Soulpepper to remount hits in new season

Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company will remount four of its successful productions from this year, including Billy Bishop Goes to War, in its 2010 season.

Artistic director Albert Schultz announced the coming season on Tuesday.

David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol also are returning for a second season.

Billy Bishop, the 1978 play about a First World War pilot that was successfully revived by Eric Peterson and John Gray in 2009, will also fly again, in January. It was the first Soulpepper play to sell every seat, Schultz told CBC News.

Schultz said he was boosting production of Canadian theatre classics, in part because of the warm response to Billy Bishop.

'Inherited gems'

Soulpepper was formed 12 years ago with the intent to revive classic plays, and has reached back 20 to 35 years to choose its Canadian classics.

"So many theatre companies are doing great work with new Canadian plays," Schultz said. "But what happens to them afterwards to those inherited gems of our dramatic past?"

What Soulpepper wants to do is "canonize these plays by putting them in the context of great plays from around the world," he said, adding that each Canadian play would get the same resources as the international classics.

Schultz has chosen plays from playwrights across the country:

• Doc by Sharon Pollock, which first played in 1984 in Calgary.
• Jitters by David French, which has had numerous productions since first opening in Toronto in 1979.
• Waiting for the Parade by John Murrell, first produced in 1977 in Calgary.

The Toronto company started programming Canadian work with David French's Leaving Home in 2007 and has since completed French's Mercer Trilogy with Of the Fields Lately and Salt-Water Moon.

"I've seen the effect it's had on David French, as someone who has contributed so much to this country. He was so engaged with the process and he was energized by it," Schultz said.

Audiences also responded to a Canadian voice, he said, adding that Soulpepper intends to keep programming Canadian classics.

The season includes a total of 12 productions, including a trio of plays about war. Billy Bishop is followed by a lighter play about the First World War, Oh What a Lovely War, a musical by Joan Littlewood, Theatre Workshop and Charles Chilton. And Waiting for the Parade, Murrell's work, is a story of two women during the Second World War.

The rest of the season has:

• Oh What a Lovely War, a musical production by Joan Littlewood, Theatre Workshop and Charles Chilton.
• Death of a Salesman, the American classic by Arthur Miller.
• Faith Healer, by Ireland's Brian Friel.
• A Month in the Country, by Russia's Ivan Turgenev.
• What the Butler Saw, a comedy by Joe Orton.

Only one of these plays was written before the turn the century A Month in the Country, which is to be presented in a new adaptation by a Canadian writer.

That is in part because older classics tend to have larger casts and Soulpepper, like many theatre companies that rely on endowments for their funding, is trying to adapt to today's economic realities.

Surplus expected

Schultz said the company should finish this year with a small surplus, but the revenue from its endowment is negligible. It is presenting more plays, with smaller casts, to keep costs down and still draw audiences.

But a special fund donated by one philanthropist is giving the company the leeway to do some more experimental production with its Soulpepper Academy, a nine-member group of working artists.

In addition to the season, three additional productions will be mounted this year with academy.

Among them are two new works, a play called Window on Toronto being written by the actors and a play based on the short story The Aleph, written by Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges.

The third piece, being developed by playwright-in-residence Daniel Brooks and the Soulpepper Academy, is a non-traditional mounting of The Cherry Orchard.

"What this does is allows us to explore plays with these resources in ways that would be too risky and expensive to produce on the main stage," Schultz said.