A Critical Lens on Canadian Arts.
About Galen Simmons
2025
Antoni Cimolino looks ahead to his final season as artistic director of the Stratford Festival
Stratford Festival review: The Winter’s Tale mixes comedy and tragedy to perfection
Stratford Festival review: Annie wows with talented kids and a cast to back them up
Stratford Festival review: Anne of Green Gables brings the fandom on stage in hilarious production
Stratford Festival review: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels offers plenty of dirty rotten fun
2024
Stratford Festival review: Director-choreographer Donna Feore does it again with Something Rotten!
Stratford Festival review: Wendy and Peter Pan offers emotional alternative to a classic
Stratford Festival review: The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? challenges an audience’s tolerance
Stratford Festival review: Get That Hope offers a familiar family story with new context
Stratford Festival review: London Assurance serves up cartoonish hilarity
Stratford Festival review: Romeo and Juliet delivers teen angst and rash decision making
Stratford Festival review: ‘60s counterculture gives new context in McKenna’s Twelfth Night
Stratford Festival Review: Rarely produced Cymbeline brought to life on Tom Patterson Theatre stage
Stratford Festival review: The Diviners weaves past and present into a story about storytelling
Category: 2025
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By Galen Simmons When given the opportunity to undergo a highly experimental procedure with a 100 per-cent guarantee of conception after trying every other method, how far will one couple go to start a family and what lessons about parenthood and their relationship will they learn along the way? Here For Now Theatre’s winter-season, world-premiere…
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By Galen Simmons When given the opportunity to undergo a highly experimental procedure with a 100 per-cent guarantee of conception after trying every other method, how far will one couple go to start a family and what lessons about parenthood and their relationship will they learn along the way? Here For Now Theatre’s winter-season, world-premiere…
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By Galen Simmons When given the opportunity to undergo a highly experimental procedure with a 100 per-cent guarantee of conception after trying every other method, how far will one couple go to start a family and what lessons about parenthood and their relationship will they learn along the way? Here For Now Theatre’s winter-season, world-premiere…
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By Galen Simmons Whether she was set up by the gods as a scapegoat for all things chaotic or curiosity got the better of her, Pandora was always going to open that box, allegedly unleashing all the evils of mankind. In Pandora, the first-ever production to be staged as part of a winter season for…
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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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Church to officially take on artistic-director role in November 2026 By Galen Simmons Having just been announced as the Stratford Festival’s next artistic director, Jonathan Church is looking forward to immersing himself fully in the Festival and getting to know its artists and audiences before he officially takes over the role from Antoni Cimolino in…
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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 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 To me, the mark of a good play – or any piece of art for that matter – is that it leaves me with a new way of looking at the world around me, or that it shifts my perspective to one I may have never considered otherwise. Director Severn Thompson’s production…
NORTHERN ARTS PERSPECTIVE 