The Atlantic Theatre Festival (ATF) was a professional theatre company located in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. The Theatre Festival presented a "broad range of critically acclaimed theatre classics" during the summer in Wolfville's Festival Theatre, the former town hockey arena which was converted into a 504 seat, thrust stage theatre and professional production facility by the Atlantic Theatre Festival Society (a non-profit charity).
Over two million dollars was contributed by the local, Nova Scotian, and Canadian governments to create the Festival Theatre. Stratford Festival veteran Michael Langham was among the directors who brought national acclaim to the festival during the Founder's Season of 1995. The reputation of the festival grew over the following seasons as it attracted the likes of Megan Follows, Christopher Plummer, and area native Peter Donat to join its company. In later years, despite originally being conceived as a classical repertory, the festival maintained its critical success as it began to include works by Canadian playwrights as well as family-friendly musicals.
The Stratford Festival is an internationally renowned repertory theatre festival which operates from April to October in the city of Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Founded by local journalist-turned-producer Tom Patterson, the festival was formerly known as the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, the Shakespeare Festival and then Stratford Shakespeare Festival before changing to the current name. Theatre-goers, actors, and playwrights flock to Stratford to take part — many of the greatest Canadian, British, and American actors play roles at the Stratford festival. It was one of the first and is still one of the most prominent arts festivals in Canada and is recognized worldwide for its productions of Shakespearean plays.
Michael Seymour Langham was an English director and actor, who spent much of his career living and working in Canada and the United States.
Megan Elizabeth Laura Diana Follows is a Canadian actress. She is known for her role as Anne Shirley in the 1985 Canadian television miniseries Anne of Green Gables and its two sequels. From 2013 to 2017, she starred as Catherine de' Medici in the television series Reign.
Despite a strong critical reputation, mounting debts over the first five years forced the Atlantic Theatre Festival to reduce cast sizes, lay-off crew, and cancel productions. The construction of the Festival Theatre initially came as a result of a twenty-year (dollar-a-year) lease from Acadia University. In 2002, this agreement was terminated and a new lease was offered that reduced the professional theatre company to a seasonal tenant. This arrangement threatened the Atlantic Theatre Festival's existence, causing the cancellation of the 2004 season. The festival theatre stage remained dark in 2005, but had a successful renewal in 2006. With one main stage production and comedic readings to form the "Summer of Laughter" season both audiences and tourists returned. The financial success did not continue the following season as the festival returned to a multi-play format. In August 2007, artistic director Nigel Bennett was forced to resign mid-season after the Board of Directors informed him that sufficient funds were not available to continue. One production completed its run while two others, one on stage and the other in rehearsal, were cancelled. A lack of funding from both provincial and federal levels was named as the main cause of the closure. [1]
Acadia University is a predominantly undergraduate university located in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada with some graduate programs at the master's level and one at the doctoral level. The enabling legislation consists of Acadia University Act and the Amended Acadia University Act 2000.
Nigel Bennett is an Anglo-Canadian actor/director/writer who has been based in Canada since 1986. He is best known for playing the vampire patriarch Lucien LaCroix in the TV series Forever Knight, for which he won the Canadian Gemini Award for best supporting actor in a dramatic series.
Currently, the Festival Theatre is used for the Acadia University Performing Arts Series, which are held throughout the University school year, and for conferences.
Michael Bawtree is a Canadian actor, director, author and educator.
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Shirley Valentine is a one-character play by Willy Russell. Taking the form of a monologue by a middle-aged, working class Liverpool housewife, it focuses on her life before and after a transforming holiday abroad.
William Russell is an English dramatist, lyricist and composer. His best known works are Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, Blood Brothers and Our Day Out.
The Drawer Boy is a play by Michael Healey. It is a two-act play set in 1972 on a farm near Clinton, Ontario. There are only three characters: the farm's two owners, Morgan and Angus, and Miles Potter, a young actor from Toronto doing research for a collectively created theatre piece about farming.
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Into the Woods is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. The musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault fairy tales, exploring the consequences of the characters' wishes and quests. The main characters are taken from "Little Red Riding Hood", "Jack and the Beanstalk", "Rapunzel", and "Cinderella", as well as several others. The musical is tied together by a story involving a childless baker and his wife and their quest to begin a family, their interaction with a witch who has placed a curse on them, and their interaction with other storybook characters during their journey.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist known for more than a half-century of contributions to musical theatre. Sondheim has received an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards, eight Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award, and a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has been described by Frank Rich of The New York Times as "now the greatest and perhaps best-known artist in the American musical theater". His best-known works as composer and lyricist include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987), Assassins (1990), and Passion (1994). He also wrote the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959).
James Elliot Lapine is an American stage director, playwright, screenwriter, and librettist. He has won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical three times, for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion. He has frequently collaborated with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn.
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Michael Vivian Fyfe Pennington is a British actor, director and writer. Together with director Michael Bogdanov, he founded the English Shakespeare Company in 1986 and was its Joint Artistic Director until 1992. He has written ten books, directed in the UK, US, Romania and Japan, and is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow. It was founded in 1898 by the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of theatre at the time. The theatre, the first to regularly put on shows implementing Stanislavski's system, proved hugely influential in the acting world and in the development of modern American theatre and drama.
Peter Stein is a German theatre and opera director who established himself at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, a company that he brought to the forefront of German theatre.
Lisa Dillon is an English actress.
Seana McKenna is a Canadian actress primarily associated with stage roles at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
This page describes the production history of the Stratford Festival'''''
The Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the second largest repertory theatre company in North America. Founded in 1962, its original mandate was to stimulate interest in George Bernard Shaw and his period, and to advance the development of theatre arts in Canada.
Thelma Holt is a British theatre producer and former actress.
Soulpepper is a Toronto, Ontario-based theatre company founded to present classic plays. The following is a chronological list of the productions that it has staged since its inception.
The Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company is a regional Canadian theatre company, producing plays since 1962. The following is a list of the productions that have been staged since its inception, starting with the most recently completed season.
Chichester Festival Theatre, located in Chichester, England, is one of the United Kingdom's flagship theatres with an international reputation for quality and innovation. The following is a chronological list of the Chichester Festival production history of productions that have been staged since its inception.
The Guthrie Theater is a center for theater performance, production, education, and professional training in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The following is a chronological list of the plays and performances that it has produced or presented. Production information from 1963 through the 2005–06 season is sourced primarily from The Guthrie Theater: Images, History, and Inside Stories and The Guthrie Theater.
The Shakespeare Theatre Company is a regional theatre company located in Washington, United States. The theatre company focuses primarily on plays from the Shakespeare canon, but its seasons include works by other classic playwrights such as Euripides, Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde.
Artists Repertory Theatre is a professional non-profit theatre located in Portland, Oregon, United States. The company was established in 1982 and focuses on presenting the works of contemporary playwrights, including world premieres. In addition to producing six to eight productions in Portland annually, the company runs special programming and collaborations. They tour productions nationally with the support and collaboration of partnering theatre companies and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Whit Hertford is an American theatre director, writer and actor.
David Thacker is an English award-winning theatre director. He is married to the actor Margot Leicester.
Gregory A. Hersov is a British theatre director.
Michael Elliott, OBE (1931–1984) was an English theatre and television director.
The Asolo Repertory Theatre is located in Sarasota, Florida. It was originally a summers-only operation called The Asolo Comedy Festival. In 1963 it began to be referred to as The Asolo Theatre Festival. Starting in the fall of 1966, when it went into year-round operation, the name was changed to The Asolo Theater Company (and it continued under that name for the next 30 years, when its title reverted to The Asolo Theater Festival. Starting In 2006, it became The Asolo Repertory Theater, familiarly known as The Asolo Rep.