Category: Stratford Festival
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Members of the company, Othello. Stratford Festival 2026. Photo by David Hou. By Galen Simmons There is no shortage of strong performances in director Haysam Kadri’s production of the Shakespearean tragedy, Othello, this season at the Stratford Festival. This production’s cast is anchored by the remarkable talents of André Sills as the titular character. Sills…
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Marissa Orjalo as Cecily Cardew, Carter Gulseth as Algernon Moncrieff, Joe Perry as John Worthing and Allison Lynch as Gwendolen Fairfax, The Importance of Being Earnest. Stratford Festival 2026. Photo by David Hou. By Galen Simmons Besides the return of Something Rotten!, which everyone knew was once again going to be a smash hit, director…
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By Galen Simmons Are they alive or dead; on Earth or in Hell? Why can’t they remember anything from one day to the next? Who is Godot and why are they waiting for him? Those questions and more are never answered in director Molly Atkinson’s production of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play, Waiting for…
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By Galen Simmons What can I write about a production I’ve seen and reviewed before? This season at the Stratford Festival marked the return of the hilarious musical, Something Rotten!, to the Festival Theatre stage. Helmed once again by director-choreographer Donna Feore, the production is almost entirely identical to the production of the same musical…
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By Galen Simmons As an avid Tolkien fan, when I first heard the Stratford Festival would be mounting a production of The Hobbit on the Avon Theatre stage, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture how the production team would bring the vast expanses of Middle Earth and its dwarves, elves, goblins and…
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By Galen Simmons In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the boundaries between what’s real, what’s fantasy and what is a dream are thin – almost imperceptible – and the play’s characters slip between one world and the next, in some cases unknowingly. That magic surrealness is captured perfectly in director Graham Abbey’s 2026 Stratford Festival…
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By Galen Simmons Guys and Dolls is one of those all-time great musicals in which every actor, dancer and singer who takes the stage has the chance to shine. And that’s especially true in the Stratford Festival’s 2026 production helmed by Stratford’s go-to director-choreographer for all things musical theatre, Donna Feore. Once again, Feore has…
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By Galen Simmons The Stratford Festival and outgoing artistic director Antoni Cimolino’s season-opening production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest proved once again that good theatre is “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Just as Prospero, played in this production by the venerable Geraint Wyn Davies, comments on the fleeting, dream-like nature of human existence and…
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From left, Joe Perry as Biff Loman and Tom McCamus as Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman. Stratford Festival 2026. Photo by David Hou. By Galen Simmons After I watched Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy’s Salesman in China a few seasons ago at the Stratford Festival, that notion that the universally understood message in playwright…
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By Galen SimmonsWhen I walked into the Studio Theatre to review Spontaneous Theatre and the Stratford Festival’s Goblin: Oedipus on opening night Oct. 17, I expected to watch a hilarious sendup of the famous Greek tragedy by the goblins, Wug, Kragva and Moog, similar to that of Goblin: Macbeth in 2023.What I didn’t expect was…