Ticket sales up, Stratford reinstates summer performances

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival has reinstated eight summer performances that had been put on hold because of poor ticket sales, the theatre festival announced Thursday.

There has been significant growth in ticket sales, with most gains from Toronto and southwestern Ontario, where Stratford had concentrated its marketing dollars over the past month, the festival said in a press release.

During April, the festival, which got $3 million from a federal tourism promotion fund, doubled the size of its ads and inserted them weekly in newspapers in Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo and London.

Eight performances in July and August of West Side Story, Three Sisters and The Importance of Being Earnest that had previously been put on hold have been put back on the schedule.

Six performances of Brian Bedford's Ever Yours, Oscar, a companion piece to The Importance of Being Earnest, have been added.

It was previously announced that all six performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream that were previously on hold have also been added back into the schedule.