Stratford Festival returns to Neverland as Wendy and Peter Pan to open 2024 season

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The Stratford Festival’s just-announced 2024 season includes the North American premiere of Ella Hickson’s Wendy and Peter Pan, a retelling of J.M. Barrie’s classic tale.

The family-friendly play, which opened at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 2013, was originally scheduled for Stratford in 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled those plans. The hook of Wendy and Peter Pan is that story of the lost boys is seen through the eyes of Wendy.

And while the Stratford Festival returns to Neverland, the hope for artistic director Antoni Cimolino is that the season’s 12 productions represent a return to a prepandemic zeal for adventure.

“I feel like the last number of years, we’ve been so house bound,” Cimolino told The Globe and Mail. “There’s a real desire to get away and experience new things and see them in new ways.”

In collecting plays for the repertory theatre festival’s upcoming season, Cimolino was attracted to “transportive” works, including strange-land flights such as Wendy and Peter Pan at the 1,079-seat Avon Theatre and Twelfth Night, one of three from the pen of Shakespeare. Making her Stratford directorial debut with the shipwreck-set romantic comedy at the 1,800-capacity Festival Theatre is Seana McKenna, a leading-lady institution at Stratford.

Shakespeare is also represented by Cymbeline and Romeo and Juliet. The latter production will be directed by Sam White, who made her Stratford directorial debut this year with another story of forbidden love, Alice Childress’s Wedding Band, critically hailed as a potential new classic.

The Bard-adjacent Something Rotten!at the Festival Theatre is one of two musicals. The Broadway comedy, which will at Stratford be directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, features songs including God, I Hate Shakespeare, Will Power and Hard to Be the Bard. Over at the Avon Theatre, it’s Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s beloved La Cage aux Folles directed by Thom Allison, who helmed this year’s hit production of Rent.

The season will also feature three world premieres: a new adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners by Vern Thiessen with Yvette Nolan; Andrea Scott’s Get That Hope, a story about a dysfunctional, lottery-winning Jamaican-Canadian family, loosely inspired by Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night; and Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy’s Salesman in China, about Arthur Miller’s 1983 production of Death of a Salesman in Beijing.

“Arthur Miller went to the other side of the world and had to ask himself what exactly it meant to be an American,” Cimolino said.

Works such as Salesman in China, La Cage aux Folles and others speak to fresh directions and departures from past assumptions, Cimolino said. “I feel like we as a society are done pivoting and that we want to actually go to someplace entirely new, even if we don’t quite know where.”

Where Stratford and the rest of the theatre industry wants to go is back to full attendance. In 2022, theatre-lovers returned to Stratford at about two-thirds of prepandemic levels. This year, the festival budgeted for an increase to 85 per cent of traditional numbers – some half a million people annually – but are pleased to see attendance at approximately 90 per cent.

“It’s coming back, but we still have a bit of a journey to go,” Cimolino said. “And we’re not going to settle for 90 or 100 per cent – we want 125 per cent of what we were.”

The other three 2024 productions are a new version of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (at the 600-seat Tom Patterson Theatre, directed by Molly Atkinson); Dion Boucicault’s comedy London Assurance (at the Festival Theatre, directed by Cimolino), and Edward Albee’s The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? (at the 260-capacity Studio Theatre, directed by Dean Gabourie).

Most of Stratford’s 2023 productions (including Rent, Wedding Band, Frankenstein Revived and the Paul Gross-starring King Lear) run to the end of the October. The recently extended Monty Python’s Spamalot continues to Nov. 12.

Tickets for the 2024 season will go on sale in December, with a presale for Stratford Festival members in November.

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