Justin: Why Guthrie Theater fans need to make a trip to Canada

STRATFORD, ONTARIO — We like to think Tyrone Guthrie is one of us. If he were alive today, we imagine he’d be holding court at Meritage every week and programming halftime shows for the Lynx.

But the legendary director made his imprint in many places, most notably a Canadian town that recruited him a decade before he made his imprint in the Twin Cities.

I journeyed here last month to visit the Stratford Festival, a repertory company Guthrie helped open in 1953 with Alec Guinness playing Richard III in a tent. It has ballooned to four venues, hosting legends like Maggie Smith, Christopher Plummer and Christopher Walken.

You’ll recognize a lot of similarities between the Stratford company’s Festival Stage and the Guthrie’s Wurtele Thrust Stage. Both were designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch to put the audience on three sides of the action, a Tyrone Guthrie trademark that creates a more intimate viewing experience.

“It was revolutionary,” said Antoni Cimolino, who will retire next year from the Stratford Festival after 15 seasons as its artistic director. “Shakespeare had gotten the reputation for being grand, but with the thrust approach, the actors don’t have to be big and bombastic. It helped make Shakespeare more contemporary.”

The Festival Theatre has 1,800 seats, making it more cavernous than the Wurtele’s 1,100 seats. But Stratford’s Tom Patterson Theatre, which opened in a new space in 2022, is much cozier; no one is more than eight rows away from the cast. While watching a matinee performance of “The Winter’s Tale” here, I was afraid to cough in fear Polixenes would break character to hand me a lozenge.

The wall-to-floor windows in the Patterson lobby offer views of the Avon River, a more soothing experience than watching the Mississippi River roar beneath you from the Guthrie’s Endless Bridge.

There’s a lot in this town that gives you a peaceful, easy feeling.

“Stratford isn’t in the middle of a big urban center,” Cimolino said. “You can take in the work, think about it and savor it. You can decompress.”

Guthrie himself lavished praise on the town in his 1959 memoir, “A Life in the Theatre,” which he put out before making his mark in Minneapolis.

“Stratford was doing something which dozens of other rich, provincial, unsophisticated, but not therefore necessarily unintelligent, little towns knew to be courageous and lively,” he wrote.

Stratford Festival employs about 1,000 of the city’s 33,000 residents, but everything seems to revolve around its activities. The gift store next to Avon Theatre, with a traditional proscenium stage similar to the setup at a place like the Pantages Theatre, is packed before shows, selling novelty items like Jane Austen hairpins and Sherlock Holmes jigsaw puzzles.

Getting reservations at the top dining sites can be a challenge. My friends and I had to book weeks in advance to snag a table at Bluebird Restaurant & Bar, a place so cheery it can serve barbecue eel and Japanese cheesecake without seeming pretentious. Hotel rooms during the season, which runs through early November, are tough to find and can run you anywhere between $150 to $300 a night.

You also need to plan well in advance for show tickets — and be prepared to pay as much as $150. In the musical “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” playing here, one of the con men who thinks he’s just pulled off a major score boasts that he can now finally afford to buy a ticket at the Stratford.

It may be a small-ish town, but the plays feature big stars — at least by Canadian standards. Americans might not be familiar with Jonathan Goad, hilarious in the Michael Caine role in “Scoundrels,” is a major TV star up north. So are Lucy Peacock and Geraint Wyn Davies, both currently stealing scenes in “The Winter’s Tale.”

But none of them has worked in Minneapolis; the Stratford seasons are too long — up to eight months — and actors likely use their short breaks for television and film work that helps pay the bills.

Cimolino has never even seen a show at the Guthrie.

Joe Dowling, who directed two Stratford productions before becoming the Guthrie’s artistic director in 1995, said he tried for years to arrange some kind of co-production.

“I really wished that these two major classic theaters that are within striking distance of each other could work together,” said Dowling, who will be directing “Macbeth” at the Guthrie early next year. “We finally realized it was not going to happen, except maybe in some half-ass way.”

Dowling, who left his position as Guthrie artistic director in 2015, said he enjoyed his time in Stratford — except for the rehearsal period in the Canadian winter.

“Nothing was open. There was no cinema in those days. No internet. It was the most miserable place in the world,” he said. “Then, the theater opens in May and you realize that there’s no place better on Earth.”