The world premiere of ‘Fall on Your Knees’ and Oscar winner Tarell Alvin McCraney’s ‘Choir Boy’ highlight the new Canadian Stage season

Canadian Stage is charging back into post-lockdown programming for 2022-23 with its first full slate of shows since 2019.

“Our 22-23 programming offers a picture of where we are at right now as a society,” said artistic director Brendan Healy in a news release. “There is an immediacy to this collection of works that grapple in different ways with discussions about race, climate and political divisiveness that are dominating global conversations right now. These are all big plays, be it in scale, in content or in formal presentation.”

The season kicks off Sept. 20 to Oct. 2 with the English-language premiere of “Public Enemy” by Siminovitch Prize winner Olivier Choinière, which is set a family dinner and is described as “a play about polarization and the way that our interpersonal relationships are falling victim to the energy of the world right now.”

It’s followed by the Toronto premiere of “Choir Boy” by Oscar winner Tarell Alvin McCraney (Nov. 8 to 19). It follows a prep school senior, the leader of the school’s celebrated gospel choir, as he wrestles with his masculinity and sexuality.

The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes production “Little Dickens,” an adults-only spin on the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol,” runs Nov. 23 to Dec. 18.

The two-part “Fall on Your Knees,” based on the acclaimed 1996 novel by Ann-Marie MacDonald, will have its world premiere Jan. 20 to Feb. 5, 2023.

The play, presented in partnership with the National Arts Centre, Vita Brevis Arts, Neptune Theatre and the Grand Theatre, will be “an unmissable moment in Canadian theatre and the birth of a new classic,” the news release said.

Celebrated playwrights Hannah Moscovitch and Alisa Palmer have adapted MacDonald’s book following three generations of a Cape Breton Island family from the First World War through the Harlem jazz age.

Also part of the season are the Red Sky Performance work “Miigis: Underwater Panther” (Jan. 21 to 29); the Canadian premiere of “Are we not drawn onward to new erA” from Belgian company An Ontroerend Goed (Feb. 9 to 11); the Obsidian Theatre co-production of Pulitzer Prize winner “Fairview” by Jackie Sibblies Drury (March 4 to 26); and “Maanomaa, My Brother” by Tawiah M’Carthy, Brad Cook and Anne-Marie Donovan (April 11 to 30), presented with Blue Bird Theatre Collective.

The Platform Series, designed to introduce audiences to vanguard artists who push the boundaries of theatre, includes “Human Measure” by transgender visual artist Cassils (Oct. 27 to 29, 2022), in which the “Anthropometries” paintings of Yves Kline are reinterpreted through dance, and the Mayday Danse production “Cabaret Noir” by Mélanie Demers (Jan. 9 to 11, 2023), which takes inspiration from Le Bal Nègre, a famed Black cabaret club in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s.

Canadian Stage will also host three guest productions: Musical Stage Company’s “Kelly v. Kelly” by Britta Johnson and Sara Farb (May 26 to June 18, 2023), based on a scandalous 1915 battle between a mother and a daughter; Necessary Angel Theatre’s “New” by Pamela Mala Sinha (April 25 to May 14, 2023), about a Bengali bride joining an Indian family in the Midwest; and Théâtre français de Toronto’s “Un. Deux. Trois.” by Mani Soleymanlou (Oct. 13 to 16, 2022).

Tickets are now on sale for renewing subscribers, with new subscriptions on sale July 11 and single tickets July 26, 2022.

See canadianstage.com for information.

SHARE: