The Stratford Festival Story: A Catalogue-Index to the the Stratford, Ontario, Festival 1953-1990

This reference book records the activities of the Stratford, Ontario (Shakespeare) Festival, which is considered the premiere professional festival in North America. Alan Somerset documents not only the Stratford theater activities, but also the Festival’s many tours, television productions, and out-of-season and workshop performances. Somerset has used the latest database-management techniques to create the most complete reference book on the Festival to date. He has organized his work into three parts: a catalogue index, title index and name index. Somerset also offers a summary of the Festival’s history and guides readers to the range of material preserved in the Festival Archives. Somerset introduces the indexes by sketching the Festival’s history and guiding readers to the Festival Archives and to his own database, which can be used by the public. The catalogue index documents all the recoverable details (including important review information) about each production, workshop, tour, television broadcast, and other type of performance mounted by Stratford. The title index provides complete reference to particular plays, and the name index allows readers to trace the careers of all performers and production staff members in the Festival’s history. This book should be valuable to theatre Festival patrons, and students of performance criticism, Shakespeare, and modern theater history.