Director Esther Jun says the play is 'deeply personal' to her life.Supplied
Kim’s Convenience, Ins Choi’s hit 2011 play about a Korean-Canadian family and their corner store that was turned into a CBC sitcom, will next be setting up shop onstage in London, England.
Casting was announced on Tuesday for the European premiere of the show, which will be produced by Adam Blanshay, a London-based, Canadian impresario whose current West End productions include Moulin Rouge! and a hit rethought revival of Sunset Boulevard. It will run at the Park Theatre from Jan. 8 to Feb. 10.
Choi, who also originated the stage role of son Jung (later played by Simu Liu in the small-screen adaptation), will be starring in this British production as father Appa (originated onstage and onscreen by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee).
Brian Law, an actor originally from Toronto, will be playing the role of Jung. Namju Go, a South Korea-born model and actress based in London, is playing family matriarch Umma, while Jennifer Kim, a Korean-American actor born in Seoul, raised in Los Angeles and trained in Bristol, is playing daughter Janet.
Meanwhile, Kim’s Convenience’s original onstage Janet, Esther Jun, now an associate artist at the Stratford Festival who runs the Langham Directors’ Workshop, will be directing the new production in the British capital, where she studied directing at Drama Centre London two decades ago.
“It’s a bit of a dream … to go back with this play that is so quintessentially Canadian, but so deeply universal,” Jun told me over the phone. “I know this play so well, it’s so deeply personal to my life as well.”
Jun has been involved with Choi’s groundbreaking comedic drama since it was originally workshopped. She acted in both the original 2011 Toronto Fringe Festival production as well as the 2012 Soulpepper production that toured much of Canada.
She’s since become a well-established director, and was the first Korean-Canadian to direct Kim’s Convenience, first at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in 2022 and then, just this fall, at the Grand Theatre in London, Ont.
Choi first tried on the role of Appa in that latter production, which just closed. Jun says he brings a little more danger and anger to the role of the first-generation immigrant entrepreneur, who has a family history that includes violence. “There is a deeper, darker side to this story and people forget that, and I think Ins had brought that back to the forefront,” Jun says.
Even with the TV series streaming internationally on Netflix, Choi’s play continues to attract large audiences for a Canadian work when it’s staged: More than 8,200 people bought tickets to its run at the Grand, a publicist for the theatre reports.
Footnote: Tuesday is a double casting announcement day for Jun. She’s making her Shakespearean directing debut at Stratford Festival next season with Cymbeline. I just wrote about the actors lined up for that production and others set for 2024.
War and plays: Hagar, Aksam Alyousef’s drama about a determined mother with a baby trying to find safety in war-torn Syria, is having a tragically timely Toronto premiere at the Theatre Centre this week as part of the Pleiades Theatre season.
The play, which premiered in Edmonton in 2018, is being performed by Amena Shehab, in English and in Arabic at different performances, for a very short run from Nov. 8 to 12.
“Hagar breaks archetypal portraits of women in war and after the war, including the refugee archetype,” Shehab says in a press release. “I was born in a refugee camp in Syria to Palestinian refugees, then became a refugee again, coming to Canada in 2014 with three children. War can reveal radical strength, drive and the ability to adapt. "
Director Morgan Norwich, recently appointed the managing director of the SummerWorks festival in Toronto, commented: “It is a devastating coincidence that this production, in the works since January 2023, went from being universally relevant to urgently topical over the last several weeks.”
One conflict that has moved off the front page amid the devastation in Gaza is the war in Ukraine.
Bad Roads, by Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit, takes place in the Donbas region of that country and is based on “astonishing testimonies from the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014,″ according to press materials. Its North American premiere opens at Crow’s Theatre this week and runs to Nov. 26.
“Sometimes it takes a piece of theatre to help us grasp the complexity of a place, its people, its struggle, its mysteries and riddles,” Andrew Kushnir, the Ukrainian-Canadian director of the production, says in a press release. I’ll be there to review this week.
Also opening or on stage this week
Chaos Menu: Disorder Up!, Second City Toronto’s latest revue, opens for review on Thursday. PHATT al and Andy Assaf carry over from the ensemble of the previous revue, and are joined by Ron Pederson, Coko Galore, Liz Johnston and Devon Henderson.
The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time, legendary performer Walter Borden’s solo show, closes on Nov. 11 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Martin Morrow reviewed director Peter Hinton-Davis’s production earlier this fall in Toronto at the Tarragon Theatre.
Le projet Riopelle, Robert Lepage’s deep dive into the life and times of Quebec artist Jean-Paul Riopelle and his contemporaries timed to his centenary, is on at Le Diamant in Quebec City through Nov. 26. I wrote about the show when it was in Montreal earlier this year.
The Chutzpah! Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts, continues in Vancouver until Nov. 23. This week’s performances include When The Walls Come Down, a dance and deaf theatre collaboration performed in ASL with English voiceovers.
J. Kelly Nestruck