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In early June, Antoni Cimolino took a break from his busy duties as Stratford Shakespeare Festival general director to sit back in the Festival Theatre and watch members of his acting company perform West Side Story for the first time.
“It was so beautiful,” he says. “I thought to myself: Right. This is why I do it. This is the big payoff.”
For a man who one Toronto Star theatre critic described as “the single most important theatre executive director in Canada,” it’s a telling tale. Cimolino, whose spent his early
days playing Romeo to Megan Follows’ Juliet in 1993, retains a love of theatre that convinced him to follow his 20-year career path.
He became spellbound with the stage, and Shakespeare, during a school trip to Stratford Festival to see Love’s Labour’s Lost. He was living in Sudbury and his immigrant parents wanted more than a theatre school for him; they decided UWindsor offered “pretty much the best university program that also taught fine arts and acting,” he says.
Cimolino BFA ’84, DHum ’04 is grateful at the “well-rounded” education he received and influence of certain professors, such as Colin Atkinson in the English department. It was also in UWindsor’s drama program that he met Brigit Wilson GFA ’82, who would become an actor and, later, wife and mother of their children, Gabriele and Sophia.
Cimolino started in Stratford with an unsuccessful audition as an actor. He persisted and landed a role under John Neville in 1988. He went on to work as an assistant director alongside former Stratford artistic director Richard Monette, then delved into special projects before moving into producing, directing and finally to his 2006 appointment as general director.
“It was one accident after another,” says Cimolino, who oversees a budget of $57 million, more than 1,000 employees and an endowment fund of more than $50 million.
Throughout his tenure, he has seen a steady succession of UWindsor alumni progress to his stage though, he says, “It’s not as if I’ve gone on a rampage and had a Windsor-only hiring policy.” The alumni’s success has been the result of a good, well-balanced program that delivers a solid “skill set” along with liberal arts and humanities studies, he says.
Looking back at his own distinguished career, Cimolino considers himself “blessed” to have worked with such legendary figures as his mentors Monette and William Hutt. He says there’s “magic” to mounting a play, like his current direction of Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair, with a cast that includes Wilson as Dame Purecraft and Tom McCamus BAG ’07 as Justice Overdo, and seeing it performed on stage.
“It’s a wonderful way to spend your life,” he says. “There’s a great beauty to living your life this way.”
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