Stratford

The origins of Ontario's Stratford are modest. After the War of 1812, the British government granted a million acres of land along Lake Huron to the Canada Company, headed by a Scottish businessman. When the surveyors came to a marshy creek surrounded by a thick forest, they named it "Little Thames" and noted that it might make "a good mill-site." It was Thomas Mercer Jones, a director of the Canada Company, who decided to rename the river the Avon and the town Stratford. The year was 1832, 121 years before the concept of a theater festival would take flight and change Canadian culture.

For many years Stratford was considered a backwoods hamlet. Then came the first of two saviors of the city, both of them (undoubting) Thomases. In 1904 an insurance broker named Tom Orr transformed Stratford's riverfront into a park. He also built a formal English garden, where every flower mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare—monkshood to sneezewort, bee balm to bachelor's button—blooms grandly to this day.

Next, Tom Patterson, a fourth-generation Stratfordian born in 1920, looked around; saw that the town wards and schools had names like Hamlet, Falstaff, and Romeo; and felt that some kind of drama festival might save his community from becoming a ghost town. The astonishing story of how he began in 1952 with C$125 (a "generous" grant from the Stratford City Council), tracked down Tyrone Guthrie and Alec Guinness, and somehow, in little more than a year, pasted together a long-standing theater festival is recounted in Patterson's memoirs, First Stage—The Making of the Stratford Festival.

Soon after the festival opened, it wowed critics from around the world with its professionalism, costumes, and daring thrust stage. The early years brought giants of world theater to the tiny town of some 20,000: James Mason, Alan Bates, Christopher Plummer, Jason Robards Jr., and Maggie Smith. But the years also saw an unevenness in productions and a tendency to go for flash over substance. Many never lost faith in the festival; others, such as Canada's greatest theater critic, the late Nathan Cohen of the Toronto Star, have bemoaned the fact that Stratford has become Canada's most sacred cow.

Sacred or not, Stratford's offerings are still among the best of their kind in the world, with at least a handful of productions every year that put most other summer arts festivals to shame. The secret to deciding which ones to see is to try to catch the reviews of the plays. The New York Times always runs major write-ups, as do other newspapers and magazines in many American and Canadian cities.

Today Stratford is a city of 30,000 that welcomes over 550,000 annual visitors. There are quieter things to do in Stratford when the theaters close. Art galleries remain open throughout winter. Shopping is good off-season, and those who love peaceful walks can stroll along the Avon. Many concerts are scheduled in the off-season, too.