Next year’s cast for Stratford Festival’s Shakespeare productions

Share

All hail to thee, Ian Lake. Hail to thee, Stratford's next Macbeth.

It has been prophesied that Lake, the Toronto-based actor who recently ended his Dora Mavor Moore Award-nominated run as Guy in the Mirvish production of Once, will return to the Stratford Festival in 2016 to play Shakespeare's power-hungry Scottish warrior in the season opener directed by artistic director Antoni Cimolino.

Lake spent six seasons at Stratford turning heads in supporting roles (Mortimer in Mary Stuart) and second-stage starring turns (Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost) at Stratford – but it took the B.C-born actor leaving for a spell to nab his first lead on the festival's famed thrust stage.

I'd like to say three weird sisters appeared on the heath outside The Globe and Mail to bring this heartening news – but, in fact, it came via an advance copy of a news release going out this week announcing key casting for the Stratford Festival's Shakespeare productions next year.

Equally of interest is Lake's Lady Macbeth: Krystin Pellerin, who made her debut at Stratford this summer in John Mighton's Possible Worlds. This is a bit of casting against type for the actress, known to Toronto theatregoers for her sunny or funny work at Soulpepper and television viewers across the country as Constable Leslie Bennett on CBC's The Republic of Doyle. It's great to see the versatile Newfoundlander get a chance to sink her teeth into a meaty dramatic Shakespearean part.

The Stratford Festival has come under fire from certain corners for not giving younger actors the chance to play large roles in recent years – but the casting of Lake (who is two decades younger than Colm Feore was when he played Macbeth in 2009) and Pellerin should go some way to douse those concerns.

Indeed, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth won't be the only leaders portrayed by actors younger than Canada's new 43-year-old prime minister in 2016. Twenty-six-year-old rising star Araya Mengesha, who had a one-season stint at Stratford in 2009 and once upon a time played Young Simba in The Lion King in Toronto, will take the role of Prince Hal and then Henry V in a cycle of history plays.

Conceived and adapted by Graham Abbey, Breath of Kings condenses Richard II and Henry IV Part I into one evening, then Henry IV Part II and Henry V into another. Tom Rooney will play Richard II, while Abbey himself will take on the role of Henry IV in this Henriad. Festival favourite Geraint Wyn Davies is cast as Falstaff – and Kate Hennig and Nigel Shawn Williams will round out the company in a number of supporting roles.

Entirely new to the Stratford Festival is the actress who will play Rosalind in National Arts Centre artistic director Jillian Keiley's production of As You Like It on the Festival stage. Newfoundlander Petrina Bromley will make her debut in a production that will, in fact, be set on The Rock in the 1980s. Bromley is a long-time collaborator of Keiley's – and is currently starring in the Gander-set 9/11 musical Come From Away, which is garnering great reviews down in the United States.

Cyrus Lane is Bromley's Orlando, while long-time Festival star Seana McKenna will be the melancholy Jaques – becoming, in fact, become the first woman in the history of Stratford to play the melancholy character and speak, in context at least, the immortal lines, "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players."

Other key casting is as follows:

• The Hypochondriac, a new version of a Molière play by Richard Bean, will reunite Stephen Ouimette and Brigit Wilson from this year’s The Alchemist as the fearful Argan and his maid-servant Toinette.
• All My Sons will see another duo paired up for a second season in a row. Joseph Ziegler and Lucy Peacock, husband and wife in just-closed She Stoops to Conquer, will play Joe and Kate Keller in this Arthur Miller drama. Sarah Afful, Lanise Antoine Shelley and E.B. Smith round out the cast.
• John Gabriel Borkman: This Henrik Ibsen play will star Seana McKenna and Lucy Peacock, another favourite Stratford pairing, as sparring sisters Ella Rentheim and Gunhild Borkman. Scott Wentworth – a Shylock and Tevye of recent years – will play the title role.
• Sara Farb, who played Anne Frank this season, has landed the role of Lucy in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Ruby Joy, André Morin and Garth Potter will play the other main children in this stage adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s novel, directed by Tim Carroll, recently announced as the incoming artistic director at the Shaw Festival.
• In the Studio Theatre, Hannah Moscovitch’s new play Bunny will feature the acting talents of Maev Beaty, Cyrus Lane and Krystin Pellerin, while Gareth Potter will star as Aeneas in Olivier Kemeid’s The Aeneid.

For more casting news, visit tgam.ca/arts