Stratford Festival extends to December for the first time ever

The show must go on! CTV’s Jeff Pickel finds out why Stratford Festival is extending one of this season’s shows.

With strong ticket sales and continuing demand, the Stratford Festival is expanding their extended show catalogue.

This season the festival takes the unprecedented step of extending four shows, ‘Annie’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ and ‘Anne of Green Gables’.

They are also extending their production of Annie longer than ever before, with an extra six weeks of added shows, taking the festival into December for the first time ever.

It is a move that makes a lot of sense for the star of’ Annie’.

“It starts about like two weeks before Christmas, and then our big finale scene is in Mr. Warbucks mansion, and it’s decorated for Christmas” said Harper Rae Asch, who plays Annie.

The young actor is excited to be part of a Stratford Festival first.

“I’m very excited because now Annie is going to be the longest running show in festival history,” she said.

Stratford Festival leadership now is the right time to try something new.

“It’s a reflection of how well the productions are being received so far this year, and it also meets an aspiration, that we’ve had over the last few years to experiment with some holiday programing,” said Anita Gaffney, executive director of the Stratford Festival.

After a sluggish 2024 season Gaffney said a longer season will help them get back on more solid footing.

“We’re seeing this year’s sales are a nice bump ahead of the previous year, so we wanted to take this chance to add some more opportunity to exceeds our goals so that we’re in a balanced financial place,” said Gaffney.

Staff acknowledge the move is not without risk.

“We don’t know if this is going to work, we don’t know what the weather’s going to be like., so there is some risk there, but there is great benefit opportunities,” said Gaffney.

More information about the Stratford Festival and tickets can be found online.