Next Stage sells well
The eighth annual Next Stage Theatre Festival closed Sunday (January 18) on a high note, with a number of full houses the final weekend.
Presented by the Toronto Fringe and staged in three venues at Factory Theatre, the festival featured 10 juried shows. Even before this Next Stage began, it had already broken a record: pre-sales were the highest in the fest’s history, up 25 per cent from the previous year.
Even the extreme cold at the start of the festival didn’t keep audiences away. Ticket sales brought in $65,000, with 70 per cent of that amount returned to the participating companies.
There were lots of hits, too, including Matt Murray’s entertaining Myth Of The Ostrich, the one show remounted from an earlier Toronto Fringe festival, and Graham Clark Reads The Phonebook, featuring the Vancouver comic doing exactly what his show title states.
We were happy to see a new production by Jenna Harris, a talented lesbian playwright whom we previously knew mainly as an actor. Her play Mine, about a relationship that goes from tentative to passionate to troubled, was one of the treats of this year’s Next Stage, both in its writing and its production.
Playwright Project call
One of the most eagerly anticipated indie theatre events in recent years has been the annual Playwright Project, which features short works by a single writer staged by local companies.
Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard and Caryl Churchill have been the focus of previous Projects. This year organizers turn for the first time to a Canadian author, Robertson Davies.
Though best known for his fiction, including The Deptford Trilogy, the respected Davies also wrote a number of one-act plays, four of which have been chosen for the 2015 Playwright Project. They are Overlaid, Hope Deferred, The Voice Of The People and Eros At Breakfast.
Festival producers are looking for submissions from directors, companies and collectives to be part of this year’s event. They are also open to hearing proposals for adaptations, original works or productions of other Davies plays.
You don’t have to have an entire team in place to make a submission organizers will help you find the right people to bring your ideas to life.
After being presented in a single venue last year, the Project is returning to its original touring format, with four non-traditional venues in different Toronto neighbourhoods staging the works on a rotating basis over two weeks. With that in mind, every production should be able to fit into each venue and use the same staging and seating arrangement as the other three shows.
Deadline for submissions is February 23, with performances in the fall. Send a short pitch – it doesn’t have to be more than a page long – to curator Matthew Gorman (matt@playwrightproject.com). For more info, click here.
Brainstorming STAF
The Small Theatre Administrative Facility (STAF), a frequent go-to place for indie theatre companies for the past two decades, holds a brainstorming session to discuss the organization’s future.
STAF intends to reinvent itself and wants to know what local groups require in an evolving indie theatre ecology, one that is often project-based and that needs to connect with new and often young, diverse audiences.
The session is Monday (January 26) from 6:30 to 9:30 pm at the Theatre Centre (1115 Queen West). If you want to participate in the free event, RSVP to info@theatreadmin.com or tweet @STAF_TO. If you can’t be there but want to be part of what’s going on, send an email with the subject line “Keep me in the loop.”
TAPA soups up its site
Also doing some reinventing is the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (TAPA), which just launched its new website, tapa.ca.
The improved site provides further online capabilities to the association’s members as well as expanded performing arts information to a younger, web-savvy group, says executive director Jacoba Knaapen.
Designed in partnership with Blair Francey and BFdesign, the site includes streamlined navigation and a user-friendly layout.
T.O. Tix, the TAPA service that offers tickets and information about theatre, dance and comedy events, will launch a new website next month.
Party hearty
World Stage 2015 kicks off with the #artlive Ball, a party collaboration between House of Nuance and House of Monroe.
Rather like a competitive fashion show “but with more dance, fashion and fierceness than could possibly be contained by that label,” the event invites you to dress as your most authentic self.
Categories include bizarre (a bubble wrap eleganza), glitterati (anything sparkling), realness (schoolboys only, any era or style) and virgin runway (just jackets and walks).
The ball, the first of 10 events in this year’s World Stage, happens Saturday (January 24) at Harbourfront Centre Theatre. For more info see listings or harbourfrontcentre.com.
Bye-bye, Lab Cab
Over the past 14 years, the Lab Cab Festival has fostered the development of hundreds of shows.
What began as a monthly cabaret in 2001 and then became an annual festival that took over Factory Theatre before moving to sites all around Parkdale has come to a close.
Artistic director Aviva Armour-Ostroff and artistic producer André du Toit are retiring the festival in order to move on to other creative projects, she as an actor, creator and member of the Actors Repertory Company and he as designer and producer.
Lab Cab will finish up with three free workshops (songwriting, audition technique and improv) and the creation of a permanent mural with a Parkdale school.
We’ll miss their hard work with Lab Cab but look forward to seeing them focus more on their art.
stage@nowtoronto.com
