In his final act as artistic director of the Stratford Festival, Antoni Cimolino will direct a fresh revival of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and a brand new adaptation of the Neapolitan comedy “Saturday, Sunday, Monday.”
The two productions are among 12 shows programmed for 2026, Cimolino’s last season after 14 years at the helm of the repertory company. The outgoing artistic director, who rose through the ranks of the festival, first as an actor before transitioning into the theatre’s management team, said the upcoming lineup is built around the theme of “rough magic,” an idea borrowed from “The Tempest.”
Cimolino’s production of “The Tempest,” which will run at Stratford’s largest venue, the Festival Theatre, marks his second crack at Shakespeare’s magical tragicomedy at the festival. He previously directed the company’s last revival of the play in 2018, starring the late Martha Henry.
“‘The Tempest’ is very much about leaving the theatre,” Cimolino said in a phone interview with the Star. “It was Shakespeare’s last sole-authored play. And he was exploring questions like: What are some of the things we did wrong? What could have been done differently? How do we get to happy, second chances?”
Cimolino notes that this new revival will be quite different from his 2018 production. It will feature a male Prospero, he said, and “be a bit more dark, a bit more abstracted, more about male rage.”
In addition to “The Tempest,” the season will include two other works by Shakespeare. Graham Abbey, the actor-director currently starring in this season’s production of “The Winter’s Tale,” will helm a new production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” next year, while Haysam Kadri, the artistic director of Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, will direct a revival of the tragedy “Othello.” Both productions will run at the Tom Patterson Theatre.
As previously reported by the Toronto Star, the festival’s two musicals will be a revival of “Guys and Dolls” and a remount of the 2024 hit “Something Rotten.” Both productions will run at the Festival Theatre, and will be directed and choreographed by Donna Feore.
In closing out his tenure with “Saturday, Sunday, Monday,” a modern commedia dell’arte about a quarrelsome middle-class family, Cimolino returns to a playwright whose works he knows well: Eduardo De Filippo. Throughout his time at the festival, the director has long championed plays by the late Italian dramatist, staging four English-language adaptations of his works. In 1997, Cimolino made his directorial debut at Stratford with “Filumena,” another one of De Filippo’s plays.
“He’s kind of like the Italian Chekhov,” Cimolino said of De Filippo’s work. “There’s a deep, rich source of comedy in his work, but underlying it is a kind of sadness — a kind of acknowledgment that the world can be a difficult place. So there’s both tears and laughter.”
Also running next season are a trio of classic plays. Director Molly Atkinson will lead a production of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama “Waiting for Godot” at the Festival Theatre. “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s searing critique of the American dream, will play at the Avon Theatre, in a production directed by Dean Gabourie. And Krista Jackson will helm a revival of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” also set to run at the Avon Theatre.
The children’s play set to occupy the lineup next year will be Kim Selody’s adaptation of “The Hobbit,” the fantasy epic by J.R.R. Tolkien about a group of dwarves who, with the help of the wizard Gandalf, set out to reclaim their homeland from an evil dragon.
Rounding out the season are two world premieres. Jovanni Sy, who directed and co-wrote last year’s critically acclaimed play “Salesman in China,” will return to the festival with “The Tao of the Western World,” a comedy that pokes fun at the upper crust of Singaporean society, running at the Avon Theatre. The intimate Studio Theatre, meanwhile, will host Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman’s “The King James Bible Play,” about the men who translated the King James Bible — and a contemporary group of women who are reclaiming that story for the stage.
These new works will mark the 30th and 31st world premieres presented under Cimolino’s tenure. That the festival has been an incubator for Canadian voices has been particularly important for the outgoing artistic director.
“The festival I first encountered and that I fell in love with 50 years ago is a very different place than it is now,” he reflected. “There were a lot of British accents on the stage and many of the directors were not from Canada. It was a wonderful place, and it was a source of Canadian pride, but I always felt it could be more Canadian. So telling our own stories, with our own voice, and really championing Canadian directors, that has been really important to me.”
Stratford’s upcoming season is set to run from April 20, 2026 through Nov. 1, 2026. The company’s current programming runs until the late fall. Cimolino’s successor is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
