In its third decade, the is still surprising newcomers. “It’s amazing for something that’s been around for 24 years that you just still meet people that admit, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this existed,'” says co-artistic director James Wallis, chuckling at the paradox of longevity and discovery that defines the Prescott, Ontario institution.
Founded by Deborah Smith in 2002 around the natural beauty of the Kinsmen Amphitheatre — a gazebo-topped outdoor stage on the St. Lawrence River — the festival embodies what Wallis calls a Canadian birthright. “Outdoor Shakespeare, outdoor anything, is really a Canadian birthright,” he says. “It’s always so cold in Canada that we’re always so interested in doing anything outside when it’s nice.”
For Wallis, performing outdoors changes something more fundamental than staging. “I think Shakespeare’s theatre was always communicative because the audience is there. They can’t be hidden, can’t be imagined away.” He points to how the plays’ famous soliloquies were never meant as private, interior moments. “It wasn’t this sort of filmic idea of them going, ‘Okay, I’m going to think about it in here.’ It was literally talking to the audience and saying, ‘What do you think of this? This is what I’m going through.'” At Prescott, that dynamic is unavoidable. “They set up their picnics — they’re having an experience that way. And so the actors have to be very engaged in that conversation… to express the words and tell the story.”
Wallis and his partner, Julia Nish-Lapidus, took over as co-artistic directors in 2023 after years as patrons. “We always said it’s the most beautiful place to see theatre,” Wallis recalls, pointing to the amphitheatre’s unusual acoustics. Now in their third season, the pair were charged by the board with a broader mandate: transform a beloved local tradition into a regional one, embracing neighbouring communities like Brockville and the surrounding townships. “This isn’t just Prescott’s Festival,” Wallis notes. “This is the region’s festival.”
That mandate has produced what Wallis and Nish-Lapidus call a season of innovation, though the phrase undersells how far the 2026 lineup stretches convention. Opening the season is R&J and Joni, a world-premiere musical mash-up of Romeo and Juliet and the songbook of Joni Mitchell, co-created by Wallis, Nish-Lapidus, Joey Herbison, and Cara Pantalone, directed by Nish-Lapidus. Six actors – Hilary Adams, Jillian Mitsuko Cooper, Nick Dolan, Andrew Iles, Richard Lam, and Cara Pantalone – play every role, sing every song, and perform every instrument. “It’s a fascinating thing that happens when you put Shakespeare’s words with Joni Mitchell’s music,” Wallis explains. “His words are so expansive; they’re ambiguous; they mean so many different things. Her songs are those as well.”
Even more unusual is Macbeth at the Tower, a promenade production staged at the Maitland Tower, a once-derelict windmill purchased and restored by local businessman Philip Ling. The idea was born on a site visit, when Ling led Wallis and Nish-Lapidus to the tower’s centre and had them look up. “There, on one of these weird wood awnings, was a giant bird’s nest,” Wallis says — a raven’s nest, as it turned out. “We get into the car after talking to Philip, and we said, ‘we have to do Macbeth there. We have to do Macbeth!” Wallis directs the production, which moves audiences through the grounds scene by scene, an approach Wallis says brings out “the sort of spookiness, the fearful imagination of the play.”
Rounding out the season is the Spotlight Series, three one-day showcases for Eastern Ontario artists at the amphitheatre: JOSIAH, Cassel Miles’s solo piece on the life of Josiah Henson, originally co-created by Cassel Miles and Charles Robertson, written by Charles Robertson, and directed by Jim Garrard; Clowns Reading Shakespeare, created by Kenzia Dalie and Toronto’s Panoply Theatre Collective, directed by Kenzia Dalie; and Echoes Down the River, created by Jessica de Bruyn and directed by Seanna Kennedy, built around the 175-year history of the Brockville Arts Centre.
For all the formal experimentation, Wallis, an experienced and respected director of Shakespeare’s plays, sees adaptation not as a departure from Shakespeare but a continuation of his practice. “He’s been being adapted since the reopening of the theatres in 1660,” Wallis says. “Shakespeare himself was an adept adapter. I think that any production of Shakespeare that has Shakespeare’s play at the centre of that idea… I think that is true to the work, because it’s always been happening from day one,” he says. What matters more to him is audience engagement than fidelity to convention. “There’s nothing more boring than going to a Shakespeare play and being told how it should be done,” he says, pushing back on the assumption that these plays have one correct form. “I think we’re so used to Shakespeare being done, for lack of a better word, in a ‘sit-down, hands-on-lap’ kind of way. They’re old, 400-year-old plays. If these things have been figured out, if we have figured out how to do these plays by now, why do them?”
It’s a conviction Wallis and Nish-Lapidus have carried since founding Toronto’s acclaimed Shakespeare BASH’d in 2010, and one that has clearly taken root at home. Their four-year-old daughter has a small voiceover part in Macbeth at the Tower this season. “Sometimes she’ll go, ‘Oh, no more Shakespeare,'” Wallis says, laughing. “I’m very proud of that.”
R&J and Joni runs July 16 – August 8, 2026 at the Kinsmen Amphitheatre; Macbeth at the Tower runs July 24 – August 7, 2026 at the Maitland Tower; and the Spotlight Series takes place July 21, 28, and August 4, 2026. Tickets and schedule are available at stlawrenceshakespeare.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
