Antoni Cimolino's job as artistic director of the Stratford Festival will be officially posted this fall, with an announcement of a new hire (or hires) expected late next summer or in the fall.JENNIFER ROBERTS/The Globe and Mail
From the outside, the Stratford Festival’s 2025 season looks like a battle royale between the world’s most famous red-headed orphans.
Artistic director Antoni Cimolino has had the puckish idea of putting both Annie, the 1976 musical based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie, and a brand-new adaptation of L.M. Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables, by Canadian playwright Kat Sandler, on the repertory theatre’s playbill next year.
Stratford insiders, however, will find a much more high-stakes competition than Annie versus Anne-with-an-E between the lines of Wednesday’s season announcement. This summer, a search committee was established to find Cimolino’s replacement; some of his most likely successors will be hoping to grab its attention next year.
Chris Abraham, Stafford Arima, Daryl Cloran, Donna Feore and Esther Jun – five names in the conversation – are all directing high-profile shows in 2025, as is a more long-shot candidate, Robert Lepage.
“Although I’m not involved in the search process, I wanted to make sure that we had as big and talented a pool of people to choose from as possible,” Cimolino said in an interview with the Globe and Mail.
(He also wanted to note that other clear contenders – he specifically named former National Arts Centre English Theatre head Jillian Keiley – may be absent from 2025 but are not out of contention; he has no role in the selection of his successor.)
While Cimolino is around until the end of the 2026 season (the final he will program), the festival has already hired a search firm to hunt for his replacement, who can expect to make upward of $350,000 a year at the destination repertory theatre with a budget of nearly $80-million.
His job will be officially posted this fall, with an announcement of a new hire (or hires) expected late next summer or in the fall. A critical or popular hit in 2025 could easily push a contender over the top.
Chris Abraham, widely perceived as a front-runner, will have the chance to show his stuff again directing As You Like It on the Festival Theatre stage. No one has had as consistent success with classics as he has at Stratford – and his Toronto company, Crow’s Theatre, has produced a steady series of hits that have transferred commercially.
Daryl Cloran, artistic director of Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, will make his Stratford debut on the same stage with an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. He has partnered on pre-Broadway runs of Six and Hadestown, as well as directing a Beatles-infused production of As You Like It that had huge box-office success in Canada and the United States.
Also at the Festival Theatre, Esther Jun, who runs the Langham Directors’ Workshop at Stratford, will be directing Les Liaisons dangereuses, Christopher Hampton’s popular play based on the 1782 French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. She has emerged as the insider candidate for AD after a succession of delightful productions such as this season’s Cymbeline, and has been further buoyed by a recent foray to London to direct the European premiere of Kim’s Convenience.
Rounding out the mainstage lineup is Annie – which is directed by Donna Feore, the choreographer/director whose long string of high-octane hits for the festival put her on a potential shortlist.
Over at the Tom Patterson Theatre, Theatre Calgary artistic director Stafford Arima will return for the first time in 15 years to direct Forgiveness, playwright Hiro Kanagawa’s adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s memoir about his grandparents’ experiences during the Second World War. The Broadway veteran is in the mix, boasting an impressive list of international connections and credits.
At the Avon Theatre, meanwhile, Lepage will direct a Macbeth set among Quebec’s biker gang. Canada’s top theatre star since the 1990s, he continues to have an in-demand international career – which makes him unlikely to seek or take the job running Stratford.
Beyond these shows, 2025 will also see former Shaw Festival director Jackie Maxwell direct Ransacking Troy, a Stratford commission and the latest classics-inspired play by Erin Shields, and Cimolino directing Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Tom Patterson.
The Avon will host Anne of Green Gables, another commission which Sandler will direct herself, and the Broadway musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels directed by Bobby Garcia, whose work has been seen from Hong Kong to Manila to Vancouver.
At the Studio Theatre, meanwhile, The Art of War, a new drama by Yvette Nolan about artists in war and in peace directed by Keith Barker, will be the sole show. “It’s 11 plays in the season as opposed to 12,” notes Cimolino, “Some of that is an acknowledgment of the financial pressures of the time.”
Inflation has led to other bottom-line decisions – such as the cancellation, this season, of an off-the-playbill presentation of the Al Purdy song-cycle The Shape of Home. While Stratford looks on pace to match last year’s heartening attendance of 443,000, Cimolino said, it remains to be seen if the company will reach its goal of topping that number by 20,000.
The Stratford Festival is still in recovery mode – which will no doubt play a role in who is selected next to run it.