Williams’ Othello will open 2019 Stratford Festival
Director turned heads with his Mockingbird production this summer
Nigel Shawn Williams, who made a splash at the Stratford Festival this season with his production of To Kill a Mock
ingbird, will take on the festival’s season opener next year: Shakespeare’s Othello.
The play is about a Black general who falls victim to an enemy who convinces Othello that his young white wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful.
In a news release, festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino said he is “delighted to have Nigel back to direct Othello next season after his beautiful interpretation of To Kill a Mocking
bird this year.” Another highlight of the 2019 season is that director and choreographer Donna Feore will again do double duty with the festival’s musicals. After shepherding runaway hit The Rocky
Horror Show and The Music Man this season she will stage
Billy Elliot the Musical and Little Shop of Horrors next year. The 2019 season will also feature the world premiere of the third part of Kate Hennig’s critically acclaimed “Queenmaker trilogy”: Mother’s Daughter, based on the life of Queen Mary I of England. Alan Dilworth will once again direct.
As a companion piece, Stratford will also stage Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. It will be directed by Martha Henry, who’s been winning acclaim this season as the lead in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Two other companion pieces will be staged at the festival’s Studio Theatre.
Cimolino will direct Birds of a Kind by Wajdi Mouawad, mark- ing the first time the festival has staged one of his works. The play premiered in Paris last fall, where it received the Grand Prix de la Critique. This will be the world premiere of the English translation by Linda Gaboriau.
It will be paired with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, an 18th-century German “Enlightenment” comedy, directed by Birgit Schreyer Duarte. The new season also includes: Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by Cimolino.
The comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, directed by Graham Abbey, a Stratford veteran who is also artistic director of Toronto’s Groundling Theatre Company.
Jonathan Goad, another long-time Stratford actor, will direct Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in his directorial debut at the festival.
Jillian Keiley returns to the festival to direct The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, next season’s Schulich Youth Play, from a script adapted by David S. Craig.
The Noël Coward comedy Private Lives will be directed by Carey Perloff, who recently completed 25 years as artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
See stratfordfestival.ca for information. Tickets go on sale Nov. 11 to members and to the general public Jan. 4, 2019.