Stratford Festival still a money-maker, but profits and attendance down

Stratford's Festival Theatre is pictured on Saturday, March 28, 2015. (Nadia Matos / CTV Kitchener)

It was a year of milestones for the Stratford Festival.

While William Shakespeare, their unofficial patron saint, turned 450, the organization also made its latest foray onto the big screen.

The end result? A $795,000 surplus – far less than the $1.4 million the festival took in over the course of 2013, but enough to make 2012’s $3-million-plus deficit feel like a thing of the past.

“We’re working really hard to increase revenues, to bring in more donations, to work with government to find ways to find funding for the festival,” said Anita Gaffney, the festival’s executive director.

The festival also saw a drop in attendance, from 480,000 in 2013 to 462,000 last year.

Festival organizers are quick to point out that while overall attendance may have been down, the number of people attending Shakespearian shows rose by 24 per cent – likely because of the bard’s birthday.

“It was a great opportunity for us to do more Shakespeare than ever before, and do it differently,” said Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director.

‘Doing it differently’ included bringing back hometown star Colm Feore to take a turn as the titular monarch of King Lear – but Cimolino says that too won audiences over.

“People were saying ‘Is he a bit young for Lear?’ As soon as … he inhabited the body of that old man, no one asked that question again,” Cimolino said.

Also in 2014, the Stratford Festival began a 10-year project to release film versions of its entire Shakespeare library.

King Lear was the first such play to get that treatment, with King John and Antony and Cleopatra set for releases later this spring.