Petty’s holiday pantos are returning to Toronto
Stage impresario will be executive producer emeritus with Canadian Stage, which is taking over program
Canadian Stage’s 2024-25 season will see the return of Toronto’s holiday pantomime tradition, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play and a production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in High Park.
The lineup, unveiled Monday, is headlined by “The Wizard of Oz: A Holiday Musical Panto for All,” running at the Winter Garden Theatre from Dec. 6 to Jan. 5, 2025.
Canadian Stage announced that, in its upcoming season, it will take over Toronto’s holiday panto productions, which were helmed for a quarter-century by theatre impresario Ross Petty.
The company said the pantos will be “a complementary and permanent addition to the Canadian Stage seasons.” The new production — of “The Wizard of Oz” — will be directed by Ted Dykstra, artistic director of the Coal Mine Theatre, and is set to star Dan Chameroy, who will return to his panto role as the audience-favourite Plumbum.
Petty, who staged his final panto in 2022 with his own company, will take on the title of executive producer emeritus as the theatrical tradition transitions to Canadian Stage.
“I’ve had a privileged career as a performer having appeared on Broadway, London’s West End and the Lido in Paris. But what I’m most proud of is having introduced the magic of live theatre to thousands of children and their families over my 25 years at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre Centre,” Petty said in a statement. “I’m delighted that Canadian Stage will breathe new life into my legacy and continue producing pantos for years to come.”
The Canadian Stage season will kick off this summer with a production of “Hamlet,” directed by Jessica Carmichael and mounted in High Park as part of Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park programming. The play will run outdoors at the High Park amphitheatre from July 21 to Sept. 1.
“Hamlet” will be complemented later in the season by the Canadian premiere of “Fat Ham,” a bold reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy set during a backyard barbecue in the American South. Written by playwright James Ijames, the work earned the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2022. The production will run from Feb. 15 to March 9, 2025 at the Berkeley Street Theatre.
The Canadian Stage season will also include “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” a stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s novel of the same name, starring Maev Beaty. The play will run from Oct. 18 to Nov. 3.
Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” will run from Jan. 18 to Feb. 2, and will feature a pair of real-life couples: TV star Paul Gross and Martha Burns along with Hailey Gillis and Mac Fyfe.
The two-part epic “Mahabharata,” meanwhile, will make its Toronto premiere at the Bluma Appel
Theatre in April 2025 after first opening to critical acclaim at the Shaw Festival in 2023.
The Berkeley Street Theatre will also host “1939,” which premiered at the Stratford Festival in 2022 and will arrive in Toronto this fall.
Set in a fictional residential school, the play by Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan follows a group of Indigenous students and their teacher as they stage a production of Shakespeare’s “All’s Well that End’s Well.”
That production will be followed by “Playing Shylock,” a one-man show by Vancouver playwright Mark Leiren-Young. Later in January, Canadian theatre stars Diego Matamoros and Nancy Palk will join forces in the satire “Winter Solstice” by German writer Roland Schimmelpfennig.