AP News, August 21st, 2007
George Bernard Shaw will join William Shakespeare next season at the Stratford Festival of Canada, with Christopher Plummer starring as Julius Caesar in a revival of Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra."
Appearing opposite Plummer as a young queen of the Nile will be Anika Noni Rose, who appeared off- and on Broadway in the musical "Caroline, or Change" and in the film version of "Dreamgirls."
The casting was announced Tuesday by Antoni Cimolino, the festival's general director. Plummer, long a favorite at the festival, last appeared there in 2002 in a production of "King Lear" that later was seen at Lincoln Center in New York.
Des McAnuff, one of the festival's three new artistic directors, will direct "Caesar and Cleopatra," only the third time in the more than 50-year history of the Ontario-based theater that it has done a Shaw play. Shaw is showcased prominently at another Canadian theatrical institution, the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Cimolino also said the Stratford Festival will produce two musicals in 2008: "Cabaret," directed by Amanda Dehnert, a resident director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., and "The Music Man," directed by Susan H. Schulman, a Stratford regular who this season directed a stage version of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Besides "Caesar and Cleopatra," McAnuff will also direct "Romeo and Juliet" next season at Stratford, which will get a name change in November _ the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Among the other Shakespeare productions planned for 2008 are "Hamlet," "The Taming of the Shrew," "All's Well That Ends Well" and "Love's Labour's Lost."
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On the Net:
http://www.stratfordfestival.ca
