Larissah Lashey, Jayce McKenzie, Abigail McDougall, Hayley Moorhouse in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Shadow Theatre will launch its upcoming four-production all-Canadian 30th anniversary season with its first-ever mainstage musical. And it’s homegrown.

Crescendo!, set in a women’s community choir, is by Sandy Paddick, with original music and musical arrangements by Jennifer McMillan. Based on Paddick’s personal experience singing in choirs, it explores the choir dynamic, as Shadow artistic director John Hudson explains. “Who joins, and why? What do they get out of it? The choirmaster’s journey….” And it touches on our human need for music, the urge to sing.

Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

The piece got its first try-out in 2019 the Edmonton way, at the Fringe. Kate Ryan of Plain Jane Theatre is back to direct the premiere (Oct. 18 to Nov. 5 at the Varscona Theatre). Her cast includes Michelle Diaz, Jenny McKillop, Kirsten Piehl, and Colleen Tillotson.

The other premiere in the anniversary season is Robot Girls, a new play by Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt. As both a playwright and a theatre director/producer himself, Schmidt has leaned into writing women characters. Robot Girls dives into a girl community, a quartet of junior high teenagers at Nellie McClung Charter School for Girls. They’re in a science club building a robot for an international competition, negotiating personal conflicts and the stresses of coming-of-age. “Heartfelt,” says Hudson, who directs the Shadow production that runs March 15 to 31, 2024. “Honest and beautifully crafted.” His cast includes Larissa Lashley, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie, and  Hayley Moorhouse.

Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm in The Drawer
Boys, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

The season includes a play that is, as Hudson puts it, “in the pantheon of great Canadian plays.” Michael Healey’s 1999 The Drawer Boy is a back story of sort. It chronicles the adventures of a young actor who’s part of a Toronto company on a foray into the Ontario heartland to research, on location, farm life for the play that would become the landmark The Farm Show.

A true Canadian classic, The Drawer Boy hasn’t been seen in these parts since a touring production arrived at the Citadel in the early 2000’s. “I’ve been hankering to do it for years,” says Hudson, who directs the Shadow revival (Jan. 18 to Feb. 4, 2023) starring Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm, and Paul-Ford Manguelle (recently seen in Grindstone’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee).

Michelle Todd in Tiny Beautiful Things, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

Tiny Beautiful Things, the season finale (April 25 to May 12, 2024), is by the Canadian actor/playwright Nia Vardalos, whose big breakthrough in theatre and film internationally was My Big Fat Greek Wedding. At the centre of Tiny Beautiful Things, based on the Cheryl Strayed novel, is an anonymous online advice columnist Sugar, the recipient of every sort of human question, problem, crisis. Michelle Todd stars as Sugar in Hudson’s production; her castmates are Emily Howard, Michael Peng, and Yassire El Fassi El Fihri.

In other news from Shadow, Amanda Goldberg, the company’s artistic director fellow this past season, is having a big finish, with Thursday’s announcement that she will be the new artistic producer at the SkirtsAfire Festival. But first, she will direct Twelfth Night for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival this summer.

Tickets, subscriptions, schedule details: shadowtheatre.org.