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The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience celebrates the work of the late Montreal singer-songwriter.Cylla von Tiedemann/Soulpepper

Summer cannot come soon enough for Soulpepper Theatre Company, the Toronto-based not-for-profit troupe whose past year was marked by giddy highs (a hit off-Broadway residency in July) and a stunning low (a sexual-harassment scandal that forced the departure of artistic director Albert Schultz in January).

On Monday, Soulpepper announced the details of its upcoming summer season. Three plays (including Sisters, a world-premiere adaptation of Edith Wharton’s pioneering novella Bunner Sisters) will share a schedule with the company’s popular concert programs. Among those music shows is The 27 Club, a new themed revue featuring the songs of Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and other tragic figures of popular music whose 27th birthday was their very last one.

The new work Sisters comes from Rosamund Small, the playwright who first gained notice with her verbatim play Performing Occupy Toronto and her site-specific work Vitals, about paramedics. Reading Wharton’s turn-of-the-20th-century story, Small was struck by the sense of frustration with marriage, the power of men and the general dreariness of the characters’ day-to-day lives. “All these women live in a domestic world that’s too small and too limited, and there’s a pulsing, urgent undertone of desire to be free,” said Small in a press release.

Soulpepper’s hot-weather season begins on July 6 with U.S. playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending romp Orlando: A Biography, which makes its Canadian premiere.

Next is Mark Crawford’s summer comedy Bed and Breakfast, a culture-clashing two-hander about city boys and small-town values.

“This season is a perfect summer-long microcosm of what Soulpepper does best,” said Alan Dilworth, acting artistic director. “A new generation of artists is reinterpreting great masters, with a lineup of plays and concerts that are collaborations between new and familiar faces.”

In addition to unveiling The 27 Club, Soulpepper brings back a pair of original concert shows. The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience celebrates the work of the late Montreal singer-songwriter. Already a part of the company’s spring schedule, A Moveable Feast: Paris in the ’20s examines the influence of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein on musicians following the First World War. The show opens for a week’s run on March 30, and returns in September.

Previously announced spring programming includes: Beverley Cooper‘s Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott, David Hirson’s La Bête, Judith Thompson’s After the Blackout and August Wilson’s acclaimed 1982 play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

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