Jonathan Church has announced his first season as Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, a 75th-anniversary playbill of thirteen productions that he opens by directing the Canadian premieres of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. British hands are on Mary Poppins as well, with Jonathan O’Boyle and Stephen Mear sharing the direction.
The Stratford Festival in Ontario has announced the thirteen productions that will make up its 75th season, and it is the first playbill assembled by Jonathan Church, who arrived as Artistic Director after ten years running the Chichester Festival Theatre.
The appointment closes a circle. Stratford’s thrust stage was created for the festival’s opening season in 1953 by the British director Tyrone Guthrie and the designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch, and Chichester’s own auditorium followed its example. “Tyrone Guthrie and Tanya Moiseiwitsch came to Canada to realize a vision they had been unable to achieve in post-war Britain and, in doing so, created one of the world’s most influential theatres,” Church said. “Having spent many years at Chichester, which was inspired by Stratford, I’ve long felt a connection to that legacy. To now work on these stages is tremendously exciting.”
Church directs the Canadian premieres of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Mike Poulton’s adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels, at the Avon Theatre. Wolf Hall runs from 4 June - 21 August and Bring Up the Bodies from 19 June - 21 August, with both opening on 27 June, and the two are scheduled so that audiences may take them on consecutive days or, in many cases, on the same day. Church has worked at that scale before: his two-part Nicholas Nickleby sold out at Chichester, transferred to the West End and toured to Toronto.
The other production led by a British creative team is Mary Poppins, the Disney and Cameron Mackintosh musical, which the Festival Theatre stages from 29 April - 6 November, opening on 31 May. Jonathan O’Boyle and Stephen Mear direct, with Mear also choreographing; he shared an Olivier Award for his work on the show in London. Vanessa Sears plays the title role, and the production promises the most elaborate flying sequences the festival’s open stage has carried.
The Shakespearean centrepiece is Hamlet, directed by the former Stratford Artistic Director Des McAnuff and set in postwar Europe under a gathering Soviet threat. It runs from 20 June - 30 October and opens on 13 July, the date of the festival’s first performance in 1953. Sharing the Festival Theatre with it is Chicago, directed and choreographed by Donna Feore from 24 May - 7 November, a return for the 2022 staging that was the company’s first full-scale musical after the pandemic closures.
The season’s most unusual strand belongs to Saul Rubinek, who returns to the Stratford company for the first time since 1969 with three linked pieces on Shylock, Jewish identity and memory. He plays the part in The Merchant of Venice, directed by Chris Abraham; performs Mark Leiren-Young’s one-person play Playing Shylock, directed by Martin Kinch; and appears in the world premiere of his own play All in the Telling, drawn from his parents’ experience as Holocaust survivors and also directed by Abraham. The schedule allows all three to be seen in a single day.
Eric McCormack, who spent five seasons at Stratford in the 1980s before Will & Grace made his name, returns to play Garry Essendine in Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, directed by Richard Ouzounian from 9 October - 28 November. The Canadian half of the playbill takes in the world premiere of a musical version of Mordecai Richler’s Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, with a book by David S. Craig and songs by Anika Johnson and Britta Johnson; a return for Kat Sandler’s Anne of Green Gables; Daniel David Moses’s Almighty Voice and His Wife, directed by Yvette Nolan; and The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Krista Jackson.
The 2027 season runs from 28 April - 28 November. Tickets go on sale on 15 November, preceded by an advance booking period for festival members, and registration for a separate Mary Poppins pre-sale is open on the Stratford Festival’s own website. Casting for the rest of the season is expected within a few weeks.
