During the Stratford Festival’s 69th annual general meeting Saturday, board members and festival executives reported a surplus of more than $553,000 from the theater company’s scaled-back 2021 season.
Despite staging a scaled-back theatrical season under outdoor canopies, the Stratford Festival accrued a surplus of more than $553,000 last year.
That news was shared with members during the festival’s 69th annual general meeting hosted virtually via YouTube livestream Saturday morning. Marking the festival’s cautious return to live theater following the near-disastrous cancellation of its 2020 season as the global COVID-19 pandemic set in, last season’s revenue amounted to nearly $28.6 million, while the season’s expenses totaled a little more than $28 million.
“If 2020 was our annus horribilis, then 2021 was our year of keeping calm and carrying on. But it was also much, much more than that,” said Carol Stephenson, who chaired the festival’s board of governors throughout the pandemic and officially retired from the position at Saturday’s meeting. “(Last year) was, in fact, a season of brilliant recovery for the Stratford Festival. It became a season of growth and development, it became a season of innovation as our board, our management team, our artists and our entire staff faced these new challenges with passion and a determination to exceed.
“We have emerged from the difficulties of the past two years with a new self awareness, a new sense of our role in society, and a new, exciting sense of possibility.”
Last season’s revenue included ticket sales to more than 34,000 theatregoers who attended a total of 274 in-person performances, $13 million in pledges through the festival’s Relaunch fundraising campaign, and a combined $6.4 million in federal and provincial government funding. The festival was also able to offset the cost of wages for 968 employees last season thanks to $6.5 million from the federal government’s wage subsidy program.
“We’re in the midst of a multi-year recovery,” festival executive director Anita Gaffney said. “While we’ve managed to keep the ship afloat over the last two years, our financial position is still delicate. After posting a shortfall (of $4.3 million) in 2020, we’ve been able to post a small surplus for 2021, a season we envisaged as both an investment in maintaining connections as well as a beacon of hope for our patrons, audiences and our community at large.
“At the same time, we have directed our resources to support this year’s return to indoor theatre. … In addition to setting aside funds from the annual endowment (fund) over the last couple of years for this purpose, we undertook a special Relaunch campaign. … That campaign is playing an important role in our multi-year recovery.”
Festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino also spoke to the challenges and triumphs of a season that had to be completely reimagined amidst the chaos of changing pandemic restrictions and timelines so performances could be staged safely outdoors with all of the resulting technical and dramatic limitations.
Cimolino also spoke of the loss of legendary festival actor Martha Henry, who died at age 83 after a battle with late-stage cancer — one she kept quiet even as she portrayed a dying woman in the festival’s production of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women.
“She was … the most innovative, the most flexible, the most responsive artist you could imagine, and she was always so reassuring. She was exactly the right person to talk to during a pandemic,” Cimolino said. “Whenever I spoke to her, I felt everything was going to be okay, that we could not only get beyond this point, but we’d learn from it and we would grow from it.
“’Don’t worry about the future,’ she’d say to me. ‘Don’t worry about what a play like Richard III will mean next year. You will be in that moment and it will be right in that moment.’ Her spirit was one with the pioneering spirit of the festival itself.”
Looking ahead at the season to come, Cimolino, Gaffney and Stephenson each spoke with excitement about celebrating the festival’s 70th anniversary, the grand-opening of the new Tom Patterson Theatre, the playbill of 10 productions on four stages, and numerous Meighen Forum events that will include guest speakers and performers like Wole Soyinka, playwright of this season’s production, Death and the King’s HorsemanNobel-Prize-winning novelist Salman Rushdie, and Indigenous Canadian playwright Tomson Highway, who will perform his cabaret, Song in the Key of Cree.
At the end of Saturday’s meeting, Stratford Festival members elected board vice chair Robert Gorlin as the board of governors’ 2022 chair, replacing Stephenson. Gorlin has served on the board in many capacities since 2015 and was appointed vice chair in March 2020.