Shadow Theatre’s new season
New season to include two comedies, solo play about Shakespeare-era actor
Shadow Theatre, currently celebrating its 20th anniversary with Little Elephants, turns 21 in 2012-2013. And under the artistic directorship of John Hudson, the Varscona-based company opens its season with an American comedy that ranks high in the likability factor.
Jack Goes Boating, a 2007 comedy by Bob Glaudini, is peopled with characters who are both romantically and professionally challenged. It premièred in New York as the work of the Labyrinth Theatre Company, much associated with the starry name Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played the title role. In the collaboration between Shadow and Calgary’s Sage Theatre, Garett Ross is the unprepossessing Jack, a questing limo driver longer on dreams than expertise in any number of fields. In Kelly Reay’s production, Frank Zotter is Jack’s best friend, who tries to cheer up his glum pal by setting him up, romantically, with an embalmer’s assistant. The play was treated affectionately by New York critics.
The season includes Carter Lewis’s Evie’s Waltz, an unusual American thriller in which a couple finds that their son has been caught with a gun at school. The focus of their predicament is a barbecue at which the kid’s fiery girlfriend appears. Coralie Cairns and Doug Mertz star as Clay’s parents; the Evie role has yet to be cast.
Shadow hosts a Calgary production of When That I Was. The star of the solo play by John Mortimer (of Rumpole fame) and the leading English actor Edward Atienza, set just after Shakespeare’s death, is a refugee actor from that illustrious company fallen on hard times. The Puritans have closed the theatres, and the aging Jack Rice is remembering the good times with Will and co., and in the process conjuring one of the culture’s momentous eras.
The season finale is the première of a new comedy by Shadow’s resident playwright David Belke. Casting for Hudson’s production of Flight of the Viscount includes Caley Suliak and Jamie Cavanagh.