Stratford Festival: A season of 'A World Elsewhere' (2024)

The inspiration for the 2024 Stratford Festival season, like so much in recent years, can be traced back to the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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But artistic director Antoni Cimolino wasn’t so much thinking about the virus itself when he began thinking about the Festival’s 2024 playbill as he was musing on our collective desire to discover “A World Elsewhere.” After months of lockdowns and gathering restrictions, there was, for many, a yearning to escape from our suddenly diminished environs.

“I was noticing people were so desperate to go on vacation again after the years of lockdown, but I also noticed people leaving jobs — you know, deciding ‘I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to do something else,” Cimolino said.

“So this idea became, ‘what happens when we go somewhere else — when we unplug and become a new person?’”

With theatre providing a similar sort of invitation — to enter and journey into new worlds — Cimolino looked for plays that would reinforce this sense of A World Elsewhere. Some choices were obvious — Peter Pan’s Neverland, for example — while the worlds elsewhere in other plays were more indefinite or abstruse. Whatever the circ*mstance, however, the idea of a journey is central to each of this season’s dozen productions.

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Twelfth Night, this season’s opening-night production, is another where the World Elsewhere is obvious. Directed by acclaimed actor Seana McKenna, this Shakespearean comedy involves a tangle of mistaken identities and a love triangle after a shipwreck leaves twin siblings stranded on the mysterious island of Illyria.

(McKenna) is one of the best actresses in the world,” Cimolino said, “and she has directed from time to time, but I wanted to give her an opportunity to really bring forward a lifetime of experience — a lifetime of learning — in terms of the work.”

With a gifted cast of Stratford stars, including Jessica B. Hill, Laura Condlin, André Sills, Vanessa Sears, Deborah Hay, Scott Wentworth and Rylan Wilkie, McKenna has set her interpretation of this romantic comedy in 1967, just weeks before the “Summer of Love.”

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“She’s found a very rich time,” Cimolino said. “It’s delightful and (McKenna’s) wealth of experience is just such a help to the cast. I think this is going to be one of the major hits of the season.”

Unlike Twelfth Night’s Viola and Sebastian, the characters in another of the season’s major Shakespearean productions, Romeo and Juliet, never actually reach a world elsewhere. The doomed lovers, though, “desperately want a different world — a better world — for themselves,” Cimolino said.

Starring Sears and Jonathan Mason as the famous young lovers from two warring houses, this production of Romeo and Juliet will embrace their romance in a way that reinforces the tragedy of their eventual loss. While director Sam White has chosen to leave the play in Shakespeare’s original Renaissance setting, Cimolino promised “different elements” that will make for a powerful production.

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The season’s final Shakespearean production, the rarely staged Cymbeline, is one of The Bard’s later works and offers an unexpected fusion of romance, comedy and tragedy. In this Esther Jun-helmed production, Cymbeline, an ancient British queen, exiles her commoner son-in-law, Posthumus, to Italy since she needs her daughter, Innogen, to produce a fully royal heir. This banishment to a world elsewhere prompts a series of villainous schemes that involve gender-swapping disguises, attempted assassinations and what Cimolino called a “hard-fought happy ending.”

“Late in Shakespeare’s life, he was interested in what happens if we get behind the misunderstandings and the anger to actually discover we aren’t entirely right,” the artistic director said. “We haven’t totally been betrayed. There is second chance at love and relationships.”

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With a “fantastic cast” that includes Lucy Peaco*ck, Jordin Hall, Allison Edwards-Crewe and Jonathan Goad, Cimolino promised that audiences will be “laughing and crying” by Cymbeline’s final act.

While Shakespeare didn’t pen the play, he is the inspiration — and a main character — for Something Rotten, one of this season’s two blockbuster musicals. Directed and choreographed by a returning Donna Feore, Something Rotten is about the creative journey of the Bottom brothers, two struggling playwrights who find themselves overshadowed by the charismatic William Shakespeare. Desperate to escape The Bard’s looming shadow, the brothers — played by Henry Firmston and Mark Uhre — attempt to invent a strange new theatrical genre in which the actors unaccountably break into song and dance.

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“Donna has just filled this production with hugely talented actors, great gags . . . and wonderful dance,” Cimolino said. “It’s kinetic. They just never stop. Donna is at the height of her powers.

“It’s about musicals – it’s about the creation of musicals – and it’s so irreverent. If you love Shakespeare, you’ll love it. If you love musicals, you’ll love it.”

The world elsewhere in the season’s other musical, La Cage Aux Folles, is just as conceptual as the vision within Something Rotten. That world, Cimolino said, is one of “acceptance and independence” where people are able to put aside their differences and embrace our common humanity.

A musical based on a hit French play, La Cage Aux Folles features a nightclub and drag cabaret of the same name that’s headlined by Albin, the longtime romantic partner of the club’s owner, Georges. When Georges’ son, Jean-Michel, introduces his parents to the family of fiancée Anne, the daughter of an ultra-conservative couple who want to shut down St. Tropez’s drag clubs, Albin is asked to play “butch” as “Uncle Al” for the duration of the visit.

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“(Director) Thom Allison and his entire creative team are hugely dedicated to this piece,” Cimolino said. “They are treating it with great care and love, with a fantastic cast that includes Steve Ross and Sean Arbuckle, among many others. With the talent on the stage through to the joyful material that is there, I think this play is going to be something to remember.”

This season’s Schulich Children’s Play, Wendy and Peter Pan, is an affectionate adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s classic novel that will introduce audiences to a more daring Wendy Darling. Directed by Thomas Morgan Jones, the play shares the journey of Wendy and her brothers to Neverland, where they help Peter Pan and the Lost Boys battle the sinister Captain Hook.

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Starring Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks, Jake Runeckles and Condlin, Wendy and Peter Pan remains largely faithful to the source material while playwright Ella Hickson adds in a few new wrinkles.

“These seemingly modest changes make an enormous difference,” Cimolino said. It’s one of the few times when a retelling of a classic tale actually makes it stronger.

“I find this version to me much more emotionally moving. It’s Peter Pan, but it’s Peter Pan in an emotionally deep and beautiful way.”

In Hedda Gabler, the Henrik Ibsen classic that’s only been performed once before on a Stratford stage, the world elsewhere is one in which women aren’t constrained by social convention. Unfortunately, this world is out of reach for Hedda, a brilliant young woman who is forced into the respectable life of a housewife. In her anger, Hedda shows an indomitable will that she asserts by manipulating the people around her.

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“This is one of the great plays in theatre history,” Cimolino said. “It’s about a woman who is extremely intelligent and capable but has nowhere to put her energy, her mind, her ability.”

Helmed by Molly Atkinson, the Stratford production also welcomes back Sara Topham, who’s returning to Stratford for the first time since starring as Juliet in 2013.

“She has been in New York and has performed and taught in many places,” Cimolino said, “so it’s wonderful to have her back home.”

Written by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy, Salesman in China will be making its world premiere when it opens at the Avon Theatre this season. Inspired by the memoirs of playwright Arthur Miller and actor Ying Ruocheng, the play recounts a historic collaboration intended to symbolize a new era of friendship between the American and Chinese governments.

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“The play is based on a real event,” Cimolino said. “China was beginning to open up in the early 1980s, so a very famous actor, Ying Ruocheng, decided to seize the moment and reach out to Arthur Miller, who’d written Death of a Salesman. … He invites Arthur Miller to come over to direct (Death of a Salesman) and Miller came with a desire to prove that we’re all people – that all of our stories interconnect.”

Starring Tom McCamus and Adrian Pang, the play delves into the challenges faced by Miller, Ruocheng and their collaborators at Beijing’s People’s Art Theatre.

“This is the kind of quintessentially American play that seemed to define the challenges of capitalism,” Cimolino said. “You’re doing a play about a travelling salesman in a country where they don’t have travelling salesman. He is contemplating suicide so his family can get the insurance money in a country where they did not have insurance.

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“So what is the essence of being American? What is the essence of being Chinese? These are the kinds of questions that (director Sy) is examining in this piece.”

In The Diviners, another 2024 production enjoying its world premiere, the world elsewhere is one that exists in the mind of Morag, a novelist struggling to finish her work-in-progress. Isolating herself from family and friends in her rural cabin, Morgan muses on the past and future, exploring her dreams and memories, and her own past journey into her Indigenous heritage.

Adapted by Vern Thiessen and Yvette Nolan from Margaret Laurence’s final novel, The Diviners tells an epic story that spans centuries of Canada’s past while being firmly rooted in a family that’s navigating its own identity. Starring Irene Poole as Morag and Julie Lumsden as Pique, The Diviners, Cimolino said, will be “something very memorable.”

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“It’s about a woman who wants to find her own voice as a writer, her daughter who’s trying to find her own identity,” Cimolino said about the Krista Jackson and Geneviève Pelletier-directed play. “It explores the divide between Indigenous, Métis and Settler communities.

“It was a novel that was well ahead of its time.”

Another work considered well ahead of its time when it opened on Broadway in 2002, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is an unconventional tale about a successful architect who shocks his wife and son when he falls in love with a goat.

“This is arguably (playwright) Edward Albee’s greatest achievement,” Cimolino said. “It basically asks questions: What is the end of tolerance? What is the nature of love? A lot of questions that don’t have easy answers.”

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While the subject matter is unsettling – and the play veers toward the tragic – The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is also uproariously funny, Cimolino said.

“You’re laughing right from the start,” the artistic director said. “He has you laughing and then he shocks you. You think you’re in control – you think you know what’s going on – and then something powerful and unexpected happens.”

Directed by Dean Gabourie and starring Peaco*ck, Rick Roberts, Matthew Kabwe and Anthony Palermo, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? can be considered a late-career distillation of Albee’s thematic preoccupations, Cimolino noted.

“This play is about who Albee was as a person and whether that was acceptable in the world,” Cimolino said. “It’s a great piece.”

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The third world premiere of the Festival’s 2024 season, Get That Hope, was inspired by Stratford’s 2018 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Written by the “phenomenally gifted” Andrea Scott, Get That Hope takes place in a crowded apartment in Toronto’s Little Jamaica while family patriarch Richard Whyte is planning an ambitious Jamaican Independence Day party. Richard’s wife and adult children, though, are dealing with their own emotional struggles, which makes for an often fraught day of disagreements and resentments that slowly fracture the family’s upbeat facade.

“(Scott) was determined to write a play from her own perspective,” Cimolino said. “It is very funny. You love the characters. . . . It’s what we all know about families. We love each other. We want to be together but, at the same time, there are challenges.”

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Directed by Sills, Get That Hope stars Celia Aloma, Conrad Coates, Savion Roach, Kim Roberts and Jennifer Villaverde.

The final big comedy of the 2024 season, London Assurance, presents a contrast between city sophisticates of the upper classes in Victorian England and their more rural counterparts. Penned by Dion Boucicault, one of the most celebrated playwrights of the mid-1800s, London Assurance follows Sir Harcourt Courtly, an aging London fop, as he attempts to court a scandalously younger bridge with a substantial inheritance during a visit to her family’s country estate.

“What I love about the play is that it has a main character who is somewhat ridiculous – a dandy at the height of fashion – who is very vulnerable because of what he values and how he lives his life,” said Cimolino, who is also directing the play. “But at the same time, he has the ability to change – the ability to learn and grow.”

For London Assurance, Cimolino assembled a cast featuring longtime collaborators like Geraint Wyn Davies and David Collins and younger stars like Austin Eckert and Marissa Orjalo.

“It’s a great group of people,” Cimolino said about the London Assurance actors. “It’s important that there’s trust in a company – that you have the talent and people ager to work – and I feel we have all of those elements in London Assurance.”

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