theatre itself – illusion, disguise, performance – and all the ways that we delight, mislead, amaze and seduce each other. Life is a theatre, and theatre is life,” said artistic director Tim Carroll in a statement. “We can’t wait to share the unique thrill of live performance with our amazing audience.”
The season opens in May with Sleuth, a psychological thriller set to be directed by Peter Fernandes (who Shaw audiences might recall seeing onstage in the fest’s gangbusters 2024 production of One Man, Two Guvnors).
Next comes director Eda Holmes’s production of Funny Girl, as well as Perfect Nonsense, directed by Brendan McMurtry-Howlett and based on P.G. Wodehouse’s 1938 novel The Code of Woosters.
Come midsummer, the Shaw Festival will present The Wind in the Willows, adapted and directed by Bad Hats Theatre’s Fiona Sauder, in the intimate Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre. Also in the Studio Theatre is Carroll’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s classic Heartbreak House. One for the Pot, a British farce directed by Chris Abraham, will play next door in the Festival Theatre.
The summer season will close out with Amadeus, Peter Shaffer’s iconic play about Mozart, directed by Carroll in the Festival Theatre, and Ohio State Murders, Adrienne Kennedy’s scorcher about race in the U.S., directed by Philip Akin in the Studio Theatre.
Also in August, the festival will present the workshop for a world premiere play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jacobs-Jenkins, who Shaw audiences may remember from the festival’s productions of An Octoroon in 2017 and Everybody in 2022.
Later in 2026, the festival will present two holiday musicals: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, directed by Kimberley Rampersad in the Festival Theatre, and A Year with Frog and Toad, directed by Jonathan Tan in the Court House Theatre.
