On Monday, Dancap Productions will announce what is billed in a press release as its 2012 "Tony-Award-Winning Subscription Series."
If you're a little surprised that they are now giving out a Tonys for such things, I'm assuming here that what this really means is that the shows Aubrey Dan and company plan to announce as part of their subscription series have won Tonys in the past.
Shall we speculate then? We shall.
Well, we already know about the big one: Prince of Broadway, a new musical about the life and career of director Hal Prince, the fellow behind the original productions of Phantom of the Opera and Sweeney Todd and the 1993 production of Show Boat that premiered in Toronto.
An American creative team will be in charge, with Susan Stroman (of The Producers fame) set to direct and David Thompson ( Flora and the Red Menace) writing the book. That's supposed to arrive in the summer of 2012, then it intends to head down to Broadway.
And the rest of the season? Well, there are three tours scheduled to come to town that Dancap will most likely be presenting:
-- In the Heights, the 2008 Tony Award winning musical about the lives of Dominican-Americans living in Washington Heights, is supposed to hit the Toronto Centre for the Arts in February.
-- Shrek, Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire's musical based on the popular movie, is set to hit the TCA in March after playing in Detroit.
- The Disney musical Beauty and the Beast, so I understand, will be at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in July.
(These will all be non-Equity tours, I gather.)
Will Dancap have any other surprises on Monday? Rumours abound.
Dan revealed to the Globe and Mail earlier this week that he's potentially interested in buying the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts from the city. That would finally give him the downtown theatre that he's craved and that the wily folks at Mirvish Productions have so far denied him, though it would also leave not-for-profits like Canadian Stage homeless.
Any announcement of a purchase of the St . Lawrence Centre would be pretty far in the future, however.
My personal hope that is that, given Dancap is involved in the surprise hit Ghost: The Musical in the West End, it'll be awfully nice if it visited Toronto before it opened on Broadway in March so I can see what all the fuss is about. But we'd likely have heard about that long before now if it were the case... So, otherwise, I look forward to the unexpected on Monday .