It seemed apt and fitting that 25 years after opening in the summer of 1993, Medieval Times would want to put a new spin on who wears the crown.

Aimée Ambroziak will be the first queen — replacing a king in previous productions — to preside over the festivities that include Middle Ages pageantry, jousting and knight-to-knight combat while the crowd feasts with its fingers. All she had to do, beyond looking regal, was to learn to ride a horse.

“I am beyond thrilled to be queen. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment and finally I get to put the crown on,” said the new monarch.

Ambroziak’s past work as an actor has been with Second City’s touring company, including its cruise ship shows. Lately, she said, “I’ve been through a ton of training with our wonderful horse trainers. It’s been truly an exceptional experience.”

The show, the first new one since 2012 and written by longtime creative director Leigh Cordner, features 12 different medieval “vignettes,” including seven fighting scenes.

“People come to see the swordfighting, the jousting, the pageantry, the music, the action, the games, the horses,” Cordner said.

But Cordner said there’s been a steady stream of requests from the public to change things up a bit gender-wise.

“There was a lot of input from a lot of customers who said, ‘we’d like to see more females in more prominent roles in the show,’ ” Cordner said.

And so, after playing the princess in the previous show, Ambroziak gets a promotion.

“There’s so much audience interaction. The whole show is built around involving the audience in medieval times. I love to see how the audiences react, to have grown adults screaming their heads off, kids screaming their heads off. It’s really so immersive, I love it,” she said.

Cordner said the wildly successful HBO series, Game of Thrones, is just among a series of shows and films over the past few decades that have “kept rejuvenating interest in the period.”

“We’ve touched on a period of history that for some reason, there’s always been this fascination for. If you want to go see what that must have been like — live — with real animals and swords … there’s no other place you can go. You can go stand in the sun at a Renaissance festival but you’re not going to have the experience of the music and lights and the costumes,” he said.

Cordner has done a lot of historical research to ensure accuracy because — well, you know …

“In every audience, there’s a guy who’s going to go, ‘that’s not how it was.’ You don’t want any bold mistakes,” he said.

But what looks like a horseplay to the audience requires a very high degree of coordination and a high level of training, particularly for the knights, who begin as “squires” and whose quest for proficiency in riding and using all 11 weapons can take up anywhere from two to three years.

“To be an entry level ‘squire,’ there’s a fitness test to make sure you’re actually healthy enough, to make sure your heart’s OK and to test basic agility. Once you get into the squire program … we can make you stronger, you can make you skinnier, we can make you bigger. But if you don’t have character and you don’t have a good work effort and you don’t have the ability to stay calm in sometimes ... unusual situations, we’ll call them ... this isn’t for you,” said Tim Baker, director of stunts and choreography.

“All the weapons are real. None of them are sharp, obviously. We’re not trying to kill each other,” Baker said.

But he noted that audiences expect an authentic experience and that means fight scenes are as real as possible.

“I actually encourage a good percentage of my guys to hit as hard as they can, to go as fast as they can. It’s very choreographed. Every single step, every single strike, everything is choreographed and set to music,” Baker said.

“If you look at the shields … there’s dents in them,” he added.

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Baker has been with Medieval Times — which has 10 different “castles” across North America, although Toronto’s is the only one in a historic building, the 1912 Arts and Crafts Building — from the beginning.

“They built the first one in my hometown in 1983, in Kissimmee, Florida …and everyone was laughing at them. They’re not laughing now,” Baker said.

MEDIEVAL TIMES, BY THE NUMBERS:

Cast of 45, including knights, squires, the queen, actors, falconers and trumpeters.

130+ service and hospitality staff

7 stable hands

28 horses

11 weapons

More than 255,000 half-kilo chickens served annually

125,000 gallons of soup served annually

Arena filled with 4,455 cubic feet of sand (about 3 to 4 inches deep), equivalent to 10 dumptruck loads