Busy season ahead for Vancouver stages
High-profile personnel changes at three local companies
The Vancouver Fringe Festival kicks off the fall theatre season (Sept. 7-17) with 100 shows around Granville Island and across the city. It will be the last fringe for executive director David Jordan, one of three high-profile changes at the top for local companies.
Ashlie Corcoran, Bill Millerd’s successor at the Arts Club, won’t begin programming until next season. Millerd’s farewell fall opens with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Perestroika, the sequel to last year’s great Arts Club production of Millennium Approaches, and Thanks for Giving, a premiere from multi-talented Kevin Loring, who moves to Ottawa this month to run the National Arts Centre’s new Indigenous Theatre Department.
Replacing Katrina Dunn as artistic director of Touchstone Theatre, Roy Surette directs Touchstone’s season-opener, Pamela Sinha’s Happy Place at the Firehall Arts Centre, which celebrates its 35th anniversary with an all-Canadian fall.
The Cultch’s mix of local, national and international work includes the premiere of 1 Hour Photo by Vancouver’s Tetsuro Shigematsu, whose Empire of the Son was last season’s surprise hit; Australian feminist hip hoppers Hot Brown Honey; and Little Dickens, a new Christmas play from Toronto puppet master Ronnie Burkett. It stars Burkett and the fabulous puppet cast of his adults-only Daisy Theatre, which has sold out The Cultch for four years running.
Pacific Theatre’s fall highlight, dark Irish comedy The Lonesome West, marks the return of another perennial local favourite, English playwright Martin McDonagh.
The season’s standout musicals are also returns: remounts of the brilliant Onegin by local geniuses Ami Gladstone and Veda Hille at the Arts Club with a suburban tour to follow, and Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music from Patrick Street Productions at Richmond’s Gateway Theatre.
For the kids, Carousel Theatre’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe plays at the Waterfront, and Where the Wild Things Are is at North Van’s Presentation House Theatre.
HERE ARE OUR TOP PICKS: MAINSTREAM
Angels in America: Perestroika Until Oct. 8 | Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage Tickets and info: artsclub.com
Part Two of Tony Kushner’s remarkable American epic, Perestroika is a play about love and forgiveness, AIDS and angels, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and the fate of Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s earliest mentor. The Arts Club’s Part One won Jessies for best production and best actor (Damien Atkins) last year. Atkins is back with the rest of the superb cast and director Kim Collier. A must-see.
INDIE
The Ridiculous Darkness
Nov. 11-19 | Annex Theatre
Tickets and info: alleytheatre. wixsite.com
Two of the city’s cutting-edge companies, Alley Theatre and Neworld Theatre, collaborate on German dramatist Wolfram Lotz’s play, described as an irreverent mash-up of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. Notable performers in this journey from piracy in Somalia to the war in Afghanistan to the darkness of the human heart include Munish Sharma, Emilie Leclerc and Daniel Arnold.
WILD CARD
Happy Place
Oct. 20-29 | Firehall Arts Centre
Tickets and info: firehallartscentre
Roy Surette directs an extraordinary group of seven diverse actresses including Nicola Cavendish, Sereana Malani, Laara Sadiq and Colleen Wheeler, in this Touchstone Theatre/Ruby Slippers Theatre/Diwali Fest production of Pamela Mala Sinha’s play about women in a trauma centre.