Angels in America on track to touch down in Toronto again in 2023

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Angels in America looks set to crash back onto Toronto stages in 2023.

A new production of American playwright Tony Kushner’s two-part epic is in the works for next fall from That Theatre Company, a brand-new theatre company being launched by actor and cookie entrepreneur Craig Pike.

Originally from Newfoundland, Pike is an actor who spent many seasons at the Shaw Festival. He is also the long-time artistic director and conductor of That Choir, an a cappella chamber choir with a similarly hard-to-Google name.

These days, however, he is best known as the founder of Craig’s Cookies, a growing tasty-treat empire that now operates out of six locations.

You might say Pike is pivoting back into theatre as artistic director of That Theatre Company.

Casting calls posted publicly on Facebook suggest the company is aiming to launch in the spring of the new year with a new production of Caryl Churchill’s sci-fi play A Number.

But then in November and December of 2023 it plans to really go big with Angels in America: Parts 1 & 2, which is being staged in association with Buddies in Bad Times, the city’s venerable queer theatre.

This seminal pair of 1990s plays – subtitled Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, respectively – were last produced in Toronto by Soulpepper in 2013, directed by Albert Schultz. Before that, Canadian Stage put on the plays in 1997, directed by Bob Baker.

The production from the Craig’s Cookies creator might cleanse the palate of those older ones, which are well-remembered but not often talked about these days, owing to the circumstances surrounding Schultz’s departure from Soulpepper in 2018, and Baker’s expulsion from the Canadian Actors’ Equity Association in 2019.

Opening this week

• Dodi and Diana, which is written by U.S.-based Canadian playwright Kareem Fahmy, involves a Wall Street banker, a Hollywood starlet and a re-examination of the 1997 car accident that killed Diana, Princess of Wales and “made the world stand still.” Colt Coeur is currently producing the world premiere at HERE in New York (to Oct. 29). (The Stratford Festival is also premiering a Canadian play inspired by Diana next season – something must be in the air.)
• Les glaces, a new play by Rébecca Déraspe, opens in French at La Licorne in Montreal (to Nov. 5). It’s about a man accused of sexual assault by an old friend 25 years after the fact, and also has a run lined up at Quebec City’s La Bordée in the new year. Déraspe is on a roll. Her translation and adaptation (with Frédéric Bélanger) of Twelfth Night is currently on at Montreal’s TNM, and her play Les Filles du Saint-Laurent is at Montreal’s Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in April.
• The Wolves, Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-nominated play about a teenage girls’ soccer team, is getting a new production from the Maggie Tree in Edmonton (Oct. 8 to 30), presented as part of the Citadel Theatre’s Highwire Series. It’s a script full of the rich language of young women, and while I can’t speak for this production directed by Vanessa Sabourin, I loved one I saw in Toronto back in 2018.

Two hits return

• Huff, a searing solo show by Cliff Cardinal, is at Halifax’s Neptune Theatre (Oct. 4 to 9) as part of the Prismatic Arts Festival. I reviewed the show back in 2015.
• Sea Sick, science journalist Alanna Mitchell’s solo show about climate change and the state of the global ocean, is back in Toronto this week for just four shows (Oct. 5 to 8). The acclaimed Theatre Centre production, directed by Franco Boni with Ravi Jain, has been touring the world off and on for eight years; the next stop after this visit home is the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland. (Martin Morrow reviewed the show for The Globe and Mail all the way back in 2014.)

What the Globe and Mail is reviewing this week

The First Stone, a new epic by Siminovitch Prize-nominated playwright Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, opens at Buddies in Bad Times on Thursday and runs to Oct. 16. The play is set during the Ugandan civil war, and is described as being about “one family’s struggle to reunite after the children are captured into an army.” It features a huge 15-person ensemble.

The New Harlem Productions show, which was supported by the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund, is being co-produced with Ottawa’s Great Canadian Theatre Company, and heads there from April 11 to 23 in the new year. Look for my review before the long weekend.