Shaw's Murder-on-the-Lake ensemble during the 2025 festival. The residency's annual Christmas Carol will be included in the upcoming Toronto offerings.Michael Cooper/Shaw Festival
The Shaw Festival will begin a three-year artistic residency at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre in 2026, the organization announced on Sunday afternoon.
The residency will see the Shaw Festival – the second-largest repertory theatre company in North America, behind the Stratford Festival – occupy the Fleck, formerly known as Harbourfront Centre Theatre, from October through March. (Not to be confused with the former Fleck Dance Theatre, which has since been renamed the Terminal Theatre and whose lease with Harbourfront Centre ended in March.)
Most of the residency’s core programming remains under wraps, but the Shaw Festival shared in its Sunday announcement that its annual Christmas Carol will be included in the Toronto offerings. (The festival has historically staged A Christmas Carol in its Royal George Theatre, which after this season will be under renovation until approximately 2028.)
“This will make the Shaw Festival’s theatre more available, more accessible to all of the GTA, and across the country,” said departing Harbourfront Centre CEO Cathy Loblaw, whose tenure with the institution is expected to end in January. “It’ll really allow us to have that next level of theatre right here on our campus.”
The announcement follows a tumultuous few years for Harbourfront Centre. In addition to the former Fleck Dance Theatre, the institution recently cut ties with the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Harbourfront also reduced its staff by 25 per cent in 2024, following a federal report which warned that Harbourfront did “not yet have a sustainable operating foundation.”
The Shaw Festival’s residency will see the company occupy Harbourfront for free, said Loblaw, but with box office revenue split between Shaw and Harbourfront. In the meantime, necessary infrastructure upgrades – including HVAC and pavement maintenance, said Loblaw – will be covered by the province of Ontario.
The arrangement, said Loblaw, has roots in a chance meeting between her and Shaw Festival artistic director Tim Carroll in 2024. The leaders were part of a panel about HoverLink, a proposed hovercraft that aims to move passengers across Lake Ontario, from Toronto to the Niagara Region, in 30 minutes. (Currently, it can take anywhere from two to four hours to get to the Shaw Festival from Toronto by car or on the festival’s shuttle bus.)
“This came from organic discussions about making the Shaw Festival more accessible and available for everyone,” said Loblaw.
According to Carroll, the Harbourfront residency isn’t expected to “cannibalize” the Shaw’s existing audience, only about a third of which comes from Toronto, he said.
“And more to that point, there are literally millions of people in Toronto who’ve never been to see us,” he said. “I think it’s time that we show them what we’re about and what we can do … It’s a great opportunity for us to take a couple of our shows to them and then, once we have them well and truly hooked, we can say, ‘Well, unfortunately, you have to come to Niagara-on-the-Lake if you want to see everything else we do.’”
As far as programming is concerned, said Carroll, the Shaw Festival’s big musicals are unlikely to transfer to Toronto. “But any of our plays from any of our theatres will be candidates for bringing up, because anything we take will have to be adjusted slightly anyway,” he said. “I think in the first instance, we’re going to see what’s going really well at the Shaw in a given season, and then take it to Harbourfront. Possibly even shows from earlier seasons.”
With reports from Kate Taylor and Josh O’Kane