Stratford Festival hoping for big season as Anne of Green Gables previews get underway

The Stratford Festival ended 2024 with a $1M deficit. CTV’s Jeff Pickel finds out how officials hope to turn things around this year.

The plucky spirit of a young orphan girl from Prince Edward Island is alive and well in Ontario as the Stratford Festival starts previews for its latest production.

“I’m excited about seeing Anne of Green Gables,” one theatre goer said ahead of the performance. “It’s a good story, I relate to Annie.”

As an eager crowd filed into the Avon Theatre on Friday, Stratford Festival staff were hoping it was a sign of good things to come after a financial shortfall last season.

“From a financial perspective, we were short about $1.1 million,” Anita Gaffeny, Executive Director of the Stratford Festival said. “That was largely driven by the box office.”

The 2024 season included musicals Something Rotten and La Cage aux Folles alongside Shakespeare plays Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Cymbeline and other plays such as Hedda Gabler, Wendy and Peter Pan and London Assurance.

Gaffeny said last season’s shortcoming was not a reflection of the high calibre performances audiences see on stage.

“We had set great expectations for ticket sales in 2024, expecting we’d continue to see the incremental change from one year to the next and it proved a bit more challenging,” she said.

Despite the disappointment, Stratford Festival is not planning on making any major changes.

“The shortfall represents one per cent of our budget, so we look at how can we focus as much of our spending on the plays and what the audience is going to see and try to find efficiencies behind the scenes and in our items that don’t impact audiences and artists,” Gaffeny explained.

Amid the ongoing trade war between the United States and Canada, Stratford Festival is hoping a love for the arts will transcend any tariff turmoil.

“We’re really reaching out to our U.S. visitors to let them know what we’re doing this year and also the incredible value of coming to Canada with the current exchange rate,” Gaffeny said.

So far, the strategy appears to be working.

“Advanced sales are showing an increase among our U.S. visitors,” Gaffeny added.

What’s coming to the stage?

The 2025 Stratford Festival season features one of Shakespeare’s most well-known tragedies, a Jane Austen adaptation and two tales about redheaded orphans.

This season’s musicals are Annie and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. As You Like It, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale round out the Shakespeare offerings, and classics lovers can look forward to Sense and Sensibility, based on Jane Austen’s novel, and Dangerous Liaisons, based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos.

Meanwhile, the Canadian classic Anne of Green Gables has been adapted for the stage by Kat Sandler and Erin Shield wrote The Ransacking of Troy to explore the Trojan War through the eyes of women and girls.