Celebrating the end of the pandemic pause

The Stratford Festival was scheduled to open its stunning new $72.4-million Tom Patterson Theatre in May of 2020. The theatre was by far the most ambitious new venue of its kind in Canada, possibly in North America. Colm Feore, the Hollywood actor who lives in Stratford, was booked to play Richard III in the building’s first big-budget production. For Stratford, its fans and supporters, the summer of 2020 was set to be the joyful culmination of years of designing, fundraising and construction.

Covid-19 had other plans. The finished building, with its curvy, gleaming glass, has been sitting empty for a year and a half. Last summer, Stratford was dark for the first time in its 68-year life. Tickets were refunded. Actors lost their jobs. Costume designers looked for other work. The hotels and restaurants in the area suffered devastating losses.

Then, this summer, something remarkable happened: the festival came back to life with a season of outdoor theatre. Actors formed bubbles to prevent the spread of Covid, production designs were minimal and audiences were capped at roughly 200 people per performance. The festival opened in mid-July to wildly enthusiastic theatregoers who didn’t care that everything was scaled back.

Instead of filling the sparkling new 600-seat Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an adjacent parking lot, under a canopy. The show had a total of eight actors, with all but one playing multiple roles, to keep the cast small. In this issue, the director of that production, Peter Pasyk, describes the logistical challenges and emotional roller coaster of staging the show under such strange circumstances (page 54).

Pasyk’s memoir is part of a collection of stories in this issue about reopening. Toronto Life wanted to take the temperature of the city during this exciting, discombobulating time. Now that a majority of us are doublevaxxed, what does reopening look like? And just as importantly, what does it feel like? The stories are largely from the point of view of people whose vocations depend on in-person gatherings—restaurant owners, religious leaders, music conductors, fitness instructors. They’re people who have spent much of lockdown madly pivoting (or feeling utterly adrift) and can now, finally, resume their work with other people in big groups and small.

Overwhelmingly, they express the profound joy of seeing friends, colleagues, congregants, fans and customers after so many months of isolation. But for many of them, the path to reopening has been bumpy. To follow all the Covid restrictions and protocols, even now, requires ingenuity. Building giant plastic dividers and tents and new patios is expensive. And often, the people who participated in this package reopened with considerable anxiety, worrying that their plans would get cancelled again or they wouldn’t be able to keep their community members safe.

In a sense, we are all in a process of reopening, crawling out of our enclosed worlds, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes exuberantly. As the people featured in this package illustrate, there’s no button to push to instantly reset everything to a pre-pandemic normal. The world has changed, and so have we. But that’s not necessarily bad. We can now appreciate more deeply things we once took for granted and celebrate being together again—despite all the obstacles and challenges we encounter along the way.