Antoni Cimolino, Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, says his final season in the role will include a production of The Tempest.JENNIFER ROBERTS/The Globe and Mail
The Stratford Festival has unveiled its 2026 season – the last to be curated by outgoing artistic director Antoni Cimolino.
While audiences wait to see who will take one of the top jobs in Canadian theatre – the festival has been tight-lipped about its selection process, divulging only that the chosen candidate will be revealed in September – Cimolino has announced that his final season in the role will include a production of The Tempest, which he will direct, in the 1,800-seat Festival Theatre. On the musical side of things, the festival will present a remount of Donna Feore’s hit production of Something Rotten!, as well as a new interpretation of Guys and Dolls.
“Something Rotten! was an event,” Cimolino said of the 2024 production in an interview. “People just loved it, and the meta-theatricality of it was delicious. We loved seeing Shakespeare onstage as a bad boy. People were screaming at us to bring it back, people who came to see it 14, 15 times. So that made total sense.”
“Guys and Dolls, meanwhile, will be a new production, a new cast, a new point of view,” he added, clarifying that while the show will be directed and choreographed by Feore, it will not be a remount of her 2017 production at the festival.
“The Tempest is a play about a lifetime in the theatre,” said Cimolino. “When Prospero talks about ‘rough magic,’ he’s also talking about his art. It’s rough because it’s powerful but inexact. Theatre’s much the same way – we can’t really tell how it’s going to work or why. We just know that bringing people together in a theatre has this incredible power that is a force for good.
“As I thought about which Shakespeare I’d like to do on the Festival stage in my last season, it became very clear to me that it needed to be The Tempest,” he continued.
What is the best show to see at this year’s Stratford Festival? Our theatre reporter answers your questions
What do you want to know about this year’s Stratford Festival? Our theatre reporter answers your questions
Rounding out the Festival Theatre programming is a new production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, directed for the mainstage by Molly Atkinson.
“The Festival Theatre is a miracle,” said Cimolino. “It’s 1,800 people surrounding what’s really a beautiful little crucible, a tiny performance space. We’ll have more news in the weeks ahead, but Molly’s vision demands that this great, tiny play be in that beautiful space.”
The more traditional Avon Theatre will see two mainstays of the English theatrical canon: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, directed by Dean Gabourie, and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Krista Jackson. Cimolino will also direct a new adaptation of Eduardo De Filippo’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday, marking Cimolino’s fourth Stratford outing with the playwright often referred to as Italy’s counterpart to Anton Chekhov.
The Schulich Children’s Play, also staged at the Avon Theatre, will be Kim Selody’s adaptation of The Hobbit, directed by Pablo Felices-Luna.
American attendance has been higher than normal at this year’s Stratford Festiveal, Mr. Cimolino says.JENNIFER ROBERTS/The Globe and Mail
“The Avon is exactly the kind of theatre Earnest was created for,” said Cimolino. “And when Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in the late ‘40s, he did so for a proscenium arch, as well.
“It’s an exacting examination of the hypocrisy of chasing the American Dream,” he said of Death of a Salesman. “I felt we needed that at this moment in time, with all the events happening in the world. I wanted to find a way to examine the emptiness of the rat race without getting into personalities.”
Like Something Rotten!, Death of a Salesman dovetails neatly with the festival’s 2024 season. Last year, the festival produced the world premiere of Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy’s Salesman in China, a new play that chronicled Miller’s experience bringing his masterwork to Beijing in 1983, to significant critical and audience acclaim.
“I’ve always loved Death of a Salesman,” said Cimolino. “But watching Salesman in China really brought home for me that that play needs to be heard again.”
Cimolino added that the late Michael Blake, whose sudden death in July sent shockwaves through the Canadian theatre industry, was slated to have roles in both The Tempest and Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
“There’s a big hole which we will now need to fill,” said Cimolino. “But it won’t be easy.”
The Stratford Festival’s smaller spaces – the thrust-stage Tom Patterson Theatre and the cozy Studio Theatre – will see intimate productions of Othello (directed by Haysam Kadri), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (directed by Graham Abbey) and The Tao of the World, a new play written and directed by Sy that bills itself as “a restoration comedy for modern times.” Nina Lee Aquino will direct another new work, Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman’s The King James Bible Play, in the Studio Theatre.
“Both The Tao of the World and The King James Bible Play are thought-provoking pieces about how we live our lives,” said Cimolino. “In a way, there are also theological dimensions to both. I feel really lucky that they’re both ready to be done in the final year of my tenure.”
While the festival has not released mid-season attendance numbers for this year, Cimolino shared that so far, American attendance has been higher than normal. In 2024 the festival reported a drop in attendance and a $1.1-million operating deficit. But despite this challenge, Cimolino said that the festival has retained guardianship of Stratford’s Normal School, where the festival houses offices, rehearsal space and its largest gift shop, through the end of the 2026 season.
