Stratford Festival’s 2023 season to headline venerable classics, new Canadian works and two musicals
“King Lear,” Shakespeare’s great tragedy, will headline the 2023 Stratford Festival season with a slate of 13 productions that includes venerable classics, new Canadian works and two Tony Award-winning musicals.
Kimberley Rampersad’s production of the play, about an aging king whose empire is thrown into chaos after he divides it among his daughters, opens the new season, set to run from mid-April through October next year.
The new productions announced Wednesday are inspired by the theme of duty versus desire, said artistic director Antoni Cimolino, who wanted to examine ideas of selfishness and selflessness at a time when many people are re-examining their place in the world and relation to each other following the pandemic.
“In many of these plays, there’s a tension between what society expects of you,” versus what you personally desire, said Cimolino in an interview with the Star. “We have traditionally thought people should follow their hearts, and yet … if we all just do what we want to do, society doesn’t really work. So there’s also this sense of a responsibility to the whole.”
Rampersad, associate artistic director of the Shaw Festival, returns to Stratford after most recently helming the festival’s 2021 production of “Serving Elizabeth.”
Though season casting has yet to be announced, Cimolino noted there will be non-traditional casting for several “major Shakespeare parts” next season. The festival last produced “King Lear” in 2014, in a production directed by Cimolino starring Colm Feore in the titular role.
Joining “King Lear” on the Festival Theatre stage — Stratford’s largest venue — is Chris Abraham’s production of “Much Ado About Nothing.” Abraham, artistic director of Crow’s Theatre in Toronto, was originally slated to direct the Shakespeare comedy in 2020, but the production was cancelled due to the pandemic. It was to star festival favourites Graham Abbey and Maev Beaty.
“Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s rock musical about a group of young artists living in Manhattan during the AIDS crisis, and the Tony Award-winning “Monty Python’s Spamalot” will be the two musicals of the season.
Broadway veteran Thom Allison, who was part of the original Canadian company of “Rent,” will direct that musical at the Festival Theatre. Award-winning director, writer, lyricist and actor Lezlie Wade will helm “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” slated again for the Avon Theatre after it was cancelled due to the pandemic in 2020.
Also scheduled for the Avon is a new adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” written and directed by Thomas Morgan Jones, and “Frankenstein Revived,” a movement-based piece inspired by the life and work of English novelist Mary Shelley, written and directed by Morris Panych.
In the Tom Patterson Theatre, Cimolino will direct Eduardo De Filippo’s comedy “Grand Magic,” translated by the late John Murrell. This translation was the last piece of work that Murrell completed before his death in November 2019, and was sent to Cimolino during the early days of the pandemic. “I didn’t have the heart to look at it then, with everything that was going on,” said Cimolino. “It’s beautiful … it’s certainly a gift from John.”
Jillian Keiley’s production of Shakespeare’s “Richard II” in the Tom Patterson Theatre is one of three productions in this Stratford season set during the AIDS era. Playwright Brad Fraser is writing what the festival describes as a “revolutionary adaptation” of “Richard II” set in the late 1970s and early ’80s, at a time where younger and minoritized populations were exploring their freedom, and news was starting to surface of a deadly new virus.
Alongside “Richard II” and “Rent,” the AIDS theme continues in Nick Green’s world premiere Stratford commission, “Casey and Diana,” inspired by the true story of Princess Diana’s visit to the Toronto HIV hospice Casey House in 1991. “Casey and Diana” will be directed by Andrew Kushnir in the Studio Theatre.
Other programming for the 2023 Stratford Festival season includes:
- Michel Tremblay’s “Les Belles-soeurs” will be the final 2023 production in the Festival Theatre. Directed by Esther Jun, this will be the first Stratford production of Tremblay’s Québécois masterpiece in 32 years.
- At the Tom Patterson Theatre, American director and educator Sam White will helm Alice Childress’s “Wedding Band,” about an interracial relationship in the American Deep South circa 1918.
- Yvette Nolan will direct Anishnaabe-Slovene playwright Frances Koncan’s “Women of the Fur Trade,” a satire of survival and cultural inheritance set in the 1800s, in the Studio Theatre.
- Peter Pasyk, director of the well-received 2022 Stratford production of “Hamlet,” will direct Shakespeare’s comedy “Love’s Labour’s Lost” in the Studio Theatre.
Tickets for the 2023 season go on sale Nov. 6 for Stratford Festival members and Dec. 12 for the general public. The current season runs through Oct. 30.
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