Arts Club Theatre Company comes back strong with new plays, large musicals for 2022-23 season
Slapstick Brit comedy Peter Pan Goes Wrong kicks off full live programming across three theatres
Citadel Theatre’s production of Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the comedy that opens the Arts Club season in September.
THE ARTS CLUB THEATRE Company has announced a full return to all three of its venues for the 2022–23 season, launching in September with a large-scale comedy that was a hit in London’s West End.
The company announced a roster of 13 shows for its 59th season–only slightly down from its pre-pandemic average of 15. The lineup includes four brand-new works by local playwrights as part of the Arts Club’s Silver Commissions program, as well as a few big, anchor musicals. Offerings include a show celebrating the music of Carole King, a classic Sense and Sensibility, a new creation by old favourites Mom’s the Word, and a rendition of The Sound of Music at holiday time.
It’s a major step forward for a company that was forced to shut down for months at a time, then pivoted to podcasts and staging solo shows amid reduced audience capacities.
“We just had to make bold decisions and go with them,” executive director Peter Cathie White tells Stir. “The work we continued to do through the pandemic was not financially sustainable, but was artistically important. And it was important for us to say ‘The arts is still here and we're not going anywhere and we're coming back.’ That was important for our staff to hear from us during this pandemic.
“We are determined to stage theatre—even when something comes that none of us expected,” he adds. “We continued to do it during the pandemic in a small way and I think that approach really helped us build confidence for being able to come back in a larger way now.”
The season kicks off September 8 with Peter Pan Goes Wrong–a coproduction with the Citadel Theatre that brings the zany slapstick British comedy here. Replete with falling props and missed cues, it’s the brainchild of Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, and Jonathan Sayer, of the U.K.’s Mischief Theatre Worldwide, whose wildly popular “Goes Wrong” formula started with the award-winning The Play That Goes Wrong. It had originally been slotted for summer 2020, and Cathie White is excited to finally see it come to life on the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage. He adds it will set a celebratory tone for the season.
“It is a local production, with local actors and set designers, but we are working with the original U.K. producers as well,” he shares with Stir. “Maybe this show could have a life beyond this production in North America. It’s been a really good learning experience for us to be working with a new producer.
Peter Cathie White
“I went to see the show in Edmonton in March,” he adds, referring to the North American opening of the coproduction that will come here, “and it was a hoot and was so much fun. We knew we wanted to start the season with something that we think has artistic merit but is hugely entertaining. That’s the public mood at the moment. We want to come back with a bang and we think this is the perfect production for that. It’s a big, large-scale production–things go wrong so it has to be!–and it’s got a big cast and is a big investment for the company.”
Elsewhere at the Stanley, artistic director Ashlie Corcoran helms the holiday production of The Sound of Music, opening November 10. The new year brings a major new stage adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s celebrated Forgiveness, based on the true story of his maternal grandfather, who was a prisoner of war in Japan during the Second World War, and his paternal grandmother, whose Japanese-Canadian family were interned here. It’s a joint production with Theatre Calgary. Later in the spring, watch for a Rachel Peake-directed version of Sense and Sensibility, based on the Jane Austen novel; Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride, about a young Elvis Presley impersonator whose path to prosperity is becoming a lip-syncing drag queen; and a Corcoran-helmed production of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
With a goal to, as Cathie White puts it, embrace the identities and idiosyncrasies of its three venues, the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage launches October 27 with the new Mom’s the Word: Talkin’ Turkey, the latest installment from the beloved collective that will run right through the Christmas holidays. And Mindy Parfitt directs the world premiere of Vancouver-based Michele Riml and Michael St. John Smith’s much-anticipated The Cull, January 26 to February 26, 2023. That’s followed by Andrea Menard’s musical celebrating her Métis culture, Rubaboo, and the jukebox musical Million Dollar Quartet, featuring the music of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins.
And the Newmont Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre features more bold, new, and unexpected fare than ever. Says Cathie White: “We want to attract a different audience to the Newmont Stage with programming that does push the boundaries. It’s important, and we wanted to come back and make that a big part of our 2022-23 season.”
Setting that mood, the theatre kicks off its season with Amy Lee Lavoie and Omari Newton’s Redbone Coonhound, a hard-hitting comedic take on race, privilege, and power. It’s an Arts Club Silver Commission that’s part of a rolling world premiere with Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre and Montreal’s Imago Theatre. Vancouver theatre artist Kyle Loven’s interactive cult hit Me Love Bingo! takes centre stage all December with Best in Snow. And then, in the new year, Corcoran helms a rendition of Teenage Dick, a collaboration with Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival and Realwheels Theatre. The buzzed-about play transposes Shakespeare's tragedy to a modern high school, focusing on a student with cerebral palsy. In notes on the show, the director writes, “When I read the script, I laughed so much I was crying. The play dazzles, delights, and with alacrity brings us to a shocking conclusion.”
Subscriptions are available now at artsclub.com or by calling 604-687-1644. Single tickets will go on sale to the general public in the summer.
Cathie White admits it will be a challenge getting big productions back on stage again. The Arts Club Theatre Company continues to operate at a reduced size. And he confirms that the arts scene here has lost some of its talent through the two years of upheaval and forced shutdowns of venues.
“That is a real thing—and not just onstage; it’s backstage and in arts administration,” he says. “This has been quite devastating in terms of artists not being able to live, and administration having uncertainty. Some have had to move into other positions, or other careers.
“There has been a shift, especially, from artists that we worked with in the past that are no longer in the industry. There are always new artists, and we’re trying to encourage them, but it's not easy. It’s difficult,” he adds. “And I think, with the pandemic, the one thing I really dislike is that uncertainty it gave us, in particular. That's why we wanted to come back strong, because we feel that commitment to give artists employment in this community, to give them that continuity, to not have more people leave.”
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