What do I aim for when choosing a playbill?
I aim to celebrate life’s joys without shying away from life’s ills. In a theatre, we bear witness to intense experiences without risk to ourselves and we are made better for it. We may laugh, we may cry, but in either case we look to theatre to inspire and invigorate us, to make us more fully alive, more in harmony with our fellow human beings.
Conflict and passion are the stuff of theatre and in planning our 2025 season theme—Apollo, Venus & Mars: Reflections on Harmony, Love and War—I have been struck by how these seeming opposites are intimately linked.
Most conflict is driven not by random hatred but by some passionate vision of how things should be—a vision we feel impelled to defend against whatever we perceive, rightly or wrongly, as a threat. Thus brothers are pitted against brothers in As You Like It, friendship and love breed fatal jealousy in The Winter’s Tale and the child-deprived title character of Macbeth seeks to eliminate the lineages of his rivals.
To an orphan bereft of parental love, the world must seem a lonely battleground—but the spirits of unparented youth emerge triumphant in our new dramatic adaptation of Anne of Green Gables and in the beloved musical Annie. In our other musical, the hilariously witty Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, con men try to prey on seemingly vulnerable female hearts, while in Sense and Sensibility, hearts are held hostage to economic insecurity. Meanwhile, in a self-declared “war” between the amoral aristocrats of Dangerous Liaisons, desire is weaponized to hurt and harm.
With its visceral description of the realities of combat, The Art of War brought me to tears when I first read it, while the new play Ransacking Troy delights us with its unexpectedly comic take on a mythical conflict. But the play that unites the threads that run through this season’s playbill is Forgiveness, a story about families finding their way beyond bitter wartime experiences to a place of resolution and healing.
To celebrate life’s joys in harmony with others. This Festival season, as always, I hope that will prove true for you.
Antoni Cimolino
Artistic Director