11 stage shows we loved this year, from John to Life After
Some performances from 2017 confronted tough issues head on, while others simply soothed us
Much like this summer’s solar eclipse, some things hurt to look at directly. There were times when the world felt like that in 2017 and art acted as a soothing intermediary between us, the audience, and the pressing global and social issues on our minds.
The best theatre productions of 2017 sometimes confronted those issues directly, such as global warming, Indigenous relations with the rest of Canada, gender inequality, or the intersection of racism and sexism (and even how that applies to classical theatre). Others offered soothing snapshots of human existence, wondrously stylized technical wizardry or the joy of a pure, charismatic performance.
Either way, these are the productions we loved this year, in chronological order. We agreed on nine and each of us chose our own wild card favourite, making our top 10 actually a top 11. Each production, in its own way, made it easier for us to get through 2017.
John The Company Theatre’s production of Annie Baker’s play, directed by Jonathan Goad — the Toronto debut for the highly acclaimed American playwright — arrived early in 2017 and set the bar high for anything that followed. Baker’s tchotchke-filled B&B in small-town America opened up an endlessly mysterious and human world through the meeting of its inhabitants, Brooklyn couple on the rocks Eli and Jenny, proprietor Mertis and her blind friend Genevieve. The last two parts in particular, played by Nancy Beatty and Nora McLellan, proved why it’s such a shame so few meaty parts for older women actors are seen onstage. True Crime In this supercool, twisty-turny solo show, musician/actor Torquil Campbell staged his obsession with the German-born con man Christian Gerhartsreiter, keeping the audience guessing about which of his claims we could really believe. If you missed it the first time, Chris Abraham’s stylish production revisits Streetcar Crowsnest from Jan. 16 to 20 before runs in Calgary and Victoria. 887 The master at work. This unforgettable solo production is Quebecois auteur Robert Lepage’s meditation on the power and instability of memory, flashing back to his experience of the Quiet Revolution and forward to the present day, combining mordant wit and surprising self-revelation with breathtaking design. Globe-trotting since 2015, the production visits the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in January. Prince Hamlet To celebrate the 10th anniversary of his company Why Not Theatre, Ravi Jain continued his streak of being one of the most interesting theatrical minds in Toronto by blowing up what we thought a production of Hamlet could look or sound like. Casting across gender, racial and ability lines, rearranging the script and even translating pieces into American Sign Language performed by Dawn Jani Birley as Horatio (who won a Toronto Theatre Critics Award) made this Hamlet the year’s favourite Shakespeare. for colored girls . . . This welcome revival of Ntozake Shange’s 1970s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf blasted Soulpepper Theatre with the passionate, hilarious, angry voices of Black women. Djanet Sears’ stripped-back production focused attention on Shange’s varied text and seven galvanic performers. Soulpepper has a long way to go in terms of diversity and casting, but this production proved opening up their repertoire brings in an audience that really looks like Toronto. Bakkhai 2017 was the year that intimacy direction became a well-known practice in Canadian theatre and Jillian Keiley’s production of Bakkhai by Euripides (in an adaptation by Greek scholar and poet Anne Carson) at the Stratford Festival was a leader. That’s why its portrayal of sexuality — as ecstatic, violent, impotent and transformational acts — felt so impactful. Few performances have been so gutting, enjoyable and frightening as Mac Fyfe as Dionysus; so rapturous and tragic as Lucy Peacock as Agave; and so simultaneously enraging and sympathetic as Gordon S. Miller as the doomed King Pentheus. Middletown Perhaps no other production this year felt as calm and confident as the Shaw Festival’s version of Middletown by Will Eno, directed by Meg Roe. Presenting a snapshot of a small town in America, Eno’s play manages to span from the beginning of life to its end, from beneath the Earth into the atmosphere, and the Shaw’s ensemble guided the play to its lengths with simplicity, empathy, beauty and just enough absurdity. Tartuffe For the second time this year, director Chris Abraham proved he knows his way around a con game, infusing Molière’s classic satire of hypocrisy with Trumpian references, and orchestrating hilarious performances from a stacked Stratford Festival cast led by the sublime Tom Rooney. Standing ovations are a dime a dozen in GTA theatre, but the one for this show on opening night was a genuine, shared celebration of the joy theatre can bring. Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools This Buddies in Bad Times production directed by Erin Brubacher was like nothing else on a Toronto stage this year: a combination of storytelling, song and audience interaction in which Inuit performer/storyteller Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and queer theatre artist Evalyn Parry shared their personal stories and respective cultures.
Real ice, painted a mottled black, bordered the stage; the image of it slowly melting both underlined the production’s cautionary message about climate change and summed up the show’s effect: a slow, cool burn. WILD CARDS The Orange Dot Sean Dixon’s play about two city workers on a job site blew out into an archetypal battle of the sexes in ways I found somewhat implausible when I reviewed Vikki Anderson’s world premiere Theatrefront production at Streetcar Crowsnest in March.
But looked at from the tail end of this momentous year for gender relations, Dixon comes off like a soothsayer, from his finely nuanced observation of male-female interaction to a gory ending that is part triumph, part tragedy of wronged, vengeful women. —Karen Fricker Life After The Fringe Festival pipeline to funnel new musicals into the mainstream continued this year with this work from writer, lyricist and composer Britta Johnson, about a teenage girl grieving her self-help guru father. If Come From Away was the blockbuster hit south of the border to give Canadian musical theatre a boost in interest, we’re more than happy to have artists like Johnson reap the benefits. —Carly Maga