My favourite Stratford production so far* this year is undoubtedly The Diviners, Verne Thiessen & Yvette Nolan’s grand adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s novel of the same name. Staged with beautiful fluidity by Krista Jackson with Geneviève Pelletier, the production contains some of the season’s grandest celebration and its quietest tenderness. The great Irene Poole […]
Coming off of last year’s superb 4-0 record for their Shakespeare work, Stratford’s 2024 season is quite a bit shakier. There are only three Shakespeare plays on the docket this year and it’s clear that they’re where the company is hoping to spare a few dollars on design as they all feature far less in […]
Two wild and silly musicals form the the extravagant core of an overall scaled back Stratford Festival season. Frustratingly, directorial issues mar the more substantive of the two and flimsy material limits how far the better production can soar. Something Rotten!, a 2015 Renaissance comedy by John O’Farrell and Karey & Wayne Kirkpatrick, represents […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2023 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Outstanding Performance (Leading) nominee Sean Arbuckle has long been one of our favourite performers at the Stratford Festival. A winner in 2012 for Pirates of Penzance, Sean is nominated for his fifth Critics’ Pick Award […]
Understudying was always one of the hardest jobs in theatre but in 2022 it’s taken on a whole new meaning. Gone are the days when an actor might learn a role only to see the entire run go by without performing it. In the first full season back for many of Canada’s biggest theatre companies […]
Three Tall Women It’s difficult to separate Stratford’s fine production of this enjoyable and alienating Edward Albee play from the experience of seeing it. A holdover from the cancelled 2020 season, Three Tall Women was the lone indoor performance in the Stratford 2021 season. It was staged in the intimate studio theatre with very little […]
I’m a firm believer that there is room for this kind of thing. I didn’t particularly like it, but I’ll defend its validity until I’m blue in the face because that’s how Shakespeare survives. For this co-production with Why Not Theatre, Stratford has cast 13-year-old Eponine Lee in the female title role. This raises […]
Finally There’s Sun My very favourite thing at the Stratford Festival this year, Finally There’s Sun is the concert production that puts into words the subtext of every other show- after more than a year of darkness this, right here, this sitting together in a theatre, it’s the light at the end of the tunnel. […]