Our annual spotlight on the fast approaching theatre season
For anyone who has doubts about Calgary’s designation as a Cultural Capital of Canada you should look no further than the plethora of plays taking place in this city in the coming year. About 70 shows gracing Calgary stages from September through June were consulted for this article and that figure doesn’t include the full complement of offerings from Calgary’s community theatres or shows that have yet to be announced.
Despite the impressive number the 2012-2013 theatre season actually sees fewer plays on the bill for both Sage Theatre and Alberta Theatre Projects.
“Over the last five years we’ve had a wonderful flourish of companies in Calgary. There are a lot of options out there” says Sage artistic director Kelly Reay adding that he cut one show from Sage’s 15th anniversary lineup for fiscal reasons.
ATP artistic director Vanessa Porteous says their decision was motivated by the desire “to do more by doing less.”
“We felt we couldn’t grow in quality and depth because we were producing more quantity” she says.
The people at ATP however have come up with a phrase to describe their season and simultaneously explain theatre’s raison d’être — “life more beautiful.”
Theatre Calgary artistic director Dennis Garnhum also came up with a phrase to capture the essence of their season — “emotional intelligence.” Garnhum says it serves as a reminder to audiences of what theatre is supposed to be: a vehicle to make people think and feel.
Lunchbox Theatre remains a leader in producing new works by Calgary playwrights. Seven of its eight regular–season shows are world premieres with over half of the playwrights hailing from Calgary.
There are also a couple of new artistic directors on the Calgary theatre scene this year: Craig Hall takes over the reigns from Mark Bellamy at Vertigo Theatre while 2012-2013 marks Haysam Kadri’s first full season as artistic producer of The Shakespeare Company.
SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER
The 2012-2013 theatre season kicks off with Vertigo Mystery Theatre’s new stage adaptation of a classic film noir Double Indemnity . Hall Vertigo Theatre’s new artistic director — formerly of Vancouver’s Rumble Productions — will direct.
“I wanted to choose something that falls into the classic world but opens itself to modern staging” says Hall.
The play about a “smooth-talking insurance salesman and a gold-digging housewife” who plan to murder the woman’s husband to secure a double-indemnity payout from his life insurance policy is set in the 1930s but has a “filmic feel” to it.
Opening close to Double Idemnity ’s heels are Lunchbox Theatre’s world premiere of The Bob Shivery Show and Theatre Calgary’s production of the Pulitzer Prize–winning rock musical Next to Normal .
Lunchbox artistic director Pamela Halstead describes The Bob Shivery Show as “a fantastical ride worthy of the depths one will go to find true love.”
Speaking of his season opener Theatre Calgary’s Granhum says they’re starting “with the most riveting musical out there Next to Normal .” The play deals with the impact of one woman’s mental illness on her family.
“What I’m most excited about is that people will come in knowing next to nothing and will be surprised” he says.
The Shakespeare Company offers up a September production of Hamlet under Kadri. (Mount Royal University is also presenting the play in November directed by former Theatre Calgary artistic director Ian Prinsloo.)
Ground Zero Theatre and Hit & Myth Productions add some edge to the month’s theatrical offerings with Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain which starred Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman in its Broadway production. The show explores the strained relationship between two Chicago cops after they commit a grievous mistake involving a child and a serial killer.
The relatively quiet Ellipsis Tree Collective — which brought Calgary a fabulous production of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined a couple of years ago — also rears its head on September 24 with a free workshop reading of a new play about African-Canadian inventor and thermo-dynamics engineer Elijah McCoy called T he Real McCoy .
And Theatre Junction Grand opens its season in September with 13 Most Beautiful…. Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests a show featuring live music — performed by returning MTT Fest headliners Dean & Britta — which accompanies a selection of “screen tests” Warhol filmed in the mid-1960s.
Because it is offering one less show this season Alberta Theatre Projects (ATP) doesn’t get in on the theatrical action until October when they start with a production of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel a play which ATP artistic director Vanessa Porteous describes as “a Valentine.”
“In [the aforementioned] Ruined [Nottage] goes really dark and political. Intimate Apparel is a much more romantic sensual and uplifting play” says Porteous of the story about a young African-American seamstress looking for love in 1900’s New York.
For those who missed The Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s latest project Ignorance at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival you’ll have another opportunity in October to see this work that the the Trouts describe as a “puppet documentary about the evolution of happiness.”
Theatre Calgary’s annual commitment to a classic also happens in October with a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice .
“It’s as poetic and pretty as possible” says Garnhum adding however that audiences should not expect a replication of the BBC series.
“We want to let the words of Austen really come forward” he says adding that the staging is abstract rather than realist. “The audience’s imagination of Regency England is better than any painting I can make.”
Downstage offers Bashir Lazhar in October. If you think the title sounds familiar you’re correct. It’s the play that was adapted for the screen as Monsieur Lazhar which won a Genie Award and was nominated for an Oscar.
Downstage artistic producer Simon Mallett says he’s had the play on his radar for a long while. The titular Lazhar is an Algerian who comes to Canada to escape conflict in his homeland. Once here he becomes a substitute teacher for a class of elementary-age students.
“It’s about how we talk to children about traumatic events and the immigrant experience. What is it like when your new home doesn’t know anything about your old home?” says Mallett.
One of Calgary’s community theatres The Liffey Players which offers plays “by and about the Irish” is bringing the Tennessee Williams classic A Streetcar Named Desire to the stage in October.
Also on Calgary stages in October: a dance piece at Theatre Junction Grand — The Tempest Replica — by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite based on motifs from the Shakespeare play and The University of Calgary’s Department of Drama is presenting a re-telling of the Greek myth of Philomele called The Love of the Nightingale .
NOVEMBER – DECEMBER
Verb Theatre — which gave Calgary audiences the Betty-nominated Jim Forgetting last season — brings Calgarians an innovative show in November called Noise . Verb’s co-artistic director Jamie Dunsdon conceived the project which she describes as “a vibration-based musical for both deaf and hearing audiences.”
Vertigo presents Alan Ayckbourn’s It Could Be Any One of Us a “campy send-up of Agatha Christie in a Fawlty Towers -style” and Sage appears on the radar in late November with Jack Goes Boating .
“It’s a romantic comedy for the messed up” says Reay Sage’s artistic director. “It’s about people trying to find meaning and connection in their lives which is pretty universal to all of us.”
Also in November some holiday shows begin their runs to get audiences in a festive frame of mind.
ATP’s seasonal presentation this year is You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown which Porteous describes as “the family musical of all family musicals.”
And naturally A Christmas Carol returns to Theatre Calgary while Storybook Theatre presents White Christmas .
Ghost River Theatre will stage its most recent creation in mid-December — The Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst . It’s based on a true story of a British entrepreneur and sailor who in 1969 seemed poised to win a round-the-world sailing competition when organizers lost contact with him. They found his boat adrift in the sea and it wasn’t until they read his logs that they started to get a picture of what really happened.
Rounding out November and December: Lunchbox Theatre’s Aviatrix: An Unreal Story of Amelia Earheart and Workshop Theatre’s Calendar Girls based on a true story about a group of English women who pose nude for a calendar to raise funds for leukemia. The University of Calgary’s Department of Drama presents two gritty George F. Walker plays: Suburban Motel: Problem Child and Risk Everythin g .
JANUARY – FEBRUARY
Of course the main theatrical happening in January is One Yellow Rabbit’s month-long High Performance Rodeo.
As part of the Rodeo: Theatre Calgary presents an Icelandic adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis featuring original music by Bad Seed’s Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; ATP hosts Daniel MacIvor’s most recent one-man show This is What Happens Next marking the company’s first direct collaboration with the Rodeo; and Lunchbox will stage a “theatrical song cycle” titled Blanche: The Bittersweet Life of a Wild Prairie Dame by Onalea Gilbertson.
Following last season’s well-received Jeremy de Bergerac Forte Musical Theatre Guild comes back in January with Maria Rasputin Presents . Featuring puppets courtesy of The Old Trout Puppet Workshop this musical looks at what happens when Maria Rasputin stages one final performance “in an attempt to rehabilitate her father’s infamous legacy.”
Vertigo offers up the classic psychological thriller Gaslight a story probably best known from the 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman.
Also on Calgary stages in January: Front Row Centre Players presents Monty Python’s Spamalot and Morpheus Theatre brings Calgary a production of The Diary of Anne Frank . Mob Hit Productions attempts an adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo .
In February Downstage holds the premiere of Sequence a play by Calgary ophthalmologist and playwright Arun Lakra — who won the Alberta Playwriting Competition last year for his script about luck and order.
“It’s an explosion of fascinating ideas explored in an interesting way” says Mallett. “It throws everything up for debate — from the question about the chicken versus the egg to whether there’s an order to the universe.”
The Canadian premiere of the stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner opens at Theatre Calgary at the end of January with a cast of 12 actors of non-European heritage something unprecedented in Calgary and which Garnhum says is gaining “buzz” in theatre circles.
Pamela Halstead describes Lunchbox’s February world premiere of He Said She Said as “the exciting pairing of two of Lunchbox’s favourite playwrights Glenda Stirling and Neil Fleming to help us decipher the intricacies of modern romance.”
February also sees Theatre Junction’s adaptation of one of the masterpieces of contemporary Dutch literature Sunken Red which deals with one man’s childhood recollections of a Japanese POW camp. And the University of Calgary presents the Anton Chekhov classic The Seagull .
MARCH – APRIL
March of course sees that theatrical extravaganza at ATP known as the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays.
While the characters in Darrah Teitel’s The Apology are real-life historic figures Mary Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron Porteous says “This is not Masterpiece Theatre ; this is more like punk rock of the 19th century. Those Romantic poets have gotten trapped in doilies and corsets. Really they were bananas — anarchists hot young teens who were just trying to figure out a way to escape the bounds of their society.”
In The Apology audiences get a glimpse of this other side of these famous figures as they head to Lord Byron’s family castle for a “several-months-long house party full of sex drugs and poetry writing.”
On a more contemporary note Joan Macleod’s What to Expect explores the fallout from a violent incident on a Sky-train between a police officer and a troubled teen and Jonathan Garfinkel’s and Christopher Morris’ ambitious Petawawa saw the pair travel to army bases in Canada and Afghanistan to interview the wives and families of Canadian soldiers as well as with the kin of Taliban fighters and insurgents. The cast features Samiya Mumtaz an actress who is coming from Pakistan to be part of the production.
Last but not least Hawksley Workman’s The God That Comes — inspired by the Greek tragedy The Bacchae — rounds out the festival.
Sage Theatre’s second show of its season — Robert Lepage’s Polygraph — takes place at the end of March. The play is in part inspired by true events as Lepage was briefly considered a suspect in the murder of one of his friends a scenario mirrored in the production.
In March Theatre Calgary stages God of Carnage a comedy that won the 2009 Tony Award for Best Play (and later filmed by Roman Polanski as Carange ). It looks at what happens when two sets of parents meet to discuss a fight between their children.
“The comedy is that the adults behave like children at the end” says Garnhum.
Mount Royal University unleashes The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Theatre Junction artistic director Mark Lawes offers up the world premiere of a multidisciplinary performance-creation piece called Sometime Between Now and When the Sun Goes Super Nov a . Vertigo Theatre stretches the boundaries of the murder-mystery genre with a play of misunderstanding and circumstance in Morris Panych’s The Ends of the Earth . Lunchbox’s film-noir mystery Scarlet Woman directed by Mark Bellamy is also on the bill for March.
ATP wraps up its season with the much-celebrated play Red about an imagined relationship between the famed abstract painter Mark Rothko and a young painter.
While the play sounds highly intellectual Porteous says “it’s more accessible than you imagine.” For one thing the playwright John Logan is also the pen behind a number of Hollywood screenplays including Hugo and The Aviator .
“I think it’s not really about art and theories of art. It’s about the relationship between a crusty old painter and a keen young painter” says Porteous adding that Logan was inspired to write Red after being moved by a Rothko painting he saw in London’s Tate Museum.
Lunchbox opens two shows in April: Joe Slabe’s musical If I Weren’t With You and Louis B. Hobson’s Almost a Love Stor y. The latter is a drama by the Calgary Sun ’s theatre and film critic which explores what happens when a son discovers following his father’s death that his father had a gay lover.
Finally The Liffey Players present a production of Martin McDonagh’s black comedy The Beauty Queen of Leenane Theatre Calgary finishes off its season with Anne of Green Gables and Stage West mounts Chicago .
MAY – JUNE
The theatre season starts winding down come May.
The Australian production of Ganesh Versus the Third Reich — playing at Theatre Junction Grand — is an unusual play about Ganesh being sent to Earth to reclaim the swastika from Hitler in 1943.
Vertigo’s final show of its season Joseph Goodrich’s Panic features a character based on Alfred Hitchcock who while attending a film premiere in Paris is accused of an unspeakable crime.
“Goodrich puts Hitchcock in one of his own sordid plotlines” explains Hall adding that the play is a “very American thriller set in a classic Parisian setting.”
Verb Theatre winds down its season with T he Dandelion Projec t a performance piece that looks at issues surrounding euthanasia and Trepan Theatre’s only show of its season The Anger of Ernest and Ernestine happens in June.
Front Row Centre Players colours their repetoire with the relatively new musical Legally Blonde while Storybook Theatre gets suitably coiffed with Hairspray .
Then when Sage Theatre’s Ignite! Festival concludes it signals that the end of another season is upon us.
