Stratford is the home of the Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, but remains an unspoiled village. It is a center of theater, of drama education, and of indigenous and local art, yet it it retains the small-town feeling that allows you to walk to every destination, if you don’t shy away from a mile expedition to the Festival Theater or a half-mile to the Tom Patterson Theater.
We stayed in the heart of town adjacent to the two other Shakespeare theaters, the Avon and the Studio. Yesterday we crossed the street from our studio apartment to attend Spamalot at the Avon, which is no larger than a small movie theater. It was a delight.
In the morning we took the tour “Festival Treasures” to see costumes and archives in a huge warehouse of performances past. Among the props from Spamalot: the 3-D printed “Holy Grail” and the chain mail shirt labeled “Very Heavy” (It was).
From the recent performance of the “Chronicles of Narnia,” a skeletal costume of the massive Aslan, the lord of Narnia, and a unicorn:
From “The Tempest,” a golden egg that opens to reveal a figure of royalty (I forget which one).
From “The Little Shop of Horrors,” Audrey, the human-eating plant. We were told there was a larger Audrey capable of ingesting an adult human body.
Heralds of the Performance
We had dinner at Gilly’s on Downie Street on Wednesday, a bar with better-than-average cuisine barely twenty steps from our apartment.
On Thursday we dined lavishly at Raja’s, an elegant Indian restaurant behind our apartment. Raja’s a is favorite we returned to after eating there in 2022 with our friends Marty and Hope.
After stuffing ourselves with Vindaloo (Lamb with a spicy sauce), Mullagatawny soup and Dansk (chicken, lentils and curry), we walked down to the Avon River, which is the shore setting for the Festival and the Patterson theaters. We circled the west boundary where a dam regulate the river flow downstream.
We enjoyed the lower Avon River banks and promised ourselves to return to the shops facing toward the river, but away from the main (Ontario) street of Stratford.
