At the Berkeley Street Theatre, dancer/choreographer Bill Coleman will premiere a new tap piece called Dollhouse.Paul-Antoine Taillefer
Canadian Stage will celebrate Canada's 150th anniversary next season with 18 shows, including four from Quebec and another five from Australia.
That's no mistake: Artistic and general manager Matthew Jocelyn is shining a spotlight on "our mirrored nation of the Southern Hemisphere" in his Toronto theatre company's 2016-17 season, during our sesquicentennial celebrations, in part to allow audiences to compare.
"It's a look at what's happened to the society and the artists of our sister nation over the past 150 years, as we have relatively similar colonial histories and relatively similar histories with our aboriginal peoples," he says.
The bulk of Canadian Stage's 2016-17 programming will consist of productions grown in Toronto, however.
The season kicks off in the fall with Jordan Tannahill's Dora-winning play Concord Floral – a reimagining of The Decameron set in contemporary Vaughan, Ont., and starring 10 teenage performers. Seen at the Theatre Centre in 2014, this Suburban Beast production will be restaged at the Bluma Appel Theatre with both actors and audience on the stage.
Also at the Bluma, Peter Hinton will stage the Nick Payne play Constellations (recently seen on Broadway starring Jake Gyllenhaal), while Jocelyn will direct the North American premiere of Liv Stein, a poetic drama about a concert pianist by young Georgian-born, German-based playwright Nino Haratischwili.
Over at the Berkeley Street Theatre, Jennifer Tarver will direct a second batch of Samuel Beckett shorts matched with opera excerpts called All But Gone: A Beckett Rhapsody; dancer/choreographer Bill Coleman will premiere a new tap piece called Dollhouse; and master monologist Daniel MacIvor will perform Who Killed Spalding Gray?
Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderon's Kiss, about a group of Western actors interpreting a Syrian play, is also back on the bill after being bumped from the current season. Ashlie Corcoran will direct in the Berkeley.
Over at Canadian Stage's Shakespeare in High Park, Birgit Schreyer Duarte will direct Hamlet (with indie-theatre darling Frank Cox-O'Connell in the title role) and Ted Witzel will return to the company to helm All's Well that Ends Well.
As for what's being billed as the "Saison du Québec," this season within a season will see the return of Robert Lepage's Panamania hit 887; choreographer Marie Chouinard's latest, Jérôme Bosch: la création, le paradis, le jardin, l'enfer; a new collaboration between Cirque Éloize and enfant-terrible choreographer Dave St-Pierre called Cirkopolis; and a production of Guillaume Corbeil's play Five Faces for Evelyn Frost that will be performed by bilingual actors – for three weeks in English, one in French.
Spotlight: Australia, meanwhile, will run for six weeks in the spring of 2017 and include Jack Charles v. the Crown from ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, Australia's leading and longest-running aboriginal theatre; and Blood Links, from Chinese-Australian performance artist William Yang.
Given the diversity to be showcased in Spotlight: Australia, it stands out that – in contrast – all the Canadian directors, playwrights and choreographers announced as part of Canadian Stage's 2016-17 season are white. Jocelyn says Toronto's diversity will be reflected in the season in other ways, however. "I think you'll see a lot of the diversity of our casting," he says – and that information is yet to be announced.
J. Kelly Nestruck