Six, the hit British musical that reimagines the wives of Henry VIII as a pop group, will have a Canadian production as a part of an all-musical 2023-2024 Mirvish Productions season.
The popular “her-story” show, with a clever and catchy Tony-winning score by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, is set to start an open-ended or what’s sometimes called a “sit-down” run in the Royal Alexandra Theatre in September, 2023.
A Canadian cast will first open Six in August at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton – where it previously appeared in 2019 as part of a pre-Broadway tour and received a four-star review in The Globe and Mail – and then transfer to Toronto.
The coming Mirvish main-stage season, announced by press release on Tuesday, also includes two musicals co-created by Canadians.
In Dreams, a new show by Schitt’s Creek writer David West Read built around the Roy Orbison’s catalogue, is set to open in Toronto in September after a world premiere at the Leeds Playhouse in England this summer.
The musical is described by Mirvish Productions as using Orbison tunes such as Crying and Oh, Pretty Woman to tell the story of “a country-rock singer who invites her old bandmates to join her for ‘the party of a lifetime’, while keeping her true motivations a secret.”
Read previously wrote the script for & Juliet – a jukebox musical and Shakespearean sequel of sorts also directed by Britain’s Luke Sheppard that recycled top pop hits by Swedish songwriter Max Martin. That show also had its North American premiere in Toronto, last summer, before transferring to Broadway where it has become the highest-grossing new musical this season in the New York commercial theatre district.
Jagged Little Pill, based on Alanis Morissette’s seminal 1990s album, and with a Tony-winning book by Diablo Cody (the screenwriter of Juno), is now getting a lengthier Toronto run from October to November.
This musical is a powerful show about a family dealing with issues such as sexual assault and addiction that will, as I wrote my review of its Broadway production, leave you feeling like Morissette’s famous sweater “as though you’ve been turned backwards and inside out.”
Jagged Little Pill was originally supposed to tour to Toronto as an off-subscription Mirvish “bonus” show for only a week in June, but that run has been cancelled in favour of director Diane Paulus’s production getting a place in the 2023-2024 main-stage season and a run of five to six weeks.
In its holiday slot, Mirvish Productions is once again bringing in a refashioned movie musical directed by Jonathan Church from Great Britain (after this season’s Singin’ in the Rain). Church’s new production of 42nd Street, a 1980 musical based on the 1933 movie musical of the same name, is set to premiere in Leicester in May and then play at Sadler’s Wells in London over the summer.
Two major hits that Mirvish Productions previously presented on their way to Broadway in 2013 will also return on tour in 2024.
Disney’s Aladdin, the stage adaptation of the animated movie directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw (The Drowsy Chaperone, The Book of Mormon), will be back in February of that year; then, that perennial favourite Les Miserables – in the retooled non-revolving production directed by James Powell and Laurence Connor – returns for a run next March.
Rounding out the next Mirvish main-stage season will be the North American tour of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which hits Toronto in June, 2024. This Tony-nominated biographical musical of the legendary rock-and-roll singer is written by playwright Katori Hall (The Mountaintop) and directed by Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!).
Mirvish Productions, which owns four theatres in downtown Toronto, does not typically announce which of its houses will host which shows at its season announcement.
The current plan, however, is to run Six at the 1,244-seat Royal Alexandra for as long as ticket sales keep it profitable and put In Dreams in the 700-seat CAA Theatre for an extended run in the fall.
The rest of the season is pencilled in for the 1938-seat Princess of Wales Theatre, where a touring production of Hamilton is currently playing through August.
This suggests that Mirvish Productions expects its open-ended Canadian-cast production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which broke a local box-office record over the holidays, to continue running well into next season; tickets are currently on sale to July 2, 2023.
The space crunch of Mirvish potentially having two open-ended runs on at once in September and the subscription season spilling over into to the CAA Theatre has delayed the announcement of the company’s Off-Mirvish season (which typically plays at the CAA Theatre).
Mirvish’s 2015 sale of that theatre – its smallest – to developers has recently been in the news as a proposal that would demolish the theatre is making its way through city approval.
Auditions for Six’s six main roles – Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr – will soon be announced.
Theatregoers can cross one possible contender off the list, however: Andrea Macasaet, the Winnipegger who originated the role of Boleyn in the Broadway production, is otherwise occupied, slated to play Mimi in Rent at the Stratford Festival from April 8 to Oct. 28.