Stratford Festival Season to Include A Chorus Line and A Little Night Music

The Stratford Festival's 2016 season will include Shakespeare favorites as well as plays by Molière and Arthur Miller. The festival is also set to present the North American premiere of Shakespeare in Love along with the beloved musicals A Chorus Line and A Little Night Music.

For the season's first offering, artistic director Antoni Cimolino will direct Ian Lake in the title role of Macbeth (May 3-October 23) in the Festival Theater, with Krystin Pellerin as Lady Macbeth. Also in the Festival Theater will be a Jillian Keiley-directed As You Like It (May 16-October 22), set in 1980s Newfoundland, that will feature Petrina Bromley as Rosalind, Cyrus Lane as Orlando, and Seana McKenna as Jaques. The theater will also feature Stephen Ouimette and Brigit Wilson in Molière’s The Hypochondriac (August 2-October 14), directed by Cimonlino, and a reimagined staging of A Chorus Line (April 19-October 30), starring Dayna Tietzen and Juan Chioran and directed by Donna Feore.

In the Avon Theater, Sara Farb, Ruby Joy, André Morin, and Gareth Potter will star in a dramatized version of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (May 10-October 22), directed by Tim Carroll. The North American premiere of Shakespeare in Love (April 19-October 16) will also play at the Avon, with Olivier Award-winner Declan Donnellan directing, as he did for the show’s hit West End run. The Avon's final offering will be A Little Night Music (May 21-October 23), starring Ben Carlson, Cynthia Dale, and Yanna McIntosh, with Gary Griffin to direct.

The Stratford Festival's Joseph Ziegler and Lucy Peacock reunite in All My Sons (May 9-September 25), directed by Martha Henry in the Tom Patterson Theater. Also in the Patterson, Breath of Kings (May 30-September 24), a play newly adapted from Shakespeare’s Henriad history cycle by Graham Abbey, will feature Mr. Abbey as Henry IV, Araya Mengesha as Henry V, Tom Rooney as Richard II, and Geraint Wyn Davies as Falstaff and Fluellen. Seana McKenna and Lucy Peacock will star as sparring twin sisters in the world premiere of a newly commissioned translation of Henrik Ibsen’s psychological drama John Gabriel Borkman (August 2-September 23), directed by Carey Perloff.

The 2016 season's Studio Theatre offerings will be Hannah Moscovitch’s new play Bunny (July 29-Septeber 24) and the world premiere of a newly commissioned translation of Olivier Kemeid’s The Aeneid (August 2-September 25), directed by Keira Loughran.

The Festival will also mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with the screening of its new film of Hamlet in Cineplex Entertainment theaters across Canada and with a series of Q&A sessions in select Cineplex locations on April 23, the date of Shakespeare’s birth and death.