Michael Blake

Beatrice and Benedick, two quick-witted and sarcastic individuals are happily single, but their friends believe they would make a great romantic match. Set in the Early Modern world, an era of ever-changing attitudes towards marriage and power, the play presents a society at once filled with progressive feminist impulses and countervailing forces rooted in traditional patriarchal values. With his astonishing wit and insight, Shakespeare explores the complexities that underlie these growing social tensions.

Charismatic, cunning, and utterly ruthless, Richard, Duke of Gloucester is the very embodiment of lethal ambition as he maneuvers and murders his way to the throne of England.

When Bella discovers that funding for her dog rescue centre is discontinued, she turns to JR, a soldier who quickly becomes attached to one of her rescues, a German Shepard named, Indie.

A young girl discovers a secret map to the dreamworld of Slumberland, and with the help of an eccentric outlaw, she traverses dreams and flees nightmares, with the hope that she will be able to see her late father again.

Filmed version of the 2019 Stratford Festival production.

Staged at the Stratford Festival and named on many 2018 year-end critics “best of” lists, the Stratford Festival’s “riveting” and “exhilarating” (The New York Times) production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, has been called “the show of the decade… a landmark production for the Stratford Festival. Maybe for William Shakespeare, too” (The Globe and Mail), and “the greatest contemporary staging of this play that I have ever seen” (Chicago Tribune).

In Shakespeare’s great drama of loss and reconciliation, a long-deposed ruler uses magical arts to bring within her power the enemies who robbed her of her throne and marooned her on a remote island. But what revenge does she mean to take?

Pursuing two respectably married women at the same time, a would-be seducer fails to anticipate that his targets will, quite literally, compare notes. Nor has he reckoned on the mischievous spirit in which the wives will use their wits and wiles to teach him the error of his ways. Set in the 1950s, in a town not unlike Stratford, Ontario, this production brings Shakespeare's rollicking comedy close to home - and close to our hearts.

Antoni Cimolino’s chilling production of Macbeth takes you back to the stark reality of the 11th century, when the murderous king clawed his way to power. It has been praised as “a thrilling terror,” (Globe and Mail) “a bold and brutal take on the Scottish King’s tragic tale” (Toronto Star), and “a brilliant, terrifying show” that leaves people “gasping in the dark” (Chicago Tribune). Starring Ian Lake in “a galvanizing performance as an unusually young and sexually magnetic Macbeth” (New York Times) and Krystin Pellerin as “a standout Lady Macbeth … at once adorable yet devious” (Postmedia), this is a production that will haunt your dreams and leave you tingling. All hail Macbeth!

The Stratford Festival’s critically acclaimed performance of King Lear. An aging monarch resolves to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, with consequences he little expects. His reason shattered in the storm of violent emotion that ensues, with his very life hanging in the balance, Lear loses everything that has defined him as a king – and thereby discovers the essence of his own humanity.