A winter story told by a melancholy child and a fanatical Lucy Maud Montgomery book club help frame the final two productions in the Stratford Festival’s 2025 opening week. The first device, in Antoni Cimolino’s production of The Winter’s Tale, is as subtle as Kat Sandler’s, for Anne of Green Gables, is bold. Both expertly tee up the theatrical experience to come.
Cimolino’s production of The Winter’s Tale begins with Hermione (Sara Topham) inviting her young son, Mamillius (Philip Myers, alternating with George Robinet) to tell her a story. But the central plot quickly overruns that tender domestic scene, as Hermione’s husband, the Sicilian king Leontes (Graham Abbey), vainly tries to persuade his old friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia (André Sills), to prolong his visit to Leontes’ court.
When, at Leontes’ bidding, Hermione succeeds where he failed and convinces Polixenes to stay, this prompts one of the most fascinating (and potentially vexing) character flips in the Shakespearean canon. Leontes becomes convinced his wife and friend are having an affair, this jealousy leading to a multi-layered cascade of tragedy. You could call this toxic masculinity and read the whole production through that lens — as does Robert Lepage with his Macbeth in this year’s Stratford season — but Cimolino’s is a subtler enterprise, leaning into Leontes’ complex interiority.
This is a text that Abbey knows intimately — he directed an excellent production for his own Groundling Theatre in 2016, remounted it at Toronto’s Winter Garden the following year, and also staged the play at U of T in 2020 — and in a riveting performance brings the audience deep into Leontes’ obsession and paranoia. Shakespeare gives Hermione far fewer lines but the heartbreak that Topham communicates through her eyes, face, and physicality are deeply affecting, as she shifts her guise from graciousness to abjection.
Among the many pleasures of this production is how perfectly Cimolino has cast it: In her several scenes, Yanna McIntosh rules the stage as the formidable Paulina, Hermoine’s defender and Leontes’ judge and jury.
After the darkness of the play’s first three acts (plus an intermission) burst the contrasting bounty of Bohemia-set pastoral scenes. We get buoyant maypole dances (choreography by Adrienne Gould); bewitching young lovers played by Marissa Orjalo and Austin Eckert; Tom McCamus and Christo Graham giving excellent doofus energy as the shepherds; and Geraint Wyn Davies charming the audience through, rather than despite, the contemporary obscurity of Autolycus’ wordplay. The palette of Francesca Callow’s costumes shifts from somber burgundy and gunmetal gray to lovely pastels, and Michael Walton’s lights too become warmer.
Lucy Peacock appears three times as the personification of Time, guiding Mamillius at the beginning and end, and narrating the 16-year leap between Sicily and Bohemia. Including Time this frequently (in Shakespeare’s original, the character only appears once) provides context for the play’s tonal shifts between dark psychological drama, abundant comedy and, in the end, wish-fulfilling romance, by suggesting that some higher power is governing these moves.
Cimolino’s not working as overt a concept as those powering the other Shakespeare productions this season, Chris Abraham’s post-apocalyptic As You Like It and Lepage’s biker-gang Macbeth, but there’s a quiet sophistication to his staging that complements the material and made it a highly rewarding viewing experience.
The captivating conceit of Sandler’s Anne of Green Gables adaptation (which she also directs) begins in its first moments as Maev Beaty appears onstage in an excessively resplendent violet frock, welcoming the audience to a gathering of her book club. Soon, Anne’s story springs to life; it’s a loving feat of world-building, as actors playing club members in contemporary clothing jump into the action, turning a wheeled cart and packing boxes into Matthew’s buggy with actor 郝邦宇 Steven Hao playing the horse.
This invitation to the audience to buy into the show’s storytelling conventions underlines a key theme of Montgomery and Sandler’s story: The transformational power of the imagination. And the device of Beaty as the obsessive fan who then plays gossipy neighbour Rachel Lynde can serve as a point of identification for audience members wary of modernizing a beloved classic.
I didn’t grow up in Canada and don’t have much knowledge of Anne’s mythology beyond her iconic image and the fact that there’s been a musical of her story playing in P.E.I. for approximately ever. Audience reaction at the opening matinee signalled strongly that the first act was hitting all the expected beats, from Anne’s appearance at the train station — red braids, endearingly intense demeanour, and all — to the emergence of the gabled Cuthbert house, first as a miniature behind a scrim and then in life-sized, rustic splendour (delightful set and costume design is by Joanna Yu 余頌恩).
Caroline Toal is captivating in the title role and manages the tricky task of playing a child character with sincerity and not cute-ifying her. Sarah Dodd as prickly Marilla and Tim Campbell as taciturn, warm-hearted Matthew anchor the show with their fully realized performances. As a longstanding admirer of Campbell’s capacity to play thoroughly decent men, it brings considerable relief to see him inhabit a role of such intrinsic goodness after playing the irredeemable James Piper in Fall on Your Knees.
While in some ways Sandler’s approach to Montgomery’s book is faithful, in others she makes deviations, most notably in a major second-act intervention which further invites contemporary young audiences into the story. She also leans into some of the text’s queer implications and tendencies in her representation of the relationship between Anne and her “bosom friend,” Diana Berry (Julie Lumsden). Sandler’s treatment of this current is subtle and affecting, as are Toal and Lumdsen’s playing of scenes between them. Sandler’s treatment of adoption narratives is also refreshingly thoughtful and of-the-moment.
The acting company (which also includes Helen Belay, Jordin Hall, Josue Laboucane, and Jennifer Villaverde) perform with the commitment and high spirits of a group that may have already known they were in the runaway hit of the festival season. Throughout my decade-long experience of Stratford Festival viewing, no writer/director team has ever really been able to crack the annual Schulich Children’s Plays assignment before, with work sometimes coming across as under-resourced and not seeming to fully connect with its audience. While I can’t speak with any authority about how every younger audience member will receive Anne of Green Gables, my friend’s thoughtful seven-year-old was able to take all the material in, including some sad second-act plot turns that had many adult audience members around me sobbing openly. It’s a brilliantly told tale, for which I’ve already bought another ticket later this summer.
The Stratford Festival’s 2025 season runs until November 2. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Karen Fricker
Karen Fricker is editorial advisor for Intermission magazine, adjunct professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University, and a member of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. She has worked as a critic in Toronto; London, UK; Dublin, Ireland; and New York City, and has a PhD in theatre studies from Trinity College, Dublin. Her book The Original Stage Productions of Robert Lepage: Making Theatre Global (Manchester University Press) was the winner of the 2022 Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Award for the best book in English on a Canadian topic. Her research interests also include contemporary circus and the changing nature of theatre criticism in the digital age.
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