Most theaters let audiences know the show is about to start by blinking the lights. Stratford’s Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, is a bit more festive. Four burgundy-uniformed buglers and a drummer quicken the pace of hundreds of theatergoers who’ve been ambling up the hill from the banks of the Avon River. When curtain time arrives, a cannon will boom.
Nora Polley works in the theater’s archives and has been with the festival since she was in high school 48 years ago. “When I was a kid here, the curtain was at 8:30, so if you were out playing, when you heard the cannon go off, you knew it was time to go home,” she recalls.
Polley now works in a huge warehouse filled with such stage treasures as the gown Maggie Smith wore as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the prompt books for every show that’s ever played the festival. The trove goes back 60 theatrical seasons.
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