Category: Stratford Festival
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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…
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By Galen Simmons It’s not about where you’re going, but who you are when you get there. In the world premiere of playwright Erin Shields’ Ransacking Troy, as directed by Jackie Maxwell for the 2025 Stratford Festival, the classic Greek epics Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey are reimagined with nine Greek women at their core,…
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By Galen Simmons While photographs and historical accounts of war may tell us what happened, the emotions – the fear and anxiety of being attacked, the boredom of waiting for something to happen, the adrenalin-pumping excitement of action, and the crushing sadness of losing friends – can best be relayed to those of us who…
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By Galen Simmons For the entirety of what will be his 40-year career at the Stratford Festival, and even before that as a young actor who chose to dedicate his life to the stage, Antoni Cimolino has been enraptured by the magic of theatre. Looking ahead to the 2026 season – Cimolino’s last as artistic…
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By Galen Simmons Part tragedy, part comedy, part tragic comedy, part comic tragedy. Whatever one might identify Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as, the Stratford Festival and director Antoni Cimolino’s 2025 production of one of the Bard’s stranger plays certainly fits the description. The play is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster ride with one half…
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By Galen Simmons When I first heard director Robert Lepage was going to stage a production of Macbeth set in the brutal and hierarchical world of motorcycle gangs, I had one word in mind – ambitious. Would the prospect of bringing motorcycles and guns to the stage in a realistic way that stays true to…
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By Galen Simmons Do the protagonists in Forgiveness, a play adapted by actor and playwright Hiro Kanagawa from author Mark Sakamoto’s 2014 book, Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, actually find forgiveness in their hearts for the people and countries that did them wrong? That’s the question I found myself asking at the end of…
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By Galen Simmons In Kate Hamill’s adaptation of the classic Jane Austen novel, Sense and Sensibility, for the 2025 Stratford Festival stage, gossip is more than a plot driver and social regulator, it is a force of nature. Though gossip plays several key roles in Austen’s book – advancing the story with half truths and…