Charlottetown Festival
The Charlottetown Festival is a seasonal Canadian musical theatre festival which runs from late May to mid-October every year since 1965.
Named after its host city Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and its Charlottetown Conference, since its inception in 1965 the festival has showcased Canada's longest-running musical, Anne of Green Gables – The Musical, as well as having sought out and commissioned more than 100 new Canadian musicals.
The Charlottetown Festival – "a Festival of Music and Laughter" – was created in the spirit of the 1864 meetings of the Fathers of Confederation whose deliberations were highlighted by numerous gala balls, social events and one of the few circuses to visit the Island in that era.]
Hosted in the Confederation Centre of the Arts, every year, the Charlottetown Festival features some of Canada's finest performers, designers, playwrights, composers, and directors in a showcase of musical theatre and comedy.
The Festival includes a summer musical theatre training program called the "Young Company." The Young Company shows are freely available to the public and take place at noon outside the Confederation Centre. The shows typically feature Canadian-themed content. In 2011 Indigenous playwright Cathy Elliott wrote and directed "The Talking Stick" featuring an all-Indigenous cast. A piece from the play was performed for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge during their tour of PEI in 2011.
Past Artistic Directors of the Festival include Mavor Moore, Alan Lund, Duncan MacIntosh, Anne Allan, and Walter Learning. The current artistic director is Adam Brazier.
