Inside the Stratford Festival’s $72-million theatre makeover

This summer time—after years of delays—the present will lastly go on at Stratford’s immaculately redesigned Tom Patterson Theatre

In August of 2019, Antoni Cimolino, the artworkistic director of the Stratford Competition, stood on a platform underneath building, a blue mild shining brightly off the steel scaffolding. He had a giant announcement to make: the next yr, the competition would open the long-awaited Tom Patterson Theatre—the crowning function of Stratford’s $72-million renovation, set to accommodate its must-see summer time manufacturing of Richard III starring Colm Feore. “It’s going to be large, it’s going to be historic, it’s going to be stunning,” he stated. “And it’s going to be enjoyable.”

Two and a half years later, the theatre has but to see a public viewers. In 2020, with almost a complete season’s price of prices already sunk and roughly $4.6 million refunded to ticketholders, the competition’s season was postponed indefinitely. So was the opening of the state-of-the-art theatre, initially scheduled for June 11, the one hundredth birthday of the constructing’s namesake and the competition’s founder, a Stratford-born journalist and Second World Struggle veteran.

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Since then, the construction itself has come to embody the disaster dealing with your complete performing arts business: immeasurable effort and wonder delivered to a standstill. Now that Ontario’s COVID restrictions have lifted, the long run is trying vivid. “That theatre, and all the completely different rooms, are but an unplayed instrument,” Cimolino says, days earlier than rebooting rehearsals for Richard III, which formally opens in early June. “There’s part of me that’s ready for the opposite shoe to drop. However what do they are saying a few pleasure deferred?”

The theatre was initially constructed as a dance corridor however was used for concert events and productions when the competition started in 1953, internet hosting Marcel Marceau, Glenn Gould and Oscar Peterson. It remained an viewers favorite, regardless of having nearly no theatrical infrastructure and doubling as a badminton courtroom within the winter.

Siamak Hariri, a co-founder of the Toronto-based structure agency Hariri Pontarini, visited the theatre as an viewers member earlier than profitable the contract to design the brand new 77,000-square-foot complicated in 2017. “The entire thing was clearly makeshift,” Hariri says. “However there have been components of it that had been good—the intimacy, the heat—and we made positive to honour these. It ought to have the Aristocracy, however to not the purpose that it’s important to put on diamonds to go.”

Located alongside the sting of Stratford’s Avon River, the brand new Tom Patterson’s curved form displays the swirls and eddies of river vegetation. The intent is for viewers members to equally collect in dialog, as if shifting with the present. The outside is roofed by a veil of Spanish bronze beams and Italian glass, which act as a translucent barrier between the character exterior and the artwork inside. At its centre, the 600-seat theatre and its stage are surrounded by a drum of sound-absorbing Danish brick. A pillar of limestone from Owen Sound stands beside the outside patio—a tough offcut that Hariri describes because the crust of the bread. “It’s the form of constructing the place, while you step into it, you are feeling somewhat weak within the knees,” he says.

Toronto’s Hariri Pontarini Architects swathed the outside in Spanish bronze and Italian glass. (Images by Scott Norsworthy)

A far cry from its badminton-court days, the brand new Tom Patterson contains no small quantity of theatrical expertise. Versatile lighting programs function extra like drone controllers than a standard guide grid and follow-spot system. It’s additionally one of many first theatres to make use of unobtrusive sound gear to evenly disperse voices and sound results throughout a tough area—audio system have been discreetly constructed into steps by the entrance row, for instance.

The stage itself is constructed from slats of Canadian birch on a large entice door, so something can emerge from beneath. The wooden was exhausting to seek out: the competition ended up shopping for a woodlot in Tobermory to mill the bushes into lumber. That story has already taken on a Shakespearean lifetime of its personal—native residents have requested whether or not the competition now owns its personal Macbeth-ian forest.

There’s a legendary high quality to the brand new facility, now so near its debut manufacturing: actors and crews are rehearsing in masks and greeting one another with elbow bumps; costume and set outlets are buzzing; the group is buffing out any leftover scuffs from building and performing closing security checks. Downtown, Stratford’s lodges and eating places—which serve about 1,000,000 vacationers in a typical yr—are staffing up for the summer time.

Nonetheless, there’s a way of reservation. Even an skilled actor like Colm Feore, poised to make his delayed look because the titular Richard III, says he’s terrified. “I used to be satisfied that once we lastly got here again, we’d be saying our victory over COVID and resuming our collective Canadian life—that we’d have succeeded by the actual fact that we had been there in a theatre collectively, talking to one another,” Feore says. “I believe we’re nonetheless somewhat broken by all of it, making an attempt to crawl our means again to confidence.”

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Based on Cimolino, the primary days again in rehearsal had been thrilling, if somewhat nerve-racking. “We appear to have new eyes and a renewed sense of pleasure—even surprise,” he says. “Dare we consider we can do what we love as soon as once more? Everyone seems to be collectively knocking on wooden.”

In fact, nothing is for sure, however the plan is that this: On June 4, Richard III will lastly formally open, together with the Tom Patterson Theatre itself. Ten productions will roll out by means of all of the Stratford Competition venues, that includes an ensemble of 125 actors.

When Cimolino put out the decision for architects, he was searching for a constructing designed to take the competition into the following 50 years. To Hariri, that’s what they’ve created, regardless of the circumstances. “The constructing has this sign beacon,” he says. “It’s saying, ‘No, we’re not anyplace close to going away.’ If something, this reveals our deep dedication to make issues occur.”