ON a sweltering afternoon recently I stood in a dusty skateboard park in Stratford, Ontario, surrounded by about a dozen sullen-looking boys, all around 17. I mentioned someone they might know, someone who a few years ago used to hang out there, too, and a couple of them said he was a jerk. They could have been jealous, of course: We were discussing Justin Bieber, who not long ago was a local kid busking on the street a few blocks from this park and is now a pop star estimated by Forbes magazine to have earned $55 million, even before last week’s release of his third full-length album, “Believe.”

The brooding Stratford boys did not want to give their names, or to say much at all. As they lazily kicked gravel and avoided eye contact, I did not volunteer much either, since I did not think they’d be interested to know that I had come to the park directly from a sharp, moving production of “Cymbeline” at one of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival theaters nearby and that I was trying to learn my way around this very small town known for the Bard and the Bieb.

Stratford, much like its most famous native son, is a town with humble beginnings that now draws hundreds of thousands of fans — or rather, tourists — for the Shakespeare festival, celebrating its 60th-anniversary season through October. And while the festival is the main draw in town, it is not the only one; increasingly, Stratford is becoming known for its food and music culture, and of course for its homegrown pop idol.

I arrived in Stratford just as the festival’s productions were beginning previews and before the crowds were there in force. Fresh off a flight to Toronto, I rented a car and took Highway 401 West to 8 West, a journey of about 80 miles that passes farms, the Mohawk Race Track, an occasional Motel 6 and a small village called Shakespeare that predates the festival by about a century. Stratford itself, whose population is about 32,000, has the feel of a sleepy suburb where the “everyone knows everyone” cliché could have originated.