Not-for-profit theatre company Canadian Stage's 2023-2024 season includes the Broadway favourite The Lehman Trilogy, which tells the story of investment firm Lehman Brothers – from its founding in 1847 up until its 2008 bankruptcy.
Canadian Stage is back in the embrace of Broadway again.
The Toronto not-for-profit theatre company’s coming 2023-2024 season, set to be announced publicly on Wednesday, centres around large-scale productions of New York commercial hits The Lehman Trilogy and The Inheritance, the two most recent winners of best new play at the Tony Awards.
There was a time in the 1990s and early 2000s when this programming would not have been particularly surprising, but the aesthetic of Toronto’s largest not-for-profit theatre company took a turn toward more unpredictable fare in 2010, when Matthew Jocelyn took over as its leader.
Canadian Stage’s current artistic director, Brendan Healy, says next season’s programming is less about a return to form, however, than about the evolving styles and subject matter that now make it to the so-called Great White Way.
“We’re seeing a shift on Broadway in terms of what’s considered a Broadway show,” Healy says. “The Lehman Trilogy is a great example of that. Fifteen, 20 years ago, that wouldn’t necessarily be a Broadway show.”
The Lehman Trilogy, adapted by Ben Power from an Italian play by Stefano Massini, has been a huge success since it made its English-language premiere at Britain’s National Theatre in 2018, in a production directed by Sam Mendes that eventually transferred stateside.
It tells the story of the American investment firm Lehman Brothers – from its founding by three immigrant brothers in 1847 up until its 2008 bankruptcy – in a way Healy calls “complex, illuminating and at times a bit frightening.” This Canadian premiere of the show, set for November, will be directed by Philip Akin in the Bluma Appel Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre, and star Jordan Pettle, Graeme Somerville and Ben Carlson.
Canadian Stage is also bringing Tony Award winner The Inheritance to its stage. The two-part, six-hour epic looks at love between gay men in New York a generation after the height of the AIDS crisis.
As for The Inheritance, this two-part, six-hour play by American playwright Matthew Lopez also premiered in London in 2018, at the edgy Young Vic, before moving to Broadway. Inspired by the 1910 novel Howard’s End, Lopez’s sprawling epic looks at love between gay men in New York a generation after the height of the AIDS crisis.
Healy himself will be directing this one in the Bluma in March, 2024, with a cast that includes the Stratford Festival’s Qasim Khan, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff and Antoine Yared, as well as playwright Daniel MacIvor in a rare performance outside of his own work
It will be, believe it or not, Healy’s directorial debut on the Bluma stage. Though he was appointed artistic director back in 2018, the current Canadian Stage season is the first full season that he and executive director Monica Esteves have been able to see through from start to finish because of the pandemic.
In terms of the company’s recovery from that crisis, Esteves says it has hit all of its box-office targets this season, and will end up with an attendance upward of 50,000 for its indoor programming, plus another 25,000 or so for Shakespeare in High Park. She says she expects the company will be back to more than 100,000 in attendance, its ideal level, next season.
Financially, Canadian Stage is in good shape despite the financial challenges of inflation. ”A show this season – the same show would have cost 35 per cent less if we produced it two and a half years ago,” Esteves says.
Also scheduled for the fall on the big Bluma stage in 2023-2024: Canadian Stage will present the latest from internationally acclaimed choreographer Akram Khan – a family show called Jungle Book Reimagined – and a brand-new, still untitled work co-created by Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, the Canadian team behind the Olivier Award-winning Betroffenheit.
The Quote Unquote Collective will premiere its latest creation, the intriguingly titled Universal Child Care.
Over at the more intimate Berkeley Street Theatre, Canadian Stage’s season will begin in September with Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’s classic 2001 play about a pair of African-American brothers named Lincoln and Booth (which also happens to have been just revived on Broadway). Tawiah M’Carthy directs.
Red Sky Performance, the in-demand Indigenous performance troupe, will return in November with a piece called Red Sky at Night. Back to Back Theatre will visit from Australia in January with The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, a collectively written piece described as being about human rights and artificial intelligence performed by neurodivergent actors.
Then in February, 2024, a big one on the smaller stage: The Quote Unquote Collective – founded by Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken, the minds and bodies behind the international hit Mouthpiece – will premiere its latest creation, intriguing titled Universal Child Care.
In April, the CS Platform performance series will see short runs of Searching for Eastman by Charles Smith and Nomada, co-created by Diana Lopez and Alejandro Ronceria.
Subscriptions for the coming season are now on sale to donors and members, and will go on sale to current subscribers on April 12. Single ticket sales start May 30.