With news from Freewill Shakespeare Festival, Marlaena Moore, Winterruption YEG, Matthew Cardinal, Emily Chu, Musée Héritage Museum, and more.
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We notice that the
Freewill Shakespeare Festival has confirmed it will
return to Hawrelak Park after
several years in temporary homes. Those temporary locations included the Crystal Palace Spiegeltent, community league rinks, and Louise McKinney Riverfront Park.
Festival director David Horak also confirmed that the festival will once again produce more than one play. Freewill typically produced a comedy and a tragedy from the Bard each season, but
pulled back in 2024 with
The Tempest to be “super cautious,” and stuck with the decision in 2025 with
As You Like It. Horak said he’s not ready to announce the shows the festival will stage at the soon-to-be reopened park, which he said features heated bathrooms and subtle changes to help its functionality. Hawrelak Park is
scheduled to reopen in early 2026.
For those who can’t wait until the summer for a dose of Shakespeare, the festival is supporting a staged reading of
The Gertrude Project at
Script Salon on Dec. 7.
Hamlet is the inspiration for this musical, by Lauren Boyd, which explores “a mother who pieces together the contradictions, warnings, rumours, and mistakes surrounding her relationship to her son to make sense of a tragedy.” Horak noted that Freewill has only reached 35% of its
goal to raise $150,000, which it launched earlier this year. Reaching the goal will help the festival make it back into Hawrelak Park and continue supporting these new, “Shakespeare-adjacent” works, Horak said.
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