Leah Cherniak will direct a new family musical for the National Arts Centre.SIMON HAYTER/The Globe and Mail
With 40 years of shows in the books, the National Arts Centre's English Theatre is looking eagerly ahead to future generations in its 41st season.
Youth and family are dominant themes for the 2010-2011 season, which begins in October with family rivalry and star-crossed love in Romeo and Juliet. The production also marks the full-season debut for the Ottawa-based NAC's new 18-member Acting Company, which has been reformed after a two-decade absence.
In January, Seana McKenna takes centre stage in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and a new translation of Michel Tremblay's Saint Carmen of the Main, featuring the acting company, will move to Ottawa in mid-March after first appearing at Canadian Stage in Toronto.
The NAC's Theatre 5 season is rounded out by a pair of offerings for patrons of any age. A new family musical by Vancouver's Peter Anderson, nativity: a coyote's christmas, will be directed by Leah Cherniak. The show i think i can is a hip-hop and tap-dancing musical with no dialogue by Florence Gibson and Shawn Byfield, which made its debut at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People in Toronto.
"Florence had this idea three or four years ago that perhaps the greatest expression of Einstein's theory of relativity is tap dancing - the speed of light, motion - it's an incredible thing that the human body can do," artistic director Peter Hinton said.
Vern Thiessen's Vimy, set in the wake of the historic Canadian battle, starts the Studio 3 series and is the first co-production between the NAC and Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company. Agokwe, a winner of six Dora Awards by young Ojibwa artist Waawaate Fobister, comes to Ottawa from Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in February, telling a tale of two young men trying to come to terms with being gay on a native reserve. And Sheldon Currie's Lauchie, Liza & Rory, a Cape Breton comedy set in a 1940s coal mining town from Mulgrave Road Theatre and Frankie Productions, appears in April, 2011.
The final family offering is Tales of the Moon, a three-province collaboration for young people by Philippe Soldevila, inspired by Pere Calders's short stories.
"I think youth is a very important aspect of the future of theatre," Hinton said. "What a society is, is often dictated by how it treats its young."