By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Edmonton’s largest playhouse, which entered the scene 60 years ago, celebrates this anniversary — and an expanding repertoire of local, national, and international connections — in the 2025-2026 season unveiled Monday.

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At the centre of the upcoming 11-production $13-$14 million Citadel Theatre lineup announced by artistic director Daryl Cloran is his new production of a great American classic staged in the theatre’s very first season in 1965, and the world premiere of a new Canadian musical based on a beloved national story trove.

The latter, Vinyl Cafe: The Musical (Nov. 8 to 30, 2025) is spun for the stage, by Georgina Escobar and the composer team of Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal, from the late Stuart McLean’s legendary CBC Radio story collection. It’s a Cloran idea, “a few years in development,” as he says. “A full singing and dancing musical, holiday-themed, built on some of the most popular Dave and Morley stories” of the Toronto couple, their kids, their neighbours, their ‘hood — ‘Dave Cooks The Turkey’ among them.

The signature sense of humour, the quintessential Canadian-ness, the national and inter-generational reach, all appealed to Cloran, who directs the new musical. “I feel it has great potential for national interest,” and with audiences across the border too (Vinyl Cafe has a considerable coterie of American fans too).

“At our workshop in December, people were laughing at the jokes before we got to them. People are so connected with the characters; people have a history with the stories. Cloran is one of those people. He remembers going to McLean’s live-audience holiday shows as a family tradition.

In this project, an heir to such Citadel musical premieres as Full Moon and Prison Dancer, the theatre has partnered with long-time Vinyl Cafe producer Jess Milton, who now has a podcast called Backstage At The Vinyl Cafe.  “When we were looking for the right book writer and composer, we asked (candidates) to musicalize a section…. Morley has a line in ‘Dave Cooks The Turkey’ describing how to be a mother at Christmas, ‘I am a train!’. Colleen and Akiva turned the line into a gorgeous song.”

In a nod to Citadel history in this anniversary season, Cloran’s production of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s ageless 1949 gut-wrencher (Jan. 24 to Feb. 15, 2026), returns Willy Loman, the iconic travelling salesman of American Dream mythology to the mainstage, where he hasn’t been for 14 years. In the 2011 production directed by Bob Baker, John Ullyatt played Biff, Willy Loman’s football hero-turned-drifter son, crushed by the weight of his father’s delusions. This time Ullyatt plays Willy Loman, tattered purveyor of dreams, with Nadien Chu as Willy’s long-suffering wife and enabler Linda.

Cloran cites in particular “the incredible work John (Ullyatt) has done with Scrooge” (a role to which he returns in the 2025 edition of A Christmas Carol). “He’s so ready to sink his teeth into a role like Willy.” And along with Ullyatt a theatre star of apparently limitless versatility, Chu,“so funny so fierce in The Three Musketeers,” as Cloran says, is “one of the finest actors in Edmonton if not Canada.”

The season opens (Sept. 13 to Oct. 5, 2025) with Life of Pi, adapted by the English writer Lolita Chakrabarti from the Yann Martel novel. Life of Pi has been onstage in the West End and moved to Broadway. “We’re the first theatre to be licensed to create our own production, a non-replica…. It’s a real coup for us,” says Cloran, “and speaks to the Citadel’s reputation that the company gets a crack at it.”

The story of the title hero, stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific with a Bengal tiger as his companion, comes with particular theatrical challenges, including visual imagery and puppetry. “It’s such a great theatrical re-imagining of a story that so many people love,” says Cloran, “with all the things that are great about theatre.” Haysam Kadri, the artistic director of Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, directs.

Casey and Diana (April 4 to 26, 2025) is by actor/playwright Nick Green, a U of A theatre school grad well known to Edmonton audiences for such plays as Happy Birthday Baby J and Coffee Dad, Chicken Mom and the Fabulous Buddha Boi. It’s Edmonton’s first look at a notable play that premiered at Stratford in 2023, and has since played to full houses and critical raves elsewhere. Set in the AIDS crisis of the 1990s, the play, “a beautiful story and a beautiful theatrical idea” as Cloran describes, takes us to Casey House, a Toronto AIDS hospice as its residents prepare for a visit by Princess Diana, whose public compassion helped changed the harsh optics of the era.

The director for the Citadel/Alberta Theatre Projects co-production has yet to be announced.

The season finale (May 2 to 24, 2026)) is a new adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, the swashbuckling Edmond Rostand romantic adventure where the wordplay is as crucial as the swordplay. It’s commissioned from Edmonton actor/ playwright Jessy Ardern (Queen Lear Is Dead), who’s made something of a specialty of contemporary re-thinks of the classics. “She really gets the humour, the romance, the poetry of it,” Cloran says. Amanda Goldberg’s production will come to the stage in full period flourish, but with “contemporary resonance.”

“Our audiences love sword-fighting and luscious design,” laughs Cloran, citing enthusiasm for the lavish Citadel/ Arts Club production of The Three Musketeers, about to open in Vancouver.

Besides Vinyl Cafe, the season’s roster of four musicals includes a classic of the repertoire, a Broadway hit, and the return (with holiday trimmings) of an Indigenous Alberta-made take on a ‘70s fave.

The “big family musical” is The Wizard of Oz (March 7 to April 12), which as Cloran points out wryly, takes up the conversations of the moment about the buzzy prequel to the whole yellow brick road story, Wicked. “Good timing, right?” Thom Allison, who appeared as an actor at the Citadel in Kat Sandler’s double-bill The Party and The Candidate, returns to direct The Wizard of Oz, the 1987 version (for the Royal Shakespeare Company) of the indelible L. Frank Baum story that licenses the stellar music of the 1939 movie.       

Expect to see a vivacious, plucky pink-clad heroine this summer at the Citadel. Legally Blonde (July 5 to Aug. 3, 2025), a bouncy 2007 Broadway musical blockbuster of the optimistic, heartwarming stripe (“super-positive, super-catchy tunes, speaks to different ages and backgrounds,” as Cloran describes) is the show. Stephanie Graham, of Thousand Islands Playhouse, directs and choreographs.

And the holiday season includes a quick six-performance run (Dec. 18 to 21) of LightningCloud Productions’ Bear Grease: Shack Up For The Winter – Holiday Special. It’s the holiday edition (with additional songs and scenes to match) of their Indigenous variety show take on the 1978 musical Grease. “A great local Indigenous success story,” as Cloran puts it, the show directed by Crystal Lightning, “which more than doubled our sale expectations” this past fall, returns to Edmonton after an Off-Broadway run in the summer. “This is a victory lap for them!” says Cloran.    

Both shows in the Citadel’s returning Highwire Series in the Rice Theatre, have theatre cred elsewhere, and strong Edmonton connections. Big Stuff (Oct. 18 to Nov. 9, 2025) is the work of married improv artists Matt Baram, who grew up here, and Naomi Snieckus, who met at Second City in Toronto, along with director Kat Sandler. “It lives very much in the world of Every Brilliant Thing,” as Cloran describes the comedy memoir that proved a hit in Toronto this past November/December.

“So funny, so heartfelt, so surprisingly moving…. It’s about stuff — the stuff you hang onto in your life and the stuff you can’t let go of, because of their connection to people you’ve lost” There is, he says, “an element of gentle audience interaction,” involving writing on a card an object that you’ve held onto, for use during the show.

The solo play Burning Mom, which arrives in Edmonton (Feb. 14 to March 8, 2026) as part of an Arts Club tour, is the work of playwright/director Mieko Ouchi, the associate artistic director of the Citadel. The play, which premiered in Winnipeg a season ago, is inspired by Ouchi’s own family. When her husband passes away, and the dreams of an RV retirement tour seem to be kaput, a 63-year-old widow takes to the road herself for a odyssey of discovery to the Burning Man art festival in the middle of the desert.

Meanwhile, season #59 continues apace at the Citadel, with Goblin: Macbeth running through Sunday in the Rice Theatre, and Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical, Heist, and Little Women to come.

Subscription packages for the upcoming season are on sale now (780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com), with Legally Blonde tickets on sale March 19, and single tickets for the rest of the 2025-2026 season July 4.  

Looking ahead at the Citadel’s 2025-2026 season

Mainstage series: Life of Pi (Sept. 13 to Oct. 5, 2025); Vinyl Cafe: The Musical (Nov. 8 to 30, 2025); Death of a Salesman (Jan. 24 to Feb. 15, 2026); The Wizard of Oz (March 7 to April 12, 2026); Casey and Diana (April 4 to 26, 2026); Cyrano de Bergerac (May 2 to 24, 2026).

Summer presentation: Legally Blonde (July 5 to August. 3, 2025).

Highwire series: Big Stuff (Oct. 18 to Nov. 9, 2025); Burning Mom (Feb. 14 to March 8, 2026).

Holiday productions: A Christmas Carol (Nov. 23 to Dec. 24, 2025); Bear Grease: Shack Up For The Winter – Holiday Special (Dec. 18 to 21, 2025).