WAIT FOR IT, TORONTO
Canadian premiere of Hamilton is the highlight of the new Mirvish season,
If you’ve been feeling “Helpless” about the musical theatre offerings in Toronto, don’t throw away your shot to finally be “Satisfied” and in “The Room Where It Happens,” because musical theatre fans won’t have to “Wait for It” much longer.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical theatre juggernaut Hamil
ton will finally have its Canadian premiere in Toronto’s Ed Mirvish Theatre from February to May 2020, Mirvish Productions announced Wednesday.
Mirvish says the best way to get tickets to the 11-time Tony Award winner that caused an international craze is to subscribe to its main 2019/2020 season, which is capped at 47,000 seats and with a price range of $290 to $790 for six productions.
The approximately 46,000 current subscribers can renew until March 1; John Karastamatis, Mirvish director of sales and marketing, says that usually happens at a rate of 80 per cent, potentially leaving more than 10,000 subscriptions available. Starting today, nonsubscribers can sign up on a first-come, first-served basis for the remaining subscriptions.
Further information about how to get Hamilton tickets will be released later in the year, but the tour’s stop in Ottawa from May 19 to June 14, 2020, makes a Toronto extension unlikely.
Besides Hamilton, Mirvish’s main subscription season includes last year’s Tony darling
The Band’s Visit, which won 10 awards including Best Musical, Direction, Book, Score, Actor and Actress for Tony Shalhoub and Katrina Lenk. The musical, based on a 2007 Israeli film with music and lyrics by David Yazbek and a book by Itamar Moses, opens this September at the Ed Mirvish Theatre.
Another Broadway favourite of past and present comes to Toronto with the 2017 Jerry Zaks revival of Jerry Herman and Marcel Stewart’s Hello,
Dolly! Toronto won’t see Bette Midler or Bernadette Peters in the role of matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi as Broadway did (nor its originator, Carol Channing, who died last month at 97), but the touring production currently stars musical theatre vet Betty Buckley (a 1983 Tony winner as Grizabella in Cats). It plays the Princess of Wales Theatre in March and April 2020.
The Princess of Wales Theatre will host Girl From the North
Country this fall, featuring Bob Dylan’s musical catalogue and playwright Connor McPherson
as book writer and director, about a down-and-out family in small-town Minnesota in 1934. It was originally planned as part of the current season, but was replaced by Sting’s The Last Ship.
Also in Mirvish’s main subscription season is Anastasia, the musicalized adaptation of the 1997 animated film about the potential last surviving Romanov by Terrence McNally, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty ( Ragtime), which received a lukewarm reception on Broadway in 2017.
Piaf/Dietrich will get its Toronto premiere starring Canadians Louise Pitre as Edith Piaf and Jayne Lewis as Marlene Dietrich. Adapted by Canadian playwright Erin Shields from the German play Spatz und En
gel ( The Angel and the Sparrow) by Daniel Grosse Boymann and Thomas Kahry, it’s about the long and intense friendship between the two artists.
The Off-Mirvish series returns with another big name from page and screen: writer Emma Donoghue famously adapted her 2010 novel Room into an award-winning film in 2015 and then a stage play in 2017, which will arrive at the CAA Theatre in March and April 2020 in a co-production with Covent Garden Productions and the Grand Theatre in London, Ont. The production features songs by Cora Bissett and Kathryn Joseph.
Off-Mirvish partners Studio 180 Theatre return with Paula Vogel’s Indecent, which tells the behind-the-scenes story of the artists who staged Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance on Broadway in 1923, which got them arrested and convicted of obscenity. The play was described as anti-Semitic and amoral for placing Jewish characters in a brothel, having a Torah thrown across the stage, and featuring a same-sex, female romance and Broadway’s first lesbian kiss. The New York Times called Indecent “virtuous, sturdily assembled, informative and brimming with good faith.”
The Off-Mirvish series also includes a discovery from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Belgian writer Carly Wij’s Us/ Them, about the 2004 Beslan school siege in which Ingush and Chechen terrorists took 1,200 people hostage in a Russian school for three days — over 700 of them children, 186 of whom were killed. It’s told from the matter-of-fact perspective of two kids who were there.
Finally, Mirvish will present three productions outside of either subscription series: Opera Atelier’s version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats and Cameron Mackintosh’s renewal of The Phantom of the Opera, which last appeared in Toronto last June.
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga