Top 5 Stratford Festival 2023 must-see productions

Festival season is just around the corner, as theatre companies across Ontario prepare to raise the curtain for performances.

In Stratford, Ont., thousands of theatre lovers will make a pilgrimage to the 2023 Stratford Festival, which begins April 8 and runs through the end of October.

As usual, the festival’s 71st season has a smorgasbord of offerings. The lineup, announced last September, includes 13 productions, from venerable works and Shakespeare classics to new Canadian plays and Tony Award-winning musicals.

To help you make your picks, here are five productions, presented in no particular order, that are on the top of my list to see and should be on your radar, too.

Rent

“Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s rock musical about a group of young artists living in Manhattan during the AIDS crisis, feels like a show we need for this moment, as we emerge from another global health pandemic and re-examine our societal bonds.

For many fans of the musical, this “Rent” will likely be the first major production of the musical they’ve seen since Michael Grief’s iconic 1996 staging, which ran on Broadway for 12 years, picked up a slew of Tony Awards and played in Toronto countless times. I’m curious to see how director Thom Allison (a cast member of the original Canadian company) interprets the show at Stratford’s Festival Theatre, whose communal thrust stage, wrapped around by the audience, feels perfect for a musical about the strength of community.

I’d also be remiss to not mention the production’s all-star cast, which includes Broadway actors Andrea Macasaet (“Six”), Lee Siegel (“Jesus Christ Superstar”) and Toronto theatre favourite Robert Markus (“Dear Evan Hansen”).

With that formidable team, I’m counting down the minutes until I can hear “Seasons of Love” live once again.

Richard II

“Inspired by the glamour, grit and glitter of New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s.” Such is the description of Jillian Keiley’s “revolutionary” production of Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” adapted by Canadian playwright Brad Fraser and starring Stephen Jackman-Torkoff (“Fifteen Dogs”) as the titular monarch.

Antoni Cimolino, artistic director of the Stratford Festival, shared last fall that Keiley’s “Richard II” is one of three productions this season — in addition to “Rent” and the new Canadian play “Casey and Diana” — set during the AIDS crisis. This triptych of shows forms the backbone of the 2023 season, built around the theme of duty versus desire.

I can’t imagine how Keiley translates Shakespeare’s play to that time period. But in the hands of Fraser, one of the country’s most celebrated playwrights, whose works have reverently explored sexuality and LGBTQ issues, this adaptation promises to be intriguing and, indeed, revolutionary.

King Lear

These days, Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is proving to be a formidable vehicle for Canadian theatre stars above a certain age.

It seems almost every theatre company is clamouring to mount the Bard’s great tragedy. Last year, Soulpepper gave us Tom McCamus in the role. A few seasons prior, Seana McKenna starred in a gender-bending production of the classic in Toronto.

If you’re not Lear’d out, Stratford’s upcoming production should prove to be a doozy. For one, it stars “Due South” actor Paul Gross, who returns to the festival for the first time in more than two decades.

This headlining Shakespeare production at Stratford’s Festival Theatre will be directed by Shaw Festival associate artistic director Kimberley Rampersad, who helmed “Serving Elizabeth” at Stratford two seasons ago.

Grand Magic

“Grand Magic” is one of John Murrell’s last works, if not his final piece. The Canadian playwright and librettist translated Eduardo De Filippo’s comedy just before his death in November 2019.

The script was sent to his close friend Cimolino in the early days of the pandemic. “I didn’t have the heart to look at it then, with everything that was going on,” Cimolino told me last fall. “It’s beautiful … it’s certainly a gift from John.”

Now Cimolino will direct this work at the Tom Patterson Theatre.

Starring acclaimed actor Geraint Wyn Davies, the play follows a once master illusionist who now finds himself performing at a seaside resort. When a trick goes awry, madness ensues among his guests.

Women of the Fur Trade

Indigenous playwright, director and journalist Frances Koncan is having quite the 2022/2023 season. In the fall, they held a workshop presentation of their new play “Medea’s Masquerade.” Last month, Koncan’s “Space Girl” premiered at Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange. And later this summer, their historical satire “Women of the Fur Trade” will run at Stratford’s Studio Theatre.

If the show’s synopsis isn’t enough to entice you to buy a ticket, I’m not sure what will. “Set in eighteen hundred and something-something, somewhere upon the banks of a Reddish River in Treaty One Territory, where three very different women with a preference for 21st-century slang sit in a fort sharing their views on life, love and the hot nerd Louis Riel,” reads the show’s description, setting the tone for Koncan’s play.

To boot, this production also marks director Yvette Nolan’s Stratford Festival debut. I had to do a double take when I read that fact. It’s hard to imagine that it’s taken this long for one of Canada’s most celebrated theatremakers, and former artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, to arrive in Stratford.

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