Ada Kelly Scrapbook Volume Two

Captions to images above:

Page 2:

In the summer of 1953 The Stratford Shakespearean Festival opened, and Kelly was in attendance. Attending the festival and then scrapbooking the articles, programs, photographs and other memorabilia she collected became a yearly ritual for Kelly throughout her life. All articles and pictures on this page anticipate the promising future for the festival.

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Glued firmly to the scrapbook on this page is a program for the first season of Stratford. The program includes a cast list of All’s Well That Ends Well and Richard III, as well as the list of patrons and board members -- a powerful and elite membership who contributed to the festival's founding. The entire program is available on the CASP site in our Theatre Programs collection.

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This is the first page of many in which Kelly displays a set of programs from the Stratford Festival. In this case we see Measure for Measure, Oedipus Rex and The Taming of the Shrew.

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The article on the right page by John Gardiner (written during the second season) argues that the Stratford Festival should be all Canadian and should refrain from importing talent. He writes: “On the two occasions we covered the Stratford Festival we expressed our belief that the festival should be all-Canadian from stem to stern and we were a bit annoyed at the importation of directors, actors and actresses.” Gardiner also gives a rough account of the festival's first director, Tyrone Guthrie citing one actor as saying “‘I was only called stupid goat three times this afternoon: I must be getting the hang of what he wants’.”

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On the bottom right side of this page there is an article titled Stratford: Firm and Permanent Growth in which Robertson Davies comments on the promising early years of the Stratford Festival.

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Here is an early program for Spring Thaw, a yearly production by The New Play Society, which began in 1948. The front of this program from 1955 describes the show as “A musical review” and one of the acts listed inside is titled Shakespeare Country. Spring Thaw featured a series of short musical acts which often commented on current affairs, particularly those in Canadian theatre.

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Included in Kelly's theatrical visits in 1956 were the Crest Theatre and The New Play Society's Spring Thaw (both in Toronto) as well as a performance of Ladies in Retirement in her home town by the Oshawa Little Theatre.

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Disclaimer: This site has been designed with only non-commercial, academic uses in mind. Although every effort has been made to secure permission for materials uploaded on the CASP site, in some circumstances we have been unable to locate copyright holders. Links may be made to our site but under no conditions are the texts and images to be copied and mounted onto another site server. Researchers using the site should accredit it following standard MLA guidelines on how to do so. Correct citation of information from the site is as follows:

Fischlin, Daniel. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. University of Guelph. 2004. <http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca>.