SOLID LINEUP AT CENTAUR
Lots to see in 50th season
Centaur Theatre has unveiled its 50th anniversary season. It’s the first to be put together by Eda Holmes, the Shaw Festival’s erstwhile associate director who took over Centaur’s reins last year.
As well as revealing six main productions of what is being called the Essential Series — the usual Centaur slots for outside companies are being called the Presenting Series and the Guests of Centaur Series — there’s a new item on the menu called the Legacy Series. This will be a series of staged readings of some of the glories of Centaur’s last half century.
First up in the Essential Series is a 2013 play from the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Moonlight. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy (Oct. 9 to 28) is set in an African-American boys’ school and revolves around the choir’s star singer pushing back against gay slurs. First produced in Washington and featuring live gospel and R&B renditions, its Canadian première will be directed by Mike Payette, whose multi-META-winning production of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna plays at the Centaur this May.
Choir Boy is followed by Holmes’s production of The Children (Nov. 6 to 25), a British play from Lucy Kirkwood, whose political drama Chimerica won Best New Play at the 2014 Oliver Awards. Despite the title, The Children is about a trio of seniors dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear power station disaster.
The new year opens with a oneman show written and performed by Torquil Campbell, lead singer of Montreal-based indie group Stars. True Crime (Jan. 8 to 27, 2019) is based on the remarkable life of American con man Christian Gerhartsreiter, and is structured like the kind of verbatim meta-theatre for which its director, Chris Abraham of Crow ’s Theatre, is renowned.
The second production of the season to be directed by Holmes will be Stratford Festival hit The Last Wife (Feb. 12 to March 3, 2019), written by the Shaw Festival’s current associate director, Kate Hennig. A contemporary take on the woman who managed to evade both Henry VIII’s divorce courts and his chopping block, it received a reading here last year as part of Imago Theatre’s Her Side of the Story event.
Morris Panych’s The Shop Lifters (March 19 to April 7, 2019) steals the limelight next. Panych, whose In Absentia played at this theatre in 2012, has re-written his comedy about haves and have-nots with a distinctly Montreal flavour, recasting two of its quartet of characters as English-speaking francophones.
The season winds up with spring — and a spot of improvised romance — in the air as Rebecca Northan’s wonderful piece of entertainment, Blind Date (April 9 to 28, 2019) books a table on the stage. It’s ostensibly a one-woman show, but its irresistible selling point is that it invites a different audience member up on stage every night to co-star with its jilted clown-like heroine.
The Presenting Series will include the usual Centaur events like Urban Tales, the Wildside Festival and Brave New Looks, which this year will be taken by a revival of The Tashme Project (Nov. 15 to 25), the META-winning “living history” play about the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War.
The Guests of Centaur Series will include Imago Theatre, Black Theatre Workshop, TOHU and a new partnership with Opéra de Montréal, while the Legacy Series will lead with a staged reading of David Fennario’s groundbreaking bilingual comedy-drama Balconville (Sept. 27 to 29), continuing with Bowser and Blue’s Schwartz the Musical (Dec. 13 to 15), during which the duo will provide live music. The series will also include a look into the future with a yet to be produced play. Whatever it is, it will be guaranteed a place as part of the legacy of Centaur’s next 50 years.
It’s just been announced that Robert Lepage’s upcoming Stratford Festival production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus will play in French at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in January. This is in addition to the reprise of Lepage’s autobiographical solo piece, 887, which plays TNM this October.