| Daniel MacIvor, the Old Trout Puppet Workshop… no we’re not discussing this year’s High Performance Rodeo, we’re talking about next season at Alberta Theatre Projects.
ATP artistic director Bob White has evidently had an eye on the experimental theatre festival next door – his planning for 2004 - 2005 includes a new (family) show by the indefatigable Old Trouts and a (non-experimental) play by the prolific MacIvor.
They join a production of a hit Irish comedy, a musical tribute to Joni Mitchell and a revival of that delightful piano-lesson memoir, 2 Pianos, 4 Hands, along with the 19th edition of playRites, to make up ATP’s 33rd season.
Stones in His Pockets, Marie Jones’s acclaimed two-hander about a couple of County Kerry lads who have a brush with on-location Hollywood, will open the season in September. A long-running hit in London, the show is closing in on its fourth year in the West End.
It’s followed in October by Joni Mitchell: River, a theatrical concert that gives the great Canadian singer-songwriter that old Jacques Brel is Alive and Well treatment, spotlighting 28 of her songs in an intimate setting with three actor-singers and a musical quartet. The show has been devised by director Allen MacInnis, who last gave ATP a pocket-sized production of My Fair Lady.
For the annual Christmas holiday presentation, the Old Trouts will put their own spin on the most famous of puppet tales, Carlo Collodi’s classic children’s novel Pinocchio. Don’t expect Disney – or Roberto Benigni, for that matter.
The Enbridge playRites Festival in February will once again mount premières of three new English-Canadian plays and one new French-Canadian play in translation. The three Anglo works are Get Away by Greg MacArthur, Mick Unplugged by Greg Nelson and The Myth of Summer by Conni Massing, author of the 1999 playRites hit The Aberhart Summer. The French play is the outrageous marital comedy The Leisure Society by François Archambault (of 15 Seconds fame), which – to judge from its staged reading this winter – may well be the most controversial work at next year’s festival.
Audiences who know MacIvor as the man who created Monster will see a more sensitive side to the Toronto-based, Nova Scotia-bred playwright when his sibling comedy-drama Marion Bridge runs next April. The play, first produced in 1998 by Nova Scotia’s Mulgrave Road Theatre, was recently turned into a film starring Molly Parker.
Closing out the season will be the return of 2 Pianos, 4 Hands, Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt’s hilarious, insightful account of growing up hunched over the keyboard, which was a smash success across Canada and at ATP, where it was presented in 1996.
For brochures and tickets, call ATP at 294-7402 or go to www.ATPlive.com.
CALGARY OPERA
Calgary Opera has also announced its plans for next season, when it will be temporarily homeless due to major renovations of the Jubilee Auditorium, as well as for its "coming home" season in 2005 - 2006. Both lineups show a slant toward modern and contemporary work, including the cabaret classics of Kurt Weill and an operatic version of Dead Man Walking.
The 2004 - 2005 season opens in October at the Jack Singer Concert Hall with a semi-staged production of Lakmé, Léo Delibes’s tragic opera set in British-occupied India, followed by a string of vocal recitals in the Eckhardt-Grammatte Hall at the University of Calgary, featuring Laura Whalen of Filumena fame and Marc Hervieux (November 25), Valdine Anderson and Kimberly Barber (February 3) and John Tessier (May 5). There will also be a special Family Day show on February 21 in the Martha Cohen Theatre that includes Turtle Wakes, a musical retelling of the Frank Slide tragedy by Calgary composer Allan Bell and playwright Rick McNair.
In March, the opera ventures into cabaret territory with an evening of Weill built around the songs of The Seven Deadly Sins, the composer’s final collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, and starring mezzo-soprano Jean Stilwell. It will run at the Calgary Petroleum Club.
The company returns to the Jube and grand opera in 2005 - 2006, with productions of Puccini’s Turandot, Mozart’s The Magic Flute and, sandwiched between, the Canadian première of Dead Man Walking, American composer Jake Heggie’s Death Row opera based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean, which also inspired the 1995 Tim Robbins film.
Tickets for the 2004 - 2005 season go on sale June 1 through Ticketmaster. |
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