Welcome to the 2025 season. Tickets on sale at stratfordfestival.ca/WhatsOn/ThePlays.

Stratford Festival Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino is proud to announce the 2025 season, a playbill of classic and new texts, that celebrates harmony and examines the forces that enhance it or work against it.

These plays are Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale; the musicals Annie and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; the classics Sense and Sensibility and Dangerous Liaisons; the contemporary Canadian plays Forgiveness and The Art of War; and two Stratford Festival commissions, Anne of Green Gables and Ransacking Troy, both of which will have their premières in 2025.

“As I was putting together the 2025 season, I began with a few wonderful plays, and one in particular that I have always wanted to direct, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Central to the resolution of this story is the god Apollo, who helps bring harmony to a family ripped apart by passionate conflict,” says Cimolino.

“Apollo is the God of healing, of music and the arts, of truth and the protection of the young. What a wonderful figure to have at the centre of the season, I thought: a god of harmony, a state we yearn for in this world.

“But in its humblest form harmony can become dull, ‘some settled low content’ as is described in As You Like It. And when it does, we yearn for passion to seize us and take us to the heights of pleasure, but it can just as easily drive us into conflict, which once more sees us craving harmony.

“And so two other gods took their place in my mind alongside Apollo, Venus and Mars, entwined in a never-ending cycle of destruction and creation. Together these three inspired what I hope audiences will find to be an entertaining and meaningful playbill, themed around Apollo, Venus, Mars: Reflections on Harmony, Love and War.”