Stratford Theatre Festival Case Study: The "Arts" As Lucrative Enterprises

Subject  > Art Essays  > Performing Arts

"July 13, 1953, was...'the most exciting night in the history of Canadian theatre.'...the atmosphere was electrifying." Originally the idea of Thomas Patterson, a man who had seen plays in Europe as a soldier in WWII, he found that the in a comparison between theatre in Canada and theatre in Europe, there was none. There were no permanent theatres in Canada, and he determined to do something about it. Partly to boost his hometown's economy, and partly the efforts to bring artistic culture there, Patterson began the efforts of transforming the town into a cultural centre. After much hard work, the Stratford Theatre Festival blossomed into a national event. The development of the Stratford Theatre Festival shows that the ...

... without another theatre being initiated: the O'Keefe Centre in Toronto; the Vancouver Playhouse; the Charlottetown Festival; Les Place des Arts in Montreal. Even in the United States, many theatres can trace their influence back to the Stratford Festival - the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, is the prime examples, of course... the Rockefeller Foundation sent [representatives]... to Stratford, where they took measurements of the state and studied seat angles for the Beaumont Theatre of the Lincoln Center... New theatres in Nottingham, Chichester, and Manchester in England were modeled on [the Stratford Festival's building's] inspired design. Even the transformation of the Tchaikovski Concert Hall in Moscow into a theatre can be traced to a two-week visit of

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