From a distance, I have followed the shenanigans at the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario) over the last year with more than my customary irritation. Let us review the chain of events:

1. In late 2006, Richard Monette retires as the Festival’s Artistic Director after 14 extraordinarily successful years, during which the Festival remained true to its mission while achieving financial stability.

2. Incredibly, the Festival’s board of directors, under no particular pressure to do so, decides to replace Monette not with one person, but with three: a triumvirate of Marti Maraden, Don Shipley, and Des McAnuff. The three are supposed to have “equal” responsibility for programming and the hiring of talent. Decisions are to be made by “consensus.” Antoni Cimolino is made “general director” of the Festival with the understanding that he will keep his fingers out of artistic decisions.

3. The three co-artistic directors plan a 2008 season with five Shakespeare plays instead of the usual four. They put four of of the five Shakespeare plays in the 1838-seat Festival Theater. They program two popular musicals (The Music Man and Cabaret), but put both in the 1083-seat Avon Theater. They give the Festival a cumbersome new name, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

4. Throughout the fall and winter of 2007-08, the three co-directors can’t agree on much of anything. More often than not, Des McAnuff is off in London and New York on other projects, making it difficult for Shipley and Maraden to collaborate with him. Cimolino interferes and makes artistic decisions that Shipley and Maraden think belong to the co-artistic directors.

5. On March 8, 2008, Shipley and Maraden quit as artistic directors, citing Cimolino’s interference. Fingers point in all directions. In an interview, the frustrated Maraden complains there was “no protocol for decision-making.” Cimolino claims he intervened only when the three couldn’t agree on major points. To her credit, Maraden keeps her commitment to direct All’s Well That Ends Well and The Trojan Women during the 2008 Stratford season.

6. Des McAnuff – the member of the triumvirate who apparently had the least time to devote to the job, and whose resume is thinnest in classical theater – is installed as sole Artistic Director. In July, Dean Gabourie is appointed as assistant artistic director.

7. Predictably, The Music Man and Cabaret are popular with Stratford audiences, and tickets for these shows are scarce. Meanwhile, the Shakespeare plays are performed before hundreds of empty seats in the Festival Theater.

8. In mid-July, Cimolino and McAnuff warn Stratford personnel that the Festival is on track to lose as much as $5 million during the 2008 season. They blame gas prices, the U.S.-Canadian currency exchange rate (currently very disadvantageous to us Americans), and a general decline in Ontario tourism – everything but the directors’ programming decisions. Personnel cutbacks and a less ambitious season are forecast for 2009.

Any fool who has spent any time with artistic types knows that appointing three experienced, strong-willed directors who don’t know each other very well to be co-artistic directors of a major repertory theater company, with all major decisions to be made by “consensus,” is a recipe for disaster. What was the Board of Directors thinking?

Anyone could also have predicted that feelings would be hurt and relationships damaged upon the inevitable collapse of the triumvirate. One can only hope that Don Shipley and Marti Maraden will not be so soured by their leading roles in this debacle that Stratford audiences will be deprived of their talents in future years.

But the Board’s decision to place the Festival’s artistic direction in the hands of a triumvirate can also be blamed for the programming decisions that will apparently cost the Festival millions of dollars this year. (the author gloomily predicts that it will not be long until he and other members of the Stratford Festival are called upon to to help narrow the deficit.) I am willing to wager that not one of the triumvirate, if the responsibility had been his or hers alone, would have gambled the 2008 season on the proposition that large audiences would fill the Festival Theater to see The Taming of the Shrew and All’s Well That Ends Well, or that audiences would buy tickets for a lesser-known Shakespeare play (Love’s Labours Lost) as readily as they would for (say) a popular work by Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, or Tennessee Williams. But responsibility was diluted. When you bargain for decision-making by committee (“the buck stops nowhere”), that’s what you get.

Most irritating of all is that the Stratford Festival has been through this before. A friend recently lent Emsworth a copy of A Stratford Tempest, a 1982 book by the Toronto journalist Martin Knelman about the leadership debacle that followed in the wake of the 1980 resignation of another highly successful artistic director, Robin Phillips. Amazingly, the Board of Directors chose to replace Phillips with a committee of nine co-artistic directors!

In no time, most of the committee resigned. On short notice, the remaining four put together a promising 1981 season – but then the Board of Directors panicked, fired the four, revamped the season, and hired a single artistic director, John Hirsch. The Festival lost a lot of money that year, too. Many of the survivors of the 1981 debacle (as described in A Stratford Tempest) are still associated with the Stratford Festival, including Brian Bedford, Marti Maraden, Martha Henry, and others. Why can’t an organization like the Stratford Festival learn from its own mistakes?
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