The Citadel Theatre’s next season will feature one of the 20th century’s iconic anti-heroes in its mainstage series. Willy Loman, the heartbreaking star of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, launches a lineup that includes Shakespeare, two recent Tony winners, a classic Broadway musical and a cult fave.
The lineup for the theatre’s 46th season, starting next fall, was announced by artistic director Bob Baker at a press conference on Wednesday morning.
Baker will direct Tom Wood as Willy Loman in the epochal 1949 Miller classic. Wood’s co-stars will include Brenda Bazinet as Linda Loman and John Ullyatt as Willy’s son Biff. Ullyatt will also return as the flamboyant Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the high-camp “˜70s musical extravaganza The Rocky Horror Show, directed by Leigh Rivenbark, a former artistic director of Theatre New Brunswick who’s now living in Alberta. The rising young star designer Cory Sincennes will collaborate with Rivenbark on the horror comedy.
God of Carnage, an elegantly acerbic, sophisticated 2009 comedy by the Parisian playwright Yasmina Reza (of Art fame) will be directed by James MacDonald. Final casting awaits. But Fiona Reid will play one of the wives in the two-couple drawing room piece, where all civility melts away in the aftermath of a schoolyard bullying incident.
Red, John Logan’s two-hander about the abstract artist Mark Rothko and his young, newly hired assistant, is the other Tony magnet. Kim Collier, whose dazzling Electric Company productiuon of Studies In Motion came to the Citadel earlier this season, will direct.
The Citadel returns to two shows, a Shakespeare and a Broadway musical, that the company produced earlier in the Baker regime, now 12 seasons. Tom Wood will direct Shakespeare’s most magical romantic comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Julien Arnold as Bottom. Baker himself will direct The Sound Of Music, with Rejean Cournoyer (Sweeney Todd, Beauty And The Beast) as Baron Von Trapp. Leslie Frankish, a frequent Baker collaborator on his largest-scale productions, will design the show.
The Citadel’s smallest stage, the Rice, will house three of the country’s most original theatrical talents, in shows they themselves perform. First up is the premiere of Penny Plain, the latest from the extraordinary Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, celebrating its 25th anniversary this season.
In addition to the new Burkett, set in a boarding house at the end of the world, the Rice season includes Daniel MacIvor’s latest, This Is What Happens Next, starring the man himself. A saucy risk-taking Toronto hit trailing New York raves is the third Rice show. Blind Date, by and starring Rebecca Northan, is different every night, since the heroine goes on a blind date with a different man, selected from the audience.
The Citadel’s family series includes The Sound of Music, the 12th return of A Christmas Carol (with Richard McMillan as Scrooge), and a production from Toronto’s Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young Audiences of Seussical The Musical, an intricate, light-footed musical compilation culled from the good doctor’s most famous stories.
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