Stratford Festival unveils 2026 season

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STRATFORD – After 14 years of shaping the Stratford Festival, Antoni Cimolino will close the curtain on his career in 2026 with a “sweeping celebration of theatre.”

Under the banner of “This Rough Magic,” the artistic director’s final season at the Festival’s helm will feature many of Cimolino’s favourite plays, bringing together Shakespearean masterworks, new commissions and a few contemporary classics.

“I was thinking about plays that really provide great parts for actors and about stories that we all loved,” Cimolino said in an interview with The Stratford Beacon Herald. “Then, I started to think more and more about meta-theatrical plays – how we all love a play within a play – and that led to the theme of the season.”

Inspired by one of Prospero’s final lines from The Tempest, “This rough magic I here abjure,” the season’s overarching theme reflects the importance of theatre, Cimolino said.

Here’s what’s scheduled in the just-announced 2026 season lineup:

FESTIVAL THEATRE

At the Festival Theatre, Cimolino will direct The Tempest, Shakespeare’s powerful meditation on magic, forgiveness and legacy, as his final Shakespearean production at Stratford.

Joining The Tempest are two musicals directed and choreographed by Donna Feore: a new staging of Broadway staple Guys and Dolls and the return of Something Rotten!, the Festival’s 2024 hit comedy about two playwrights trying to outdo Shakespeare by inventing the musical.

The theatre will also host Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic, in its first Stratford staging since Cimolino’s first year as artistic director. Directed by Molly Atkinson, the play remains one of the most influential works of the 20th century.

While Waiting for Godot has been performed at Stratford before – most recently during Cimolino’s first season as artistic director in 2013 – it has never been staged at the Festival Theatre.

AVON THEATRE

Considered one of the best plays of the 20th century, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman returns to Stratford for the first time in nearly 30 years. Inspired by last season’s production of Salesman in China, which told the story of Miller’s 1983 visit to Beijing to direct a Chinese production of his play, Cimolino thought it fitting to bring back the original masterwork. The staging also provides the Festival with an opportunity for political commentary.

“(The play) kind of reveals the rat race for what it is, while the same kind of empty promises that led to the populism that we’re seeing right now are what Arthur Miller wrote about in 1948,” he said. “So in that way, we’re talking about the world we live in today. It’s political without being overtly political.”

The 2026 Schulich Children’s Play will be The Hobbit, Kim Selody’s fast-paced adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien classic, directed by Pablo Felices-Luna. Bilbo Baggins’s journey from the comforts of the Shire to the gold-festooned lair of the dragon Smaug will be distilled into a family-friendly adventure full of theatrical invention.

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest – still the theatrical gold standard for sharp-tongued romantic farce – returns under Krista Jackson’s direction, pairing mistaken identities with Wilde’s sharply honed wit.

Cimolino will close out his artistic directorship with Saturday, Sunday, Monday by Eduardo De Filippo, in a new adaptation co-written with Donato Santeramo. Set in a bustling Neapolitan kitchen, this comedy of love, jealousy and family squabbles marks Cimolino’s fourth Stratford production of De Filippo’s work, cementing his role as one of the playwright’s major champions in the English-speaking theatre world.

TOM PATTERSON THEATRE

The three productions planned for the Tom Patterson Theatre are intended to probe transformation and the thin, shifting line between truth and illusion, Cimolino said.

Graham Abbey, a veteran Festival actor, will direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s most enchanting comedies. Featuring lovers who flee the city for an enchanted forest, only to be caught in a web of fairy mischief, mistaken identities and shifting affections, the play’s magical interventions and play-within-a-play structure make it an enduring exploration of how imagination can reshape reality.

In Othello, directed by Haysam Kadri, the boundaries between perception and fact become deadly weapons. As the Moorish general rises to the height of his military career, jealousy and calculated deceit corrode his marriage and his trust, culminating in one of Shakespeare’s most devastating tragedies.

One of the season’s world premieres, The Tao of the World, comes from playwright-director Jovanni Sy, who co-authored last season’s Salesman in China. This inventive mash-up of Congreve’s The Way of the World and the opulence of Crazy Rich Asians drops Restoration comedy into the glittering, high-stakes world of modern billionaires.

STUDIO THEATRE

Playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman offers The King James Bible Play, a new Stratford commission directed by Nina Lee Aquino, in the Studio Theatre’s sole 2026 production. Part historical drama, part contemporary response, the piece begins with the 17th-century translators of the English Bible before shifting to the present day, where a group of women reclaim and reinterpret the text’s legacy.

“The play gives two very different points of view – one from 1607, one from today. One is male-oriented, the other female, and it’s funny. It’s smart, it’s really insightful, and it’s about men, women, parents and children,” Cimolino said.

PASSING THE BATON

With The Tao of the World and The King James Bible Play, Cimolino will end his 14-year tenure having premiered 31 new works, marking a record for a Stratford artistic director. It’s a milestone he says reflects both the variety of stories staged and a common thread running through them.

The 2026 season will again feature The Meighen Forum, the series of talks, panels and performances Cimolino introduced in his first year to bolster audience engagement and foster an ongoing dialogue about the role of theatre in contemporary life.

Cimolino’s legacy will also be celebrated with several special events throughout the season, though he said his focus will remain on the productions ahead.

The 2026 season runs April 20 to Nov. 1. Tickets go on sale to members in November and to the public in January.

burquhart@postmedia.com