Canadian Stage aims to be ‘Toronto’s theatre’ again and attract an audience of 150,000 with 2024-2025 season

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Canadian Stage is making a play to become “Toronto’s theatre” next season, looking to have its total attendance grow to a size not seen at the not-for-profit company in more than 20 years at a time when many others are struggling.

On Monday, artistic director Brendan Healy is unveiling a lineup of plays and one musical for 2024-2025 that would seem to appeal to a wider swath of theatregoers than many in recent years.

Famous-beyond-the-stage stars such as Paul Gross and Saul Rubinek are set to appear in classics and Canadian plays – and the commercial producer Ross Petty’s annual holiday musical pantomime will be relaunched and integrated into the company’s annual programming.

“In my opinion, Canadian Stage is an anchor institution,” Healy told The Globe and Mail in advance of the announcement. “It should be the largest employer of Canadian artists in the city. … We should be Toronto’s theatre.”

His ambitious goal, along with that of executive director Monica Esteves, is for Canadian Stage to leap from an expected attendance of 100,000 in the current season to more than 150,000, easily regaining a clear position as the largest not-for-profit theatre company in the city.

The Wizard of Oz, a new family holiday musical comedy being written by pantomime vet Matt Murray to be produced at the Winter Garden from Dec. 6 to Jan. 5, is a key part of that plan – with Petty actively involved as executive producer emeritus and long-time collaborator Dan Chameroy returning as his popular character Plumbum.

For 25 years, Petty produced panto in Toronto to an audience of roughly 50,000 – his turning of a profit dependent on casting of TV stars and sometimes helped by screening advertisements on stage.

Healy is not ruling anything out as the tradition is passed to Canadian Stage. “We’re not-for-profit, but that doesn’t mean we’re anti-profit,” he says. “How we function is that certain shows make a little money, and some shows don’t – and those that don’t are covered by those that do.”

The artistic director sees panto as a natural complement to Canadian Stage’s long-established presentation of Shakespeare in its High Park amphitheatre to family audiences.

Hamlet is scheduled for that slot in summer 2024 with Jessica Carmichael, who has distinguished herself recently at both the Stratford and Shaw festivals, directing Southern Ontario festival regular Qasim Khan in the title role.

Over at the indoor 867-seat Bluma Appel Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, Canadian Stage has three shows lined up next season. My Name is Lucy Barton, a one-person adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s novel of that name by Rona Munro, will run in October. Maev Beaty will take on the role that Laura Linney played on Broadway – and Jackie Maxwell is set to direct.

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Then, in January, 2025, Healy will direct Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – with real-life couple and Slings & Arrows co-stars Paul Gross and Martha Burns reuniting to play the squabbling academic couple George and Martha.

Finally, in April, Canadian Stage will present the Toronto premiere of Why Not Theatre’s two-part Mahabharata, one of the most acclaimed productions of 2023 in its world premiere at the Shaw Festival; Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes’s adaptation of the classic Indian epic will be on tour.

Complementing Hamlet will be the Canadian premiere of Fat Ham at the Berkeley Street Theatre, Canadian Stage’s smaller 244-seat venue. American playwright James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation, wherein the melancholy Dane is reinvented as a young queer Black man named Juicy, will star the comedically gifted Peter Fernandes; Philip Akin is set to direct, in early 2025.

Two other Canadian plays at the Berkeley also have links to Shakespeare.

1939, Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan’s Stratford Festival hit set at a fictional residential school where Indigenous students are rehearsing All’s Well That Ends Well, will run in September.

Then, Saul Rubinek – a Genie Award winner who began his career at Toronto Free Theatre before becoming a familiar face in Hollywood – will star in a rejigged revival of B.C. writer Mark Leiren-Young’s one-man show Playing Shylock, about an actor in a production of The Merchant of Venice that gets cancelled. It will be directed by Martin Kinch, one of the founding artistic directors of the avant-garde Toronto Free Theatre, which merged with the more mainstream Centre Stage in 1988 to become Canadian Stage.

Rounding out the season at the Berkeley will be Necessary Angel’s production of Winter Solstice by the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, originally scheduled to play at Soulpepper in 2020.

While there are no world premieres announced Monday, Canadian Stage will be holding a second edition of its Festival of New Theatre in spring 2025 – and says it is doubling its annual budget for new-work development.

Formed with the goal of being the biggest not-for-profit in Toronto in 1988, Canadian Stage stumbled at times over an unhappy marriage of missions and deficits before eventually pivoting to a new, more elitist and “rightsized” interdisciplinary mission under the direction of Matthew Jocelyn starting in 2009; it was then surpassed by Soulpepper in attendance many seasons.

Notable by its absence in Canadian Stage’s 2024-2025 season are any dance shows or international presentations that Jocelyn introduced during his tenure; Healy says they’re not necessarily gone forever. “To me, [next season] feels like a continuation of something that both Monica and I have been trying to achieve since we started,” says Healy, whose inaugural season in 2019-2020 season ran smack into COVID-19.