What’s on at The Stratford Festival in 2023

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The Stratford Festival in 2023

With the 2022 Stratford Festival starting to wind down, it was a pleasure to receive notice of what to expect for The Stratford Festival in 2023. Filled with classic Shakespeare and a good dose of world premieres and adaptations plus the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning hit on Broadway – Rent opening the mid-April to October season. Also on stage are productions held over from the cancelled 2020 season. The much anticipated Monty Python’s Spamalot, Much Ado About Nothing, and Frankenstein Revived will be amongst the 13 productions featured at the Stratford Festival in 2023.

Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino announced the 2023 season, inspired by the theme of Duty and Desire. The playbill includes lively and thought-provoking productions across four theatres, along with a full slate of events in The Meighen Forum.

The Duty and Desire theme explained takes a look at social stigma and societal pressures, at selfishness and selflessness – at a time when we are all reexamining our place in the world. Cimolino explains why this theme is a reflection of our contemporary times:

“We’ve always been told to follow our hearts, but that hasn’t been so easy over the past few years. The pandemic has left us in dire need of pleasure, eager to fulfill our desires but often with no way to do so. At the same time it has brought us face to masked face with the vital importance of social responsibility. Here in the West, many of us have had the luxury of pursuing romantic notions for decades. Desire has fueled our economy. But what do we do when suddenly we must sacrifice our comfort for the greater good, when our heart’s not in what we do anymore, when we want to shirk responsibility even though we know that could have dire consequences? These are the questions and ideas that inspired the plays of the 2023 season.”

Antoni Cimolino

There will be two crowd-pleasing musicals at the Stratford Festival in 2023: Monty Python’s Spamalot and Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical Rent. Unlike this year’s hit Chicago, neither of these productions will be choreographed by Donna Feore. She will be taking 2023 off from Stratford for other musical projects in the US. That said, I am really looking forward to seeing choreography by Marc Kimelman of Rent and Jesse Robb’s Spamalot in the 2023 version.

Here is a breakdown of which productions are playing where and a short synopsis provided by The Stratford Festival.

FESTIVAL THEATRE

King Lear

By William Shakespeare ~ Director: Kimberley Rampersad

Perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, King Lear is the story of an aging king, who, in demanding a show of devotion from his three daughters, leaves his kingdom divided, his family destroyed, the faithful banished and the hateful left to wreak inhuman havoc in the realm.

Rent

Book, Music and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson ~ Director: Thom Allison ~ Choreographer: Marc Kimelman

Set in Manhattan in the 1990s and inspired by Puccini’s opera La Bohème, the musical follows a group of young East Village artists, performers, and philosophers as they struggle through the hardships of poverty, societal discord, and the AIDS epidemic in the search for life, love, and art.

Much Ado About Nothing

By William Shakespeare ~ Director: Chris Abraham

The story follows Beatrice and Benedick, two quick-witted and sarcastic individuals who are happily single, but whose friends believe would make a great romantic match. Set in the Early Modern world, an era of ever-changing attitudes towards marriage and power, the play presents a society at once filled with progressive feminist impulses and countervailing forces rooted in traditional patriarchal values. With his astonishing wit and insight, Shakespeare explores the complexities that underlie these growing social tensions.

Les Belles-Soeurs

By Michel Tremblay ~ Translated by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco ~ Director: Esther Jun

After 32 years, Tremblay’s masterpiece, which revolutionized Québécois theatre and is renowned the world over, returns to Stratford on the Festival Stage. Written in 1965, Les Belles-Soeurs portrays 15 Québécois women expressing their anger, desperation and frustration loudly, rudely and audaciously. Germaine Lauzon has won a million stamps in a contest. She invites her family and neighbours into her kitchen to help paste them into booklets. Fighting for any power in their suffocating lives, the women yell, backstab, dream and steal in grand theatrical style.

AVON THEATRE

Monty Python’s Spamalot

Book and Lyrics by Eric Idle ~ Director: Lezlie Wade ~ Choreographer: Jesse Robb ~
Music by John Du Prez and Eric Idle
A new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”
From the original screenplay by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin

And now for something completely different: over at the Avon Theatre, Monty Python’s Spamalot offers up a hefty share of irreverence in a hilarious spoof of the story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table as they go in search of the Holy Grail.

A Wrinkle in Time

By Madeleine L’Engle ~ Adapted for the stage by Thomas Morgan Jones ~ Director: Thomas Morgan Jones

The classic fantasy by Madeleine L’Engle, in which a young heroine leads her brother and a friend on a spectacular journey through space and time, from galaxy to galaxy, to save the world and rescue her father who mysteriously disappeared while working on an astounding scientific concept.

Frankenstein Revived

By Morris Panych ~ Based on the novel by Mary Shelley ~ Music by David Coulter
Director: Morris Panych ~ Movement choreographer: Wendy Gorling ~ Dance choreographer: Stephen Cota

Focussing on Mary Shelley, who at just 18 wrote the most celebrated horror story in English literature, this exuberant and passion-filled theatrical movement-based piece explores the big question at the heart of her work: what does it mean to be human?

TOM PATTERSON THEATRE

Grand Magic

By Eduardo De Filippo ~ In a new English translation by John Murrell ~ Director: Antoni Cimolino

In this comedy, we find Otto Marvuglia, a once master illusionist, reduced to performing magic for money at a seaside resort. When one of his tricks seems to go awry, a guest tumbles into a world of illusion as another escapes an unhappy reality.

Richard II

By William Shakespeare ~ Adapted by Brad Fraser ~ Conceived by Jillian Keiley ~ Director: Jillian Keiley ~
Choreographer: Cameron Carver

In a revolutionary adaptation by Brad Fraser, this Richard is the story of a king who believes that God gives him the right to live above the rules and who ultimately suffers the consequences. The story is embedded in a time of great freedom that is soon crushed – the late 1970s and early ’80s: when lives were lived at great volume against a suffocating strain of conservatism and fear.

Wedding Band

By Alice Childress ~ Director: Sam White

An emotional portrayal of a relationship between a Black seamstress, Julia, and a white baker, Herman, in the shadow of the First World War and the 1918 flu epidemic in Charleston, South Carolina. The couple’s deep love and commitment face the cruel racism of the Deep South in this revealing portrayal of interracial love… Written during the Civil Rights era, the play resonates in our modern times of racial reckoning with movements such as Black Lives Matter across North America, and at a time when a new pandemic is tragically altering lives. 

STUDIO THEATRE

Casey and Diana

By Nick Green ~ Director: Andrew Kushnir

Stratford Festival commission with its world premiere at the Stratford Festival in 2023. As the Toronto AIDS hospice, Casey House prepares for the historic visit of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1991, residents and staff are inspired to beat the odds as a plague continues to ravage a generation.

Women of the Fur Trade

By Frances Koncan ~ Director: Yvette Nolan

This lively historical satire of survival and cultural inheritance shifts perspectives from the male gaze onto women’s power in the past and present through the lens of the rapidly changing world of the Canadian fur trade.

Love’s Labour’s Lost

By William Shakespeare ~ Director: Peter Pasyk

In this beloved early comedy, Shakespeare delivers a touching and funny coming-of-age story with a twist ending. Seeking self-improvement, the King of Navarre and his three best friends swear off sex and love for three years, just as the Princess of France and three other women arrive on a diplomatic mission. Pasyk will give this classic play a fresh and modern take.

As excited as it is to have a preview of the Stratford Festival in 2023, there is still time to catch critically acclaimed productions of Richard III, Chicago, and Death and the King’s Horseman made it to the stage this year.

Tickets for the 2023 season go on sale November 6 for Stratford Festival in 2023 members and December 12 for the general public. The current season runs through Oct. 30.

Stratford Productions through the years:

• What’s Playing at Stratford in 2022
• Watch past productions of Stratford Festival online – Stratford@Home – 2020
• Richard III – 2022
• Little Shop of Horrors – 2019
• To Kill a mockingbird – 2018
• Twelfth Night – 2017
• Guys and Dolls – 2017
• Crazy for you – 2014
• Theatre Do’s and Don’ts – Theatre Etiquette

We were lucky enough to see these productions (and more) through the years but you now have the opportunity to watch past productions of Stratford Festival online.