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When I asked Antoni Cimolino where his signature lay as artistic director of the Stratford Festival, he immediately pointed to his work as a season programmer: “You only direct one or two [shows], but you program all 12. When people stop me on the street and say they like something, that’s probably my work [as curator],” he said.
I interviewed Cimolino by phone in late September 2025, and he spoke of the rewards and stresses of programming 14 Stratford seasons — including the 2026 lineup — and other aspects of his work as artistic director that he sees as his legacy. He will step down in fall 2026, having spent some 30 years in leadership roles at the festival, after starting his career there as an actor in the 1980s.
“You want to choose things that feel important to the moment,” he said about building a Stratford season. “If you choose plays and they don’t resonate, it’s very hurtful. You believe in them and the power of them.” The festival was “fortunate,” he said, with their choice of two new plays set in wartime, Forgiveness and The Art of War, in the 2025 season: “People were feeling we were talking about the moment. I heard conversations in the interval of Forgiveness, saying this is what is happening in the U.S. about the move to fascism.”
Cimolino programmed the 2026 season and will oversee its delivery, as his successor, Jonathan Church, focuses on programming 2027 and getting to know North America’s biggest repertory theatre company.
Discussing what’s new for 2026, Cimolino points to the choice to put both musical shows, Guys and Dolls and Something Rotten!, in the Festival Theatre: “There is an energy around the musicals which is really vibrant. There are 1,800 seats in the Festival, which is bigger than every Broadway house but one. And just practically, that theatre is best when it’s full.”
In a related shift, Cimolino has programmed two of the season’s three Shakespeare plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello, in the 600-seat Tom Patterson Theatre. While likely an acknowledgement that works by the Bard may not have packed the festival’s larger theatres in recent years, Cimolino foregrounds formal and aesthetic advantages of such programming. “These are intimate plays, especially Othello. I wanted to provide a theatre that allowed closeup examination,” he said. “That’s a luxury here — you’re going to see brilliant acting, and inventiveness in terms of staging and design.”
The 2026 season also features three beloved and well-known modern plays: at the Festival Theatre, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and in the Avon, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Cimolino is quick to note that he’s not making a “greatest hits of modern drama” statement — “because what about O’Neill and Williams?” — rather that these were personal choices, plays he’s long wanted to program.
It was Jovanni Sy and Leanna Brodie’s much-lauded 2024 world premiere Salesman in China (a co-production between Stratford and the National Arts Centre) that brought Miller’s play to top of mind for Cimolino. And then he began to consider the contemporary resonances. “I wanted to program something that had something to say about the complete obsession we have with money, finances, and the veneer of success in our society,” he said. “I don’t want something that belittles that. People like Trump are not the issue, they are the symptom. I couldn’t think of a play that addresses that more than Salesman.”
Alongside Miller’s “practicality,” said Cimolino, the “delight and absurdity” of Wilde’s Earnest and the “haunting philosophy” of Waiting for Godot make for a “good cross-section” of 20th-century drama.
Perhaps improbably, one of the signatures of Cimolino’s tenure as artistic director of this classical theatre company has been his support of new writing, which has led to such landmark premieres as Hannah Moscovitch’s Bunny, Nick Green’s Casey and Diana, Kate Hennig’s Queenmaker Trilogy, and indeed Salesman in China.
“I’m very proud of it,” says Cimolino of this focus on new work. “The voice of the ancient needs to be put alongside the modern… I’m not saying that reinterpreting classics for our time doesn’t do that, but there is something really powerful about a play that represents a moment in time and will resonate for generations to come.”
He’s confident that the 2026 world premieres, The Tao of the World by Sy (which will play in the Tom Patterson Theatre) and The King James Bible Play by Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman (the sole 2026 offering to appear in the 260-seat Studio Theatre), are going to “do extremely well.
“I finally feel like in the last five or six years I’ve added more value for new work as artistic director,” he said — an approach that involves “generosity, understanding the point of view of the writer, trying to create something that’s not happened before.
“If you come in with known solutions you’re cutting off something that could be original and beautiful.”
Another feature of his tenure which Cimolino refers to as his “baby” is the Meighen Forum series of talks, events, and performances. “You arrive in Stratford, it has to be a rich environment,” said Cimolino. “As much as plays need to stand on their own… there is an opportunity to help us understand the connection between the plays and the world we live in.”
Cimolino is directing two productions this year — a tall order made more manageable by the fact that programming is off his plate. He can be fully present in the rehearsal room, he says, without the overhanging pressure of “finding out you don’t have the rights for something or having to negotiate the availability of a director.”
In the Avon, Cimolino will direct Saturday, Sunday, Monday by Eduardo de Filippo, the Italian playwright whose work has been a throughline of his artistic leadership. He made his Stratford solo directing debut in 1997 with de Filippo’s Filumena (starring Lally Cadeau and then-artistic director Richard Monette), and subsequently directed Napoli Milionaria! (2018) and Grand Magic (2023).
Cimolino is collaborating on a new version of Saturday, Sunday, Monday with Queen’s University professor Donato Santeramo, working from a literal translation by Santeramo. “We’re going to take a long time with that,” said Cimolino, calling the co-writing “a joyful process of understanding the fibers underneath the play.”
His final Shakespeare as artistic director will be The Tempest with Geraint Wyn Davies as Prospero, a character who Cimolino considers a representative artist: “The Tempest is about the life of the human creative act. It’s called magic in the play, but it’s also Prospero’s art…. Through science, art, theatre, we create. Sometimes we don’t like what we create. Sometimes we love it. It’s a defining aspect of what makes people human, along with compassion.”
While the pressures on him as artistic director are already starting to lift, Cimolino says he’ll really feel that this job is over once all the 2026 shows are open. When asked what’s next, he spoke with certainty about not wanting to take on another administrative job: “If you are a headhunter, don’t bother. I’ve done that now,” he said.
He’s equally certain that he wants to keep directing.
“I want to be in rooms with actors, designers, and creative teams, imagining beautiful things.”
Tickets for the 2026 Stratford Festival season go on sale tomorrow, January 10. More information is avaialble here.
The Stratford Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Karen Fricker
Karen Fricker is Intermission’s editorial director and adjunct professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University. She has worked as a critic in Toronto, London (UK), Dublin, and New York City, and has a PhD in theatre studies from Trinity College, Dublin. Sustaining the field of theatre criticism in our digital age is a big focus of her work, through academic research projects and training/mentorship ventures including Page Turn and Youareacritic.com. She is co-director of the international research network Circus and its Others, and has researched the Eurovision Song Contest for two glorious decades and counting.
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