By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Mayfield Theatre turns the big five-oh next season — and achievement in itself in the rigorous world of commercial theatre.

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And as a milestone birthday bonus, as artistic director Van Wilmott announced Monday, the lineup comes with not one but two big Broadway musicals. Plus salutes to a storied five-decade history.

The season, Wilmott’s 17th at the helm, launches, as promised, with the next instalment of the Mayfield’s original Musicians Gone Wild series by Wilmott and playwright Tracey Power, designed to celebrate seminal eras in pop culture history. It premiered this past September with Rock The Canyon, a 10-musician extravaganza which took audiences to Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills in the late ‘60s early ‘70s, a communal incubator of a starry genealogy and the ‘California sound’. Next season’s Nashville: Music City (Sept. 3 to Nov 3, 2024) focuses, as Wilmott puts it, on “the story of a place in the middle of nowhere and how it became the poster child of country music.”

That story, he says, has deep roots. goes way back, to the Carter family, back to Hank Williams, “the Gretzky of the late ‘40s,” back to the Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry. The show capitalizes on the Mayfield’s greatest strength, music, as Wilmott says. “And country music is huge, with massive instrumentation.” It demands the versatility of the 10 musician performers on a variety of instruments, guitar, ukulele, mandolin, lap steel, fiddle, among them.

The “Christmas show,” the Mayfield’s perennial best-seller — this season Canada Rocks: The Reboot had a record-breaking run — is an original homage to the theatre’s 50th. Flashback Fever (Nov. 12 2024 to Jan. 26 2025), billed as a “rock and roll dinner party,”  assembles “the best 50 tunes, the 50 great musical moments, of the last 50 years,” as Wilmott puts it. “Great musical moments, the great, the hilarious, the terrible! A flashback of the last 50 years in the world of music.” Wilmott and “a handful of other writers” will put it together.

The collars are blue in both of the Broadway musicals in the Mayfield lineup. The Mayfield’s biggest cast of the season (16 or so, plus the band) happens in The Full Monty (Feb. 4 to March 30, 2025). Heartwarming and funny, the 2000 hit spun from the 1997 Brit film, tells a classic underdog triumph story. A group of unemployed steelworkers in rustbelt Buffalo — “it’s a slow town when you don’t know where to go” as the opening number has it — get a bright idea for redeeming their tattered masculinity, and generating some cash. They form a strip act. The book is by the star American playwright Terrence McNally, and the clever, appealing score is by David Yazbeck (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Band’s Visit, Tootsie).

Jersey Boys (April 8 to June 8, 2025) finds its blue-collar pizzaz in the mean streets of New Jersey. And it gets its dramatic traction from telling a real-life story, grit included: the rise from obscurity to top-40 stardom of The Four Seasons. That’s what sets this Tony- and Olivier Award-winner apart from the jukebox musical crowd — that, and a string of two dozen indelible chart-topping hits, including the likes of Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like A Man. “A great musical, perfect for our audience and our venue,” says Wilmott, buoyed by the availability of rights between American tours of Jersey Boys, and undaunted by the recent Citadel production. As for The Full Monty, the cast and director have yet to be announced.

The summer of 2025 (June 17 to July 20) is the perennially popular 1986 solo play Shirley Valentine by the Brit playwright Willy Russell. It’s been 14 years since the Mayfield last produced it. The middle-aged title character is a veritable poster child for life-changing re-discovery. When Shirley steps out of the rut of her humdrum life with an emotionally distant husband and wins a trip to Greece, nothing will ever be the same.

Meanwhile, the current season continues with this week’s opening of One Night With The King, an original tribute show starring Matt Cage, last seen here as Elvis in the Mayfield production of Million Dollar Quartet in 2019. It runs through March 31, followed by a production (April 9 to June 16)  of Grease, the musical that takes us all back to our universal alma mater Rydell High. Kate Ryan directs. And the summer show (June 25 to July 28) is On Golden Pond, the Ernest Thompson chestnut set in the frictions of a long marriage and the intergenerational divide.

Tickets and subscriptions: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051.