With countless adaptations of Anne of Green Gables already existing – from the long-running Charlottetown Festival musical to the beloved CBC series to Netflix’s Anne with an E – you may wonder why the Stratford Festival would commission a brand-new stage production. After all, most of us already have favourite versions of the story of the carrot-topped orphan with the soaring imagination, precocious vocabulary and impulse control challenges who finds her people and her home at Green Gables.
Having just seen playwright Kat Sandler’s brilliant new adaptation, I understand why. This big tent love letter to the enduring power of Anne’s story and the abiding power of imagination is the Anne of Green Gables we didn’t know we needed.
What makes this production revolutionary is its ingenious framing device: as audiences enter the Avon Theatre, they find a delightfully busy Maev Beaty is on stage channeling Rachel Lynde in her Victorian dress. She is inspecting a miniature Green Gables model, fussing with various props, and preparing to read from her well-worn copy of Montgomery’s novel. She is soon joined by a diverse group of Anne readers old and young, who convince her they can do better by actually bringing the story to life. And they do just that. Through an exertion of shared imagination, they manifest the beloved principal characters – Anne, Marilla, and Matthew – onto the stage. And then they transform themselves into the story’s supporting players.
This device does more than cleverly frame the narrative – it celebrates how stories, and especially this story, live through their readers. Set and costume designer Joanna Yu 余頌恩, has created the full-size Green Gables set (which the on-stage readers also conjure) as an open, two-storey frame of bare beams of that iconic green colour, without walls. This skeleton becomes a canvas for imagination, like the world itself is for Anne . . . and like Anne is for readers far and wide. The on-stage readers improvise props and costumes as the plot requires, playfully wink at plot absurdities (like Gilbert’s convenient presence in a boat when Anne falls into the river), and matter-of-factly revise dated elements, such as the schoolteacher’s inappropriate interest in his oldest student Prissy Andrews. And they do all of this with love, energy and good humour that honour the story’s essence.
Caroline Toal’s Anne is like a lightning bolt fired straight from a stage at the Charlottetown Festival. She is garbed in the standard Anne-iform of red braids, hat and too-small dress, but her delightfully concentrated, wickedly intense version of the orphan literally sets the stage aglow with her righteous anger or soaring joy. Sara Dodd’s Marilla and Tim Campbell’s Matthew provide perfect complements – she as the prim “old maid” learning to replace judgment with curiosity, and he as Anne’s quiet but steadfast champion.
Around this essential trio, the book club members shape-shift through the story’s other characters with fluid grace and abundant joy. Julie Lumsden is wonderful as a grounded, smart, and elegantly complicated version of Anne’s “bosom friend” Diana Barry, while Jordin Hall crafts a winningly tongue-tied, emo-athletic Gilbert. Helen Belay shines as the scheming Josie Pye, while Josue Laboucane and Jennifer Villaverde deftly handle both student and teacher roles. Steven Hao earns the show’s biggest laughs as a first-time reader who discovers the twists and turns of Anne’s story on stage in real time . . .and jumps right into the role (and the frock) of student Jane Andrews, in order to be part of it. And an exquisite Maev Beatty is endearing in her enthusiastic embodiment of the many sides of Mrs. Lynde.
Fear not, purists – all your most beloved scenes are here: from the slate-breaking to the hair-dyeing disaster to the raspberry cordial incident. But they crackle with new life, delivered through dialogue that has been turned up to 11, amplifying Montgomery’s already famously effusive language. And Sandler fearlessly remixes and reorders these key events, finding new and more direct paths to the story’s emotional and intellectual truths. Finally, the production makes an especially bold choice partway through its second half that proves what adaptations like Anne of Philly have long suggested: this inspiring story gains, rather than loses its magic and power when we reimagine its incidental details. (The only such detail I might query is the number of references to flatulence: though funny, they feel unnecessary).
Ultimately, what makes Sandler’s production extraordinary is its understanding that Anne of Green Gables has never belonged to any single constituency. The precocious orphan who finds her place through imagination and heart has always been a mirror for readers of all kinds: young, old, straight, gay, rich, poor, white, Black, brown, yellow… other and othered. Sandler’s production makes this explicit by putting all of these diverse readers on stage, allowing them to participate directly and joyously in Anne’s story, while celebrating their role in keeping it alive.
As the final scene fades with Anne poised between past and future — all life possibilities stretching before her, and none whatsoever closed off — we understand what Sandler has achieved. This is not simply one more staging of a 1908 novel called Anne of Green Gables. No, this extraordinary production — so funny and moving, so kinetic and brainy and soulful — is a celebration of how stories live and grow through their readers, and a demonstration of exactly why this tale continues to matter so deeply to so many.
In a Sandler inflation of an evocative Montgomery line, Anne speaks in the show of covering “the past with a mantle of warm oblivion”. In a sense, this is the production’s mission statement: not erasing what has come before, but lovingly building upon it to create something warm, wildly original, yet deeply respectful of its source.
Anne of Green Gables is a Stratford Festival Commission and runs until October 25 at the Avon Theatre. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
