What a shame that two of the three individuals appointed as the festival’s co–artistic directors resigned in March. Citing artistic differences, Marti Maraden and Don Shipley exited the stage, leaving Des McAnuff reluctantly flying solo and general director Antoni Cimolino overseeing the fest’s day-to-day management.

A shame because the program that the threesome assembled is far and away the most interesting in recent memory. All three were well connected internationally and managed to draw eminent foreign artists to Stratford. These include Broadway director Susan H. Schulman (doing The Music Man); U.S.-based actors Brian Dennehy, Anika Noni Rose and Christopher Plummer (who have five Tonys between them); from London, Simon Callow; and from Berlin, the renowned Deutsches Theatre company. Add dramas from Spain and Germany and Stratford has an impressive 2008 playbill that ranges further afield than usual.

The 55-year-old festival is also doing promising new works—also something of a rarity here—and has reasserted Shakespeare’s centrality. There will be five this year (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s Labour Lost), and the fest is being rebranded the Stratford Shakespeare Festival while banishing musicals from the mainstage. “Shakespeare is ultimately what makes us different,” Cimolino says. “If you’re going to get in a car and drive 10 or 12 hours to get here, what’s the thing you can’t get back home?”

For years, there have been complaints that casts at Stratford are too lily white. The co-directors responded by casting more performers of colour—really good performers like Yanna McIntosh and Nikki M. James—as well as finding more strong roles for women. “It’s important that if you’re coming from a school in Brampton that you look at the stage and it looks like the population pool you come from,” McAnuff says, adding, “Also, Shakespeare was a little bit stingy with his female roles, because they all had to be men… It’s really important to find great roles for women.”

At least McAnuff, the last man standing, is well rounded; he did Shakespeare at New York’s Public Theatre with the legendary Joseph Papp and incubated many of the top musicals of the past 20 years at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. Of the Romeo and Juliet he’s directing here, he comments, “It’s a play that examines hatred without ever trying to explain it away… This was a very sophisticated topic for a young dramatist to tackle.”

Then McAnuff shifts gears to talk about one of the season’s two musicals, The Music Man: “It has one of the more audacious scores in the history of musical theatre, with one terrific show tune after another… But like all great musicals there’s darkness here, too. It’s a tale of somebody who’s abandoned his soul.” But he’s not pro-musical just for artistic reasons: “Musicals tend to be popular, which is a very good thing when you’re running a theatre that gets—certainly compared to international theatres—a very modest amount of subsidy.”

Alec Scott’s picks for the best shows at Stratford >>

Plus:
• The best restaurants in Stratford >>
• The best accommodations in Stratford >>