Antoni Cimolino looks ahead to his final season as artistic director of the Stratford Festival

For the entirety of what will be his 40-year career at the Stratford Festival, and even before that as a young actor who chose to dedicate his life to the stage, Antoni Cimolino has been enraptured by the magic of theatre.

Looking ahead to the 2026 season – Cimolino’s last as artistic director – he recently spoke with the Times about how he was feeling as his tenure comes to an end, providing insight into how he plans to take his final bow after 14 seasons leading the festival’s creative team.

“I’m really happy to have (next season) announced and the reception has been really terrific, which is great,” Cimolino said. “That all feels wonderful and it is time (for me to step down). It’s time for me, it’s time for my family, but also, it’s time for the festival. It will be wonderful to have new energy, new ideas coming, so it’s great to have it announced.

“I mean, it’s 39 years I’ve been at the festival and, either as executive director or as artistic director, this is the 29th season that I’ve … put together. So, I don’t know what it’s going to be like (after). I’m sure I’m going to miss it terribly.”

An actor at heart, Cimolino says he wants to ensure his final season with the festival – at least for now – is filled with great parts that allow the festival’s company of extraordinary actors the chance to test the full scope of their talents.

Built on a theme of “This Rough Magic,” a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest – one of three Shakespeare plays to take the festival stage next season – Cimolino said the 2026 playbill includes some of his personal favourites – the plays that helped solidify his core belief that theatre is indeed magic.

“I also wanted to celebrate theatre,” he continued. “It feels to me there’s something so powerful, so magic about it. We all need it; want it. So, I tried to look for plays that really kind of celebrated (theatre), either by having a play within a play or, like The Importance of Being Earnest where everyone is acting a part, it celebrates theatre itself.

“There’s this power to theatre. We start doing it when we’re kids. We learn through play acting, either with friends or siblings. You never have to explain to children how to play act – they do it automatically. When you take them to the theatre, they take to it like ducks to water. There’s something about getting a group of people together in a room to watch another group of people act things out. We all know they’re not the people they’re portraying, but we somehow get into this mode where we become very moved by it – we laugh, we cry, we learn things. It’s a unique element in creation. … I wanted to celebrate kind of the overt theatricality that’s there.”

That overt theatricality, Cimolino says, played heavily in the decision to restage the festival and director-choreographer Donna Feore’s incredibly popular 2024 production of Something Rotten!, a musical comedy that puts the vainglorious William Shakespeare himself at the centre of an uproarious story that sets the stage for the advent of musical theatre as a genre.

The Tempest, last staged by the festival in 2017 with the late Martha Henry as lead, is Shakespeare’s last solely authored play. With clear parallels to Shakespeare’s own career, as well as Cimolino’s, the play is a meditation on legacy, on letting go and on the enduring power of art to heal and inspire.

“Here’s a magician who refers to his magic as his art, and he’s contemplating laying it aside,” said Cimolino, who will direct the 2026 production as one of two plays he will helm next season. “The Tempest is very much the centrepiece of this season, but each one of these plays has a kind of tip of the hat to theatricality. Whether it’s a play within a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or whether it’s the disguises that really all the characters put on in The Importance of Being Earnest, there’s a sense of play acting.

“There are one or two plays here where the sense of illusion is internalized. For instance, Death of a Salesman; I wanted to do a play about the current world situation within this mix. Death of a Salesman is one where the illusion is kind of believed, it’s taken onboard – this whole notion of the American dream. I wanted to find a way of examining the world today that wasn’t too specific to one personality south of the border. I wanted to look at why populism is on the rise right now, why we all feel that all the things we were promised are unattainable … and what the endless pursuit of just money, money, money means to our lives.”

Director Pablo Felices-Luna’s 2026 Schulich Children’s play, The Hobbit, is another example of that internalized illusion – in this case for the better – where the main character, Bilbo, play acts as a brave adventurer and thief, and, along his journey, finds those qualities within himself as well as others that are more important – honesty, loyalty and kindness.

This season’s two musicals – the return of Something Rotten! and a new production of Guys and Dolls, last staged at the festival in 2017 – as well as Waiting for Godot and The Tempest were selected to display the versatility and flexibility of the Festival Theatre stage.

“There’s some differences in this season which are really kind of important. For instance, we have two musicals on the Festival Theatre stage, and I wanted to celebrate the flexibility of (that) stage. One, Something Rotten!, is absolutely the same cast, brought back, and Guys and Dolls will be a new production. Guys and Dolls is like Hamlet; you’re going to end up doing it (again) because it’s like a Rorschach test. It tells you who you are by your interpretation.

“ … Waiting for Godot is an intimate, beautiful play. Remember that the top deck of the Festival Theatre (stage) is only 19 feet across. It’s actually quite small and the creative team for Godot is so excited to be able to do it on the Festival Theatre stage; it’s what they wanted to do. … Think about the range. There will be two huge musicals and Shakespeare, and then this very, very intimate production on the Festival Theatre stage.”

This season’s other Shakespeare plays – A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello – have, like The Tempest, been staged by the Stratford Festival within the past decade, however Cimolino says the 2026 productions will be quite unlike those staged at the festival before.

“We normally do those plays at the Festival Theatre, but I wanted to give people an opportunity to see these enormous, iconic plays that are so important to our understanding of who we … in an intimate space so we can see them differently. We see them up close, we get an experience of them at the Tom Patterson Theatre. In terms of audibility and proximity, you can hear everything so clearly.”

In addition to The Tempest, Cimolino will direct Eduardo De Filippo’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday in a brand-new adaptation by Donato Santeramo and Cimolino himself. This play is a richly layered comedy that invites audiences into the heart of a Neapolitan kitchen, where love abides but conflict simmers over.

“Saturday, Sunday, Monday is a beautiful play about family and about a marriage,” Cimolino said. “ … (De Filippo’s plays) have this incredible power because they have you laughing, but at the same time, they’re usually about serious situations and they also have a power of really moving you. In this one, the love between the members of this family – it’s a big Neapolitan family that all live together in this big apartment – is about a couple that has grown apart and they’re not talking anymore. … It’s about that process of couples growing apart and not really being able to connect, and how to set that right. In this story, it does get set right and they get a second chance, a new beginning.

“ … My first language is Italian; I’m not Neapolitan, I’m from northern Italy, but the family meals, especially Sunday meal, was a big deal. They would bring everybody together. But along with that … they sometimes turn into not the happy occasions we want because we put so much pressure on them. ‘They’ve got to be perfect, we’ve got to make them perfect,’ and in that lies disappointment. De Felippo wrote for a company of actors. There’s something like 20 actors in this play, so it’s fantastic for the festival. All of his plays have parts for young people, older people, women, men. … Having a company like we have here … of great actors; it suits the talents here beautifully.”

With this production, Cimolino marks a milestone; the festival will have staged four of De Filippo’s plays under his direction, placing him among a rare group of artistic leaders in the English-speaking world to champion the Italian playwright’s work so extensively.

Finally, the season’s two new plays are playwright and director Jovanni Sy’s The Tao of the New World and playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman’s The King James Bible Play.

The world premiere of Tao of the New World fuses 17th and 18th century English playwright William Congreve’s The Way of the World with the fun and glamour of the 2018 film, Crazy Rich Asians, promising hilarity, romance and billionaires behaving badly.

Commissioned by the Stratford Festival, The King James Bible Play, as directed by Nina Lee Aquino, begins with a gripping portrait of the men behind the monumental translation of the King James Bible, revealing the power structures and cultural biases embedded in their work, and ends with a contemporary group of women who take to the stage to reclaim the narrative, creating a play about the process. The work is a fascinating interrogation of translation in all its forms – between generations, between genders, between what we inherit and what we choose to believe.

Together, these two plays bring the total number of new plays staged by the festival during Cimolino’s tenure as artistic director to 31, a landmark in the festival’s history.

While Cimolino plans to remain close with the Stratford Festival after the curtains close on his time as artistic director, perhaps directing the odd play if asked, he is looking forward to the next chapter in his life, which he says he hopes will be filled with more time with family and friends, and enjoying all the festival has to offer as an audience member and not as an administrator.

“From the time I was in grade school, in high school, I was involved in plays. … I disappointed my parents by not going to law school, but I think it was because I so enjoyed the power of putting on plays – the magic of that – and I don’t regret that for a moment,” Cimolino said. “At the same time, it’s so fulfilling to watch people get transported in the way that theatre does.

“ … One thing I know for certain is I don’t want to do any more management or administration – that part I know I’m done. Directing plays is a joy and, of course, if down the line, I was asked to direct something at the festival; if I could, I would. I’ll always be there for the festival if they need something. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare says, ‘There is a world elsewhere.’ After almost 40 years at the festival, I’m going to stay in Stratford … and I do want to continue directing, but I want to get back to the art. … I’m looking forward to other things and attending the festival and just enjoying the plays.”