Antoni Cimolino on Leaving the Stratford Festival after 39 Years
About This Episode:
Antoni Cimolino has spent 39 years at the Stratford Festival: as actor, producer, executive director, and finally as artistic director since 2012. In this wide-ranging conversation with host Phil Rickaby, Cimolino reflects on what drew him to Stratford as a teenager, the moment a play on the thrust stage changed the course of his life, and the long arc from audacious young actor, to the outgoing steward of one of the world’s great theatre institutions.
Cimolino talks candidly about programming his final season around themes of forgiveness and the power of theatre, the existential financial crisis the pandemic brought to Stratford, and why he ultimately stayed on longer than he had planned. He also digs deep into the unique demands of the thrust stage, the philosophy behind commissioning ambitious new Canadian work, and what it meant to shepherd the festival through a fundamental shift in how audiences consume entertainment.
This is a generous, thoughtful conversation with someone who has dedicated his professional life to a single institution, and who leaves it, by almost any measure, in better shape than he found it.
Guest: 🎭 Antoni Cimolino
Antoni Cimolino is the artistic director of the Stratford Festival, a post he was named to in 2012, having served as general director, executive director and general manager, in addition to other roles.
He began at the Stratford Festival in 1988, as an actor, taking on his first directing projects in the mid-1990s. Highlights of his career include playing Romeo to Megan Follows’s Juliet; directing Richard Monette in Filumena, William Hutt in Twelfth Night, Brian Bedford in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Martha Henry in The Tempest; the creation of the multimillion-dollar Endowment Foundation; the renovation of the Avon Theatre and the creation of the Studio Theatre; and the building of the glorious new Tom Patterson Theatre.
In 2013, his first season as Artistic Director, Cimolino introduced The Meighen Forum, a season-long series of more than 150 events illuminating the themes of the playbill and illustrating their relevance in today’s world. That same season he directed The Merchant of Venice, with Tom McCamus and Scott Wentworth, and Mary Stuart, with Seana McKenna and Lucy Peacock, a production that was extended an unprecedented four times.
His recent productions include The Winter’s Tale in 2025, Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance and Eduardo De Filippo’s Grand Magic with Geraint Wyn Davies in 2023/2024, as well as Richard III and The Miser with Colm Feore in 2022; the English-language première of Birds of a Kind by Wajdi Mouawad; The Merry Wives of Windsor with Geraint Wyn Davies, Sophia Walker and Brigit Wilson; Napoli Milionaria! with Tom McCamus and Brigit Wilson; The School for Scandal with Shannon Taylor, Geraint Wyn Davies and Joseph Ziegler; Macbeth with Ian Lake and Krystin Pellerin; The Hypochondriac with Stephen Ouimette and Brigit Wilson; Hamlet and The Alchemist with Jonathan Goad; King Lear with Colm Feore (one of the top-selling Shakespeare productions in the Festival’s history); and The Beaux’ Stratagem with Colm Feore and Mike Shara.
In 2014, Cimolino and Executive Director Anita Gaffney launched Stratford Festival On Film, an ambitious project to capture all of Shakespeare’s plays. The productions from this ongoing initiative, along with films of some non-Shakespeare productions and original digital content are part of a massive catalogue of arts programming available on the Festival’s subscription streaming platform, StratFest@Home.
In 2018, Cimolino and Gaffney launched a $100-million campaign to build a new Tom Patterson Theatre. The campaign exceeded its goal and the new theatre opened in May 2022, winning a number of architectural awards, including the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture, the global MasterPrize Award, the UK Civic Trust Award and the Design Excellence Award from the Ontario Association of Architects, as well as the OAA’s People’s Choice Award.
Cimolino, now in his 39th season at the Festival, is the director of the 2026 production of The Tempest at the Festival Theatre and Saturday, Sunday, Monday at the Avon Theatre.
More with Antoni Cimolino:
🎬 Documentary: This Above All: The Theatrical Life of Antoni Cimolino – available on CBC Gem
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Transcript
[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast, and on Stageworthy, I talk to theatre makers of all kinds, from actors to directors, to playwrights, to artistic directors, if they make theatre in Canada, I talk to them.
Some of the people I talk to are household names and the rest are people I really think you should get to know. Before we get into today’s episode, let’s do a little bit of housekeeping. I want to remind you that the 500th episode of Stageworthy is coming up in the new year.
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But I do this show because I love it. I love talking to people who make theatre. And so if you want to help me to make this show, please consider becoming a patron.
Go to patreon.com slash stageworthy and become a patron. Patrons get early access to episodes. We’ll have some conversations about interesting things that are happening in the theatre world.
And the more people who join the Patreon, the more I’ll be able to offer to my patrons. But if you can’t or don’t want to commit to monthly support, there’s another way that you can support me. There’s a link at ko-fi.com slash stageworthy. That’s ko-fi.com slash stageworthy. And you can leave a one-time contribution there to help me keep this going. That is more than enough housekeeping because we should really get into today’s episode because my guest today is Antoni Cimolino.
Antoni Cimolino is the outgoing artistic director of the Stratford Festival, a post he was named to in 2012. But he has been with the Stratford Festival in one aspect or another for 39 years. This is a conversation that I’ve been looking forward to sharing with you because it is a thrill to be able to talk to someone as inspirational as Antoni Cimolino and to talk about his final year of being the artistic director and to look back on his time as artistic director.
I really enjoyed talking with Antoni and I hope you enjoy listening to it. So here’s my conversation with Antoni Cimolino. Antoni Cimolino, thank you so much for joining me.
This is a real pleasure for me. You’ve been with the Stratford Festival for 39 years. You’ve been an actor.
You’ve been executive director, general manager, artistic director. This is your last season at the Stratford Festival as the artistic director. I am curious, what went into deciding what shows you would include in your last season as artistic director?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Oh, you know, theatre really needs to be of the now. And so as I was looking at the world in 2025, as we were, you know, because usually the season is set by about May of 2025, so it’s 2024, 2025. I saw that there’s a lot of conflict, like there’s always a lot of conflict, but boy, there was a lot of conflict.
And I felt like finding a way through to finding a resolution to differences, to find, you know, forgiveness for the other side and whatever other side there is was really critically important. So I thought about the power of theatre, that theatre can do that better than anything else. Like there’s no university course.
There’s no lecture you can go to that is going to be as powerful as experiencing something in the theatre where you not only witness, but you become emotionally involved in the conflict that’s on stage and how it eventually gets resolved. So out of all that, I wanted to do plays about forgiveness. I wanted to do plays which celebrate the power of theatre.
And so that’s how I came up with that group of plays. I, uh, and, and as I approached that work, Phil, I, I, and in my own work and on the Tempest and Saturday, Sunday, Monday, that was really at the forefront of my mind.
[Phil Rickaby]
Were there any plays that, because some of the, a couple of the plays are kind of revisits from past shows. And in fact, I think a couple of them were ones that didn’t get to happen. Or there’ve been a couple of shows over the past couple of years that were supposed to be part of the 2020 season, which have been introduced.
And I wonder, I was wondering if, if there were shows that were particularly meaningful to you as a final season, or was it just, it, was it mostly the, the, the wine to explore conflict and forgiveness?
[Antoni Cimolino]
First of all, uh, I’m just trying to, I’m grappling with what you said about revisit, something rotten is from our 2024 season, so that was brought back. But everything else is new. And, uh, and so it’s either entirely new work, like the Dow of the World or the King James Bible play, or the new productions with new directors.
And, and each one of these plays, you know, looks at, well, like the Tempest, a situation where there’s a lot of anger and how do you get beyond the anger? And that was really, you know, uh, the driving force. I wanted to say something about what was happening in the United States.
And I didn’t want to do something that was too nail on the head. In a way, what’s going on down there and the election of Trump, it feels to me like a direct manifestation of the, the economic system that is down there. And so thinking about that, a play like the Tempest is very much about early capitalism and what it does to people to make everything have a value and commoditize everything.
And of course, Death of a Salesman was a play that is about that too, which talks about the underlying causes of what what’s happening in the world today. So yeah, no, I tried to find plays that celebrated the power of theatre that are metatheatrical. Like in a way the importance of being earnest or Midsummer Night’s Dream certainly has, you know, play within a play.
So those were the driving thoughts behind it.
[Phil Rickaby]
Now I want to get a little bit, I want to, you know, we are sort of celebrating your, your, your history at the, at the, at the festival. You, there’s a documentary that just came out. It’s available on CBC Gen, CBC Gem about you, about your time at the festival.
And I want to get into a couple of things that I learned while watching that documentary a little bit later on. But I’m, you joined the festival in 1988 as, as an actor.
[Antoni Cimolino]
That’s right.
[Phil Rickaby]
Was the, the, the, the Romeo and Juliet with Megan Follows year.
[Antoni Cimolino]
That was in 1992.
[Phil Rickaby]
92. When you joined the, the, the company, what, what, what had been prior to that? What was your relationship with the Stratford festival?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Well, I’d come to the festival as a teenager, you know those years when you’re still trying to figure out, many of us are trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives. And I’d seen plays at the festival and I was struck by the quality of them, but it was really seeing a play in the festival theatre that kind of changed my life. Um, and, and, and so it was the theatre itself as well as what was on stage.
So I was on the side of the theatre. I was able to watch the audience. I was able to watch the play.
And I was so struck by the power of that space where we, it was a very conscious act of theatre going. It wasn’t like we were watching a movie at the end of the room. We were, I was watching the audience react to the play.
I could see the audience across from the play. So I really wanted to be at Stratford. I decided not to, you know, go to law school, but instead I was going to become an actor.
And, you know, that didn’t go over well with my parents and, uh, but it was Stratford that provoked that. So I always wanted to, to work and make a contribution for this place.
[Phil Rickaby]
As you, as you sort of moved towards that, you didn’t become a lawyer and you, you, you studied, you went, you, you know, you post-secondarily you started acting. Um, was, was it in your wildest dreams that you would spend as long as you have at this festival?
[Antoni Cimolino]
No, I’d never, uh, I didn’t even know if I would ever be working at the festival. And I auditioned a couple of times. Many people audition several times before they get in.
I was one of those people and, and it was heartbreak to hear I didn’t make it. And, uh, the auditions meant everything to me and as auditions, you know, do, and that’s not helpful in a way, you know, I’ve been auditioning young performers for decades and, and there’s no way around it. Like the, you, you know, the fact that they respect their audience or they really want the job make ratchets up the tension and that doesn’t help us.
So it’s really hard to, to, you know, find that balance. But, um, I never, you know, when I eventually got in, it meant a lot. And, uh, and then I was really lucky.
I was asked to, after a couple of seasons to work as an assistant director by, uh, the artistic director, David William. Um, and, uh, and that was life-changing.
[Phil Rickaby]
Having, having performed on this stage, the stages at Stratford, um, what did that teach you about directing on those stages or anything that, that, that having performed there, uh, helped you as a director?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Yeah, totally. Phil, in the sense that a thrust stage is a very different beast than a proscenium arch stage. And, um, you know, a proscenium arch is that, that, that square at the end of that rectangle at the end of the room.
And in its most extreme form, it’s a very narrow auditorium, right? Like where you’re all directly in front of the stage. And the, the reason why a lot of directors like that kind of setup is that you can really control the viewpoint of the audience.
So, you know, if you’re going to create a magic trick, the best way to do it is in one of those proscenium arches. The thrust stage puts the actor in the text right in the middle of the audience. So it’s a much more democratic, uh, experience for the audience in the sense that they can choose where they want to look and see being seated in a different place and yields a different experience.
You know, um, it’s not a static two-dimensional box at the end of the room. It is fully three-dimensional. And it means that, that the actor on the stage, there are people looking at your back.
You’re acting with the whole of you. There’s no kind of throwing a performance forward as you, you know, cheat, as they say in the proscenium arch, like you’re in the middle of the audience. There’s no escape.
And so you better be, um, fully immersed in your character because otherwise you’re exposed. So working on that stage as an actor, learning by experience, what it takes to pull the audience in to a long shot, a medium shot, a closeup, simply by the use of your body. Um, it helped me as a director because, uh, guiding the audience’s eye to where you want it to look is much more complicated on a thrust stage than it is in a proscenium arch.
So I don’t think it’s a situation where it’s very easy for a director who’s never had many experience on a thrust stage to, uh, in their first couple of goes to be able to, you know, um, do well on it, it takes time. It takes experience. And indeed before this creation of the Stratford Festival, that stage did not exist for over 300 years.
It is the stage that Shakespeare wrote his plays for. And then it disappeared, uh, by the middle of the 17th century, uh, when the players went to France and started to do plays at the end of tennis courts. And, um, and so, uh, none of us knew how to really work that stage until, you know, Guthrie and Michael Langham and a group of Canadian players worked out what are the rules of working on a thrust stage?
And, uh, and so that’s the kind of thing you learned firsthand as an actor on a thrust stage.
[Phil Rickaby]
I’ve been thinking about the fact that there’s the recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe in England, which is their best guess at what that particular theatre may have looked at in the times of Shakespeare. And I, I haven’t had the opportunity to be there, but I’ve seen a few recorded performances and one of the things that struck me was sometimes the length of time it takes somebody to get from backstage to onstage, which is often reflected in the language of Shakespeare, long come, you know, here comes my father, and then you have a lot of time to say something before somebody comes in. Um, is that when that theatre is, is being created, is there any kind of, uh, communication back and forth between Stratford and that particular stage, that particular company in terms of like the performing on that, or were they working from scratch as far as you know, or.
[Antoni Cimolino]
Okay. Well, a lot of time, a lot to talk about there. So let’s, let’s go.
So all we have of Shakespeare’s original stage is a drawing on a napkin from a Dutch tourist of the outside of the theatre. We do not have anything telling us what it’s like on the inside. There are excavations of the rows.
There was conjecture. So, you know, we just don’t know what we do know from the plays is that there’s probably an inner stage. There is a trap that’s needed.
There’s a balcony that’s needed. Like you, you, you get from the staging and, you know, very few stage directions in Shakespeare. Like the Tempest is, uh, uh, we have it from the folio.
It has more stage directions than anything else. And they’re very few. And we probably think that came from a stage manager’s, uh, composite script.
So we don’t know is basically the answer. When they built the Stratford festival stage, they wanted to take a Greek amphitheatre, add the Roman vomitoria, those areas downstage that can spew up action, just like vomitoria suggests, and an Elizabethan stage house, as they imagined it would be. And the impulse was not ye old.
There was no, it was not an antiquarian fetish to try to wonder what it was like when they ate the bard’s own candy. It was modernist. And so it was a modernist design and, um, and, uh, it evolved over time.
The stage house changed, uh, the internal stairs changed the width of that Greek auditorium going from like 220, 240 degrees down to about 180, as it is now. So, uh, Olivier came to the festival and he famously said, well, they can’t all see my face. And so it was like, that’s right, Lawrence.
They can’t all see your face because that was not the intention. The intention is to have an actor in real space as Greeks had, where some of the people are seeing your back as a wagon would have been Phil, if you brought it into a town square and you know, 700 years ago, you, you, as Molière says, two planks and a passion so that, you know, you got the actor in the middle of the audience. All right.
So when Olivier built the Olivier theatre at the national and the designs were come up, were made and Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who designed the festival stage was on the building committee there. That stage is very wide. So if any of you’ve been to the Olivier, it’s really wide.
And the problem with it, it’s a thrust stage, right? It’s not really a true thrust. Like the audience is always in front of it.
It kind of goes around in a circle. And as one actor said, there’s no sound problem on the Olivier stage that can’t be solved with a follow spot, because it’s not that you can’t hear. You just have no idea who’s talking because the stage is so wide.
This is not true of the festival or the Tom Patterson, which is a much narrower thrust stage. And there’ve been different iterations of Tanya’s stage done around the world. The Olivier, as I just discussed, but also probably the best of them is the cockpit in Sheffield.
But there’s also Chichester, which was made in emulation of the festival, the Guthrie theatre, the Mark Taper Forum in LA, the Vivian Beaumont in at Lincoln Centre, which they came and actually measured the stage and kind of cut it down by half. But it doesn’t work as well. I mean, we took Lear with Chris Plummer down there and there were actors, you know, extraordinary actors like Brent Carver, who were absolutely audible on the festival stage.
And you couldn’t hear them despite a kind of amplification system at the Vivian Beaumont. So there’s something that really works about the festival. Now, back to your question about the replica of the, of the globe.
So that was based on conjecture and my problem with it. I’ve stood on that stage. I’ve watched plays in it.
My problem with, they have these two huge kind of pillars on the side of the stage that hold up a roof. And I don’t believe they would have ever had two huge pillars on the side of the stage. It betrays a proscenium mindset where you can really anticipate everybody being in front of the stage.
They wouldn’t have done that. Like there’s, and so I feel like it’s, it’s, it, it’s somebody’s guests. And that guest was a person who hadn’t worked on a thrust stage and it was a bad guest.
And so I, in a way it’s, it’s, it’s quite flawed, but you know, like that’s somebody’s guests. You’d have another guest. I’d have another guest guest, but, um, it’s, uh, I can’t say it’s a hugely enjoyable experience, but you’re either below and, and, and I think that’s another issue with a lot of these stages that have been created in the last 34 years, which you call sort of courtyard stages.
The stage either is really above the spectators, the groundlings, if you will, um, who are below the stage, or there’s people in, in balconies on either side of the stage, usually much too close to the stage so that you’re either looking up an actor’s nose or you’re staring squarely down at their bald spot because you’re either too high or too low. Right. The great thing about the festival theatre and the Tom Patterson is that you can actually see the whites of everybody’s eyes, like you can, the angle of sight is such that the actor is available and, um, and you can see their face and you can see their eyes.
And I think that’s really important that you not be in extreme angles. I don’t think, you know, that’s not true of any Greek theatre. And I only mentioned the Greeks because we actually have that architecture, right?
It wasn’t done in wood and disappeared. We have it. And the acoustics are usually fantastic.
The sight lines are great. They’re open. The Romans changed those theatres by getting rid of the first couple of rows and putting in vomitoria so they could bring the lions and tigers and bears, oh boy, but fundamentally that’s what good theatre is about is having access to the actor.
And I feel like that’s not true of the globe. It is true at the Stratford festival.
[Phil Rickaby]
Mm. Yeah, absolutely. In your time, uh, as an artist, as artistic director, have you found that your taste has changed?
Like, is there a play that you would program now that you wouldn’t have when you first took on the role?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Hmm. That’s a good question. Um, I think my, I think one of the things that’s changed for me was my thirst for new work.
Um, you know, uh, Casey and Diana in recent years, the breathing hole, it just getting to, you know, uh, Salesmen in China, um, developing and working with playwrights and Anne of Green Gables last year to, to see new work. What’s really not really as much on my radar, um, early on. And when I started to commission new play skill, I was trying to commission big new plays because I felt like, look, there’s two handers everywhere and they’re usually like fantastic plays by resourceful Canadian playwrights who didn’t think they would be produced if they didn’t do something really, really small.
But I wanted to commission work that was bigger to give chance for those playwrights to actually, you know, have a variety of voices on stage. Hence something like the breathing hole with Colleen Murphy, quite an ambitious piece, you know? Um, involving, uh, actors from, uh, uh, uh, you know, spoke, uh, in U.S and, and coming from the North as well as a real, uh, large ensemble. But then what I found was they weren’t produced that often afterward, like that had a life at the national arts centre. So the problem with big plays is that then they don’t have a second chance. So over time we found a kind of middle ground, um, to some degree on it, but yeah, that’s the kind of work I don’t think would have been quite as, um, front of mind for me when I started 14 years ago.
[Phil Rickaby]
One of the shows that sort of comes to mind, to my mind as a, as when it was announced, it was surprising to me was, was the Rocky horror show, because to me it was like, that’s an odd choice for the Stratford festival to do for a theatre that was perceived as, as a classical theatre festival, but one made that show, which has over the years, we’ve seen so many people do it since then. Um, what made that show right for the festival at that time?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Well, the person I assisted directed in 1990 of the Stratford festival was Bill Gaskill, who was the head of the Royal court among other places. And when he was head of the Royal court, one of the shows that they started in their upstairs space was Rocky horror. And, uh, I didn’t do it for that reason.
I’m just saying it’s provenance is actually, um, uh, more kind of refined than one would imagine. Um, uh, and the, the work of the piece actually, I grew up in that generation, Phil, so it spoke to me, I loved it. And a challenge for a place like Stratford is that people start to think as Ogden Nash says, that it’s got antiques in its pantiques, you know, that it’s a twee and good for you and you’re somebody’s grandmother’s thing.
And so it’s incumbent upon an artistic director. I think of the festival occasionally to challenge that and do something irreverent and, um, but it’s critical to do it well, they say the only crime in the theatre is to aim low and miss. And so, uh, I’m not suggesting that Rocky horror is aiming low, but some people might accuse us of, you know, well, why are you doing that material in a classical theatre?
So if you’re going to take that on, you’ve got to do it really, really well. And I think Donna Fiore did a fantastic job of it. Like she was vibrant and Dan Chameroy was delightful.
Steve Ross, just an incredible group of people. Jen Ryder Shaw, just, and so, um, yeah, I was, I was actually very proud of that. And, um, I watched it quite a few times and I couldn’t watch it again or quite a few more.
[Phil Rickaby]
That show obviously has a lot of rewatch ability. After all, people have watched the movie so many times and people return to see the live show whenever it’s performed as often as they can. And that, that, that production was extended many times.
I think almost up until the point where it couldn’t be extended anymore.
[Antoni Cimolino]
Did you see it? You saw it, right?
[Phil Rickaby]
I didn’t get to see it. So wanted to, I’ve seen that show so many times and it was one of those productions that I really did want to see. I didn’t get to see it that year.
Um, but you know, it, it was, it was delightful.
[Antoni Cimolino]
She did a great job and you’re right. The audience was like, just, just fully there. I mean, they show up ready to rock and roll, ready to go.
And, uh, and I think that’s brilliant. Like, you know, and, and, and listen, it’s not the audience that you, you necessarily think. Like there was a real cross-section of humanity in that, you know, there were like 80 and 90 year olds showed up, showed up ready to party.
And, um, and so I, I, I think that’s great. Like that’s critical for the theatre to, to do things well, always. Um, but make sure that there’s a real variety of things that you’re approaching.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. And that show does bring out like so many different, different crowds. You’ll get the people who come every year and the people who came just for Rocky Horror.
And the experience of, of that show is, is, is something where, you know, the, the callbacks from the audience and the call outs is something that doesn’t happen often in the theatre. So it can be kind of disruptive to what people think theatre is going to be.
[Antoni Cimolino]
Yeah. And look, there were some people who showed up perhaps only to see Rocky Horror with, you know, black lips and, uh, and wild outfits. Um, but you know, we had some people in their seventies showing up like that too.
And so there was a real cross section and, and it’s in the nature of a festival, which will have a hell of a lot of variety on the stage that there will be people who show up and they only want to see, let’s say a Shakespeare, or they only come because they want to see the new work. And so it’s our job to get them to take a risk on something a little bit outside of their, uh, their, their initial taste or comfort as somebody who started as an actor at the festival.
[Phil Rickaby]
Um, you moved to the theatre administration, uh, at the festival, uh, I believe when Richard Monette became the artistic director, what made you want to move into an administrative role?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Well, I worked as a producer in that time. So, um, Janice Price, who is now the head of the ROM foundation, uh, she was our marketing director at the time. And Phil, we were looking at ways of taking the work on our stages and moving it to radio or on tour or into films.
And so Janice, who is a marketing director needed someone to be able to, uh, work with her, her marketing expertise was one thing she needed somebody on the artistic side who could, you know, speak to the actors, um, uh, talk to the creative teams, and so she needed an assistant in that area. I was already working as an assistant director and had been for about five years at that point. And so I was, she asked for me.
And, um, I was so lucky to be mentored by her. I was at a gala last night where she won the Peter Herrndorf Award for exceptional arts leadership, because she’s, you know, run Lincoln Centre, you name it. She’s she’s done it.
And I learned a lot. So I didn’t kind of get into administration directly. I got into, uh, uh, working on translating the place on our stages to other media, other, other possibilities.
So the Long Day’s Journey Into Night film came out of our work. The CBC radio drama series with Stratford, the drama series came out of our work. I eventually worked on and pioneered the, the, um, Chris Plummer in Barrymore with live end.
I eventually brought us to New York city, but always from a producing point of view, always as someone who understood, you know, more about the stage than about the business side. Over time, I learned more about the business side, but I, I didn’t kind of jump into administration. I kind of started out just trying to see what we could do to have the festivals plays resonate more in the broader community was there.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, that moving into, into a producing role and then into executive director, um, was it at that point, were you thinking my role as an actor is done or were you hoping to go back to it or what was, what was your view of, of, of your time as an actor at that point?
[Antoni Cimolino]
I think as I began to work more on, on, uh, you know, producing and doing, I started to do the season schedule and I was, I was really interested in all that. Like I, I was kind of, um, I was, my interest in directing dated back to when I was in university and actually in high school, so I’d be kind of doing that. I ran a theatre company out of Laurentian University in Sudbury where I’d grown up every summer.
We would take it around to parks and it was based out of the university. It was kind of summer work scheme for, uh, students, but it was an experience as rustic and simple as it was that kind of helped me understand. It’s kind of fun helping a play come together.
It’s so interesting to work with different people and working as a director, you’re working with a whole bunch of actors, you’re working with a composer, you’re working with, you know, there’s a lot of, so I really was taken with that. And as I started to do more work and learning about film and, you know, working with Rhombus Media and getting, uh, the long days journey film done, I, um, I realized I was very much drawn to that and I wasn’t looking back. Like there wasn’t a real part of me that felt I wanted to become the sole contributor of one instrument in the symphony.
I kind of loved helping make the symphony happen. Um, and so no, I, I, I never thought Phil, oh, I won’t act again. I just didn’t think about it.
I was really interested in doing other things. And, you know, there’s 750 performances in the festival season, programming those performances, learn you’re speaking to the different departments. I was like really an eye opener, um, directing at the festival.
Uh, all those things kind of drew me in. And then at some point I was asked by the board to take on the role of executive director, which I knew nothing about. Like I had been a producer up at that point, but I didn’t know anything about HR.
I didn’t know anything about, you know, computer systems, IT. And so I had a lot to learn, but the fact that there was a lot to learn was really, really interesting. And so I, uh, it wasn’t a question of walking away from something.
I was running towards something else.
[Phil Rickaby]
Right. Yeah. Now the move from executive director, then general director, and then the general manager, and then into artistic director, how did the move to artistic director come about?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Well, I had, uh, I’d been the executive director for quite a few years. And when, uh, Des McAnuff, um, wrapped up his time at the festival, there was an open call for people to put their name forward. And I thought I’m going to put my name forward.
I, I, I didn’t feel it was the right time before then to do that. I didn’t put my name forward for the artistic director’s job specifically when Richard Monette wrapped up his time. But I felt about six years later that it was the right time for me, that I’d learned enough and I, I had something I wanted to offer, and so there was a search committee that was constituted and a search firm, I was hired and they went through all the formal processes.
And I was one voice among many that stepped forward. Um, I suppose I had the advantage of understanding the festival profoundly from my, you know, 20 some years at the festival, but, uh, I was eventually selected and, uh, and I felt, you know, a great responsibility because I really wanted to do a good job.
[Phil Rickaby]
Hmm. Yeah. Um, now having been an executive director, you know, really sort of looking at like the function of the, of the festival and in, in, in, in the business side, in, in a way of looking at it, have, and now is there then as the artistic director, did you ever have times when your history as the executive director sort of pushed against the needs of the artistic side?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Well, you know, an artist always needs to understand their materials like craftsmen. Like they, you need to understand the quality of a certain fabric, how it hangs, what it can do well, you know, um, uh, the tension that it contains the ability, what it, what it can, the kind of outfit that could serve well to create or the kind where it’s just the wrong fabric, knowing materials is what artists have done for hundreds and hundreds of years. Um, and so the materials that a theatre director has a producer are many.
They’re the talent of the, the, the people you work with, the actors, the writers, uh, there’s also, you know, what kind of resources do you have to be able to present that? What is the nature of the stages? How are they different?
What are they best support? Um, and so I, I was well versed in those materials and I knew in a repertory system, like when I go see a play, I see a play, let’s say with sand all over the stage and 1000 candles that are lit, and so it’s the cost of sand and a bunch of candles and they sit on that stage and they’re beautiful, but that would be really, really hard to do in a repertory system because we have to take stuff off of the stage and put for another show. We will spend, I don’t know, I’ll pull it up. We may spend $500,000 putting a set together, but we will spend 1.2 million moving it on and off stage. And so understanding all of that helps you play your strengths. Know what, you know, is achievable, what is going to be more tough to do. And I’d like to think I understood it well enough, Phil, that I also tried to do the seemingly impossible, do things that you think, oh, that can’t be done and, uh, and deliver them.
So I felt that rather than the experience of executive director serving as an impediment to the work, it actually liberated it because I kind of knew, you know, the basics, right. And then once you can do things in 4-4 time, you have the hope of playing jazz, but you can’t do it the other way around. So, uh, yeah.
Yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, before you were the artistic director, you basically, you saw, uh, from, uh, the executive director and general manager seat, three eras of leadership in the festival. What did that time teach you about the impact of an artistic director?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Well, I guess I saw more Phil, cause I saw, I was brought into the company by, uh, John Neville. I was in, um, David Williams company, then Richard Monette and, uh, and the artistic director kind of sets the tone of the place. Like there’s 1200 people that work at the Stratford festival.
There are 130 plus actors, many crafts, people, composers, musicians, designers. Um, and without kind of being overt about it, what you care about, you know, gets manifested. And so I tried to, um, centre the text, centre the actors, especially.
I appointed a head of design a number of years ago and Michael Walton has done a phenomenal job and, and really, I think was a real advocate for the importance of design, but I felt like the, you know, the simpler the work, the more, much more touched our hearts, the better. And so those are the kind of values. I know that sounds like, Oh, gee, wouldn’t anybody want those things?
And I’m not sure that’s true. There’s sometimes people want glitzy productions or they want, you know, you know, there, there can be different values. TC’s love over at the Shaw of improvisation of the sense of, you know, discovery in the moment.
I can see that in the work there. I can see that he works with the company on that and it leads to a different kind of work than the kind of work that we’ve done at the festival. So, um, yeah, so, uh, You’ve got to make sure that you think carefully about what’s important to you and manifest that with people because it will out and, uh, and if your focus is on the wrong things, um, or things that maybe aren’t as important to the artists around you, then it can feel a bit empty and soulless.
And I really didn’t want to create that kind of theatre. I wanted to create work that, that used the full talent of the actors so they could grow work that challenged our company. Whether it’s new plays or classics, I didn’t want vapid.
I didn’t want facile and I didn’t want showy.
[Phil Rickaby]
Now we, I mentioned earlier the documentary, this above all at which people can watch on CBC Gem and they want to like, you know, see that documentary about your time at the Stratford festival. Um, now that there has been a documentary about, about you and about, about your time at Stratford, is there, is there something you think that documentary gets right or wrong about being an artistic director about, about you?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Well, it’s always weird to be the subject of a documentary or, you know, like we spend our life in the theatre telling stories about other people. We don’t kind of expect to ever be the story. I thought Barry did a phenomenal job of an earth of manifesting certain themes and taking facts and people’s voices and weaving them together so that they tell a, uh, a compelling story.
I thought he did a good job of that. I think it’s, you know, he’s telling a particular story, uh, which is a little bit melancholic. Um, and sweet and touching.
And, uh, and, and I think Phil really, he kind of captures a lot about the Stratford festival, which is great. Like the one part I really like about it is that I think it helps people understand the complexity of a place, right? Um, uh, that we’re all trying to do our best, but we all come from different disciplines and we’re all making a contribution and, you know, if the schedule works for the stage manager, it’s probably not going to work for the production manager and how do you reconcile that tension?
And I think all that really becomes clear in the documentary. I think probably another documentary would show, you know, the stupid kind of joy I got at every turn of what I was doing and how I couldn’t stop. Um, uh, so yeah, I think, I think it’s, it’s, it’s, I think it’s, it’s really phenomenal, especially given the poor subject matter you had to deal with.
[Phil Rickaby]
No, I disagree with poor subject matter. But, uh, in the documentary, uh, Colm Feore tells a story about, um, you sending a letter to the festival offering toaster ovens in exchange for an audition or a role, which is a pretty audacious thing to do in your time as artistic director. Have you, has anyone ever surprised you with an equivalent amount of audacity in their audition or in their, their approach?
[Antoni Cimolino]
You know, I, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, but, but it was, I guess it was cheeky and here we are like 30 some years later talking about it. It’s bizarre, but you know, I, I have to say part of it was a joke. Part of it was like, you know, in an age of infomercials and shopping channels, I thought, okay, you know, but there was also part of me as a young actor who, you know, um, egotistical, uh, dissatisfied wondering why I would go to the theatre and see people who I didn’t think in every case were great.
And you know, it’s hard to be a young actor because you have a belief in yourself, but you’re unproven, right? And people don’t know your work and you think I could do that. I could do better than that.
And give me a chance. And so part of me was kind of saying, if you’re going to hire people who maybe can’t do it, then at least get a toaster oven out of it. Um, so, you know, so it was, um, it came out of more, um, angst than the story kind of reveals and you’re right.
It was maybe audacious and maybe stupid because I’m certain that some people might’ve, um, taken it as a kind of, you know, being offensive, but, um, I think people found it really funny and word spread for managements across the country because they got this, this letter and, um, and I had to give up some toaster ovens. I definitely went out to the hardware store and bought some and sent them off. My dad did not run a hardware store.
It seems to be implied by what Colin was saying. But, um, but yeah, it’s, uh, it was something that came out of an experience that I think most young artists have. Um, I just kind of did something, um, that maybe was, um, I got lucky that it wasn’t taken the wrong way.
[Phil Rickaby]
No, but it is, it is important to, especially as a young actor to, to, to get noticed and to, to, to do something that some people take note of. And obviously the people took note of this and, uh, and, and, and obviously because they’re still telling that story, as you say, 30 some odd years later.
[Antoni Cimolino]
Yeah. And you know, as you say that Phil and kind of thinking, cause I didn’t really look back, like I did it and, and you know, and I suppose it did get you the audition, but that doesn’t get you the part, but I guess, I guess you’re right. It probably did something to, to get noticed.
And what did they say? It’s not enough to have talent. You have to have a talent for talent.
And I guess that, that kind of chutzpah, that kind of thing would probably serve me well later on in working with the marketing director, like, like Janice Price, since we’re trying to put things together, I don’t know, you look back on life and you think, wow, you know, like the cartoon characters, you know, they, they go off the end of the cliff and they’re just fine until they look down. And so sometimes you just got to keep going and not look down. It’s true.
[Phil Rickaby]
Just last couple of questions for you. It must’ve been, was it a difficult choice to, to decide that it was time for your, you to step down as artistic director or like, how did you decide that the time was right for that?
[Antoni Cimolino]
Well, I really thought I would, 2024 would be my last season because we were going to open this beautiful new theatre in 2020 and I wanted a couple of years of directing in the space and we had a whole bunch of projects that new plays and stuff that we had been preparing for years, Phil, and so I thought I’ll be able to get those done by 2024 and there’ll have been 12 years, which is a long time and, um, and it will be time to go.
And then the heartbreak happened of the pandemic in which, you know, people died. So it’s, it’s complaining about losing a theatre season seems almost churlish, but the fact was it was really, it was an existential crisis in a way for the Stratford festival. I mean, I know we all think of it as indestructible, but you know, we stopped in March and.
In March, we had 15 plays that we were either building or in rehearsals and we had invested something like $30 million into creating those plays. And that would never come back to us because, you know, we didn’t know when we would be able to start rehearsing again at that time we thought, Oh, we’d gone for two weeks and maybe we’ll be back, but it was clear that wasn’t going to happen and then we had, we had sold about $20 million worth of tickets. That really was money that wasn’t ours.
So, you know, when you think about it, 30 million spent, uh, 20 million against it, that wasn’t really ours. We were, we were really in a difficult situation and the digging ourselves out of that hole over the next couple of years, I realized I can’t hand the festival off to the next artistic director in this kind of shape. Last year in 2025, our sales, our ticket sales exceeded that of 2019.
And, um, and you know, there has been growth and change here. So, um, in the middle of the pandemic, I realized I needed to stay another year or two and the board wanted me to stay. And so I agreed to an extra two years.
And, um, and I’m happy that it does feel now that we are coming out the other end. Now I say that Phil, but that isn’t exactly true. Theatres around the world are still suffering.
We still, the change in, you know, and it hasn’t simply been the pandemic. You know, when I became artistic director, social media was really in its infancy compared to, you know, the people were handing their first generation iPhones to their kids in 2012 or so because the second iPhone was coming out and we started to treat it very differently and over that time, Netflix and stuff has become so pervasive everywhere that we have audiences that come to the theatre, fully expecting sir titles on everything, you know, they’re used to turning up the volume and being in their jammies and they’re not used to being out at night.
Uh, so matinees are selling better than evening performances. We, it’s not simply the pandemic, uh, having hit, uh, and changed audiences. Um, there has been an entire change in how we consume medium, how we entertain ourselves, and I think theatre is going to be fine in the longterm, um, because it’s been around for 24 centuries and change and, you know, I wouldn’t bet against it and the more we have bespoke, um, uh, video or music sent to us intended to either play to our prejudices or get us good and angry.
Um, but it’s a one-on-one thing, right? That whereas a theatre, it’s about a group of people coming together in the space and finding commonality together, finding community together, and that’s going to be more important than ever before. Um, so I realize I’m leaving a vastly different environment than when I started and, but I do feel that we are handing a healthy theatre off to, you know, Jonathan Church, who, uh, is the next artistic director.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. My last question, um, is after the last season, after the last show of the season has closed and your tenure as artistic director is finished, what do you want the Stratford festival history book to say about the Antoni Cimolino era?
[Antoni Cimolino]
That the work was good. That, you know, new plays of quality were created, that there were productions of Shakespeare that were insightful and, and touched hearts that, uh, the musicals were, you know, exceptional and to calibre that can’t be found in many places in the world, that new initiatives like the forum where, you know, over 150 different events during the year, some performances, some exceptional people coming, talking about what these plays mean in our world today, that forum was like a real extra dimension to Stratford, a new dimension to it, uh, uh, you know, a way of coming to the festival and experiencing the plays in a deeper sense.
Um, that they see the films and that they, um, they see that the work was good. And by creating a streaming platform, which streams, not only our work, but theatres from across work of theatres from across Canada, that there was a new, another new dimension added to the festival that it wasn’t simply about, you know, what happened in Stratford, Ontario, but something that could be streamed around the world that it, therefore it met the moment, uh, the digital age. Um, I’d like all of that, Phil, and I want people to kind of, you know, when I started in, uh, as executive director and we started an endowment, it had zero assets in 1999 and today it has $170 million in assets.
We get more support from our endowment than we do from all levels of government combined in any given year. Um, I’d like, we, you know, we’ve renovated all the theatres, but especially the new Tom Patterson, which is just, you know, as the New York times said, the best new theatre in the world. And, um, so I’d like people to think about that.
Um, but basically I’d like people to say he took care of the place and helped it grow.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think that much is absolutely clear, Antoni for your time and your generosity today.
[Antoni Cimolino]
Thank you, Phil. Thanks very much.
[Phil Rickaby]
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you’re watching on YouTube, please make sure that you like this episode, leave a comment so that I know that you were here and if you’re like stage worthy, make sure that you hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.
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All right. Let’s talk about next week’s episode because my guest next week is Adam Lazarus. Adam is an award-winning theatre creator, director, and acting instructor.
He’s been showcased nationally, internationally. He’s been all over his show. Daughter has been performed all over the world and raised the eyebrows all over the world.
His new show is called Versus and it runs at the theatre centre from November 11th to the 28th. I think you’re going to like this conversation with Adam and I don’t want to give too much away because that’s what the episode is for. So tune in next week for my conversation with Adam Lazarus.
