One of the busiest theatre months of the year features some of the year’s best plays.
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Cold, grey February, the butt-end of winter. Besides Valentine’s Day, Family Day and Black History Month, what is it good for? It’s good for theatre!
One of the busiest theatre months of the year, this February features multiple shows from the PuSh Festival and a few very good plays carrying over from January.
It also brings us the return of the great Ronnie Burkett, the remount of one of the best shows of 2024, and the reprise of two of our favourite theatre-makers who long ago absconded to Toronto.
Wonderful Joe
The most extraordinary theatre artist in Canada, puppet master Ronnie Burkett returns to The Cultch with his latest solo epic, the story of a man and his dog. After they lose their home, they meet Mother Nature, Santa Claus, Jesus and the Tooth Fairy in this saga of imagination and hope. If you’ve seen Burkett before, you don’t need persuading. If you’ve never seen him, DO NOT miss this show.
A Doll’s House, Pt. 2
Lucas Hnath’s powerful dramatic sequel to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Fifteen years after Nora walked out the door to seek her personal freedom, she returns home to confront the husband and daughter she left, and the nursemaid who raised her children. A remount of last year’s sterling Western Gold production starring Melissa Oei and Tom McBeath. Directed by Seamus Fera.
Primary Trust
Eboni Booth’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winner, like Wonderful Joe, is an anthem of goodness and hope. What could be more welcome in this time of political darkness and cynicism. In the Arts Club’s Canadian premiere, Andrew Broderick plays a man with an imaginary friend, who loses his job only to be buoyed up by the compassion of strangers. Directed by Ashlie Corcoran.
Flight
Vancouver Opera’s Flight marks the return — for this show only, alas — of now-Torontonians Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald, two of the brightest lights of Vancouver theatre in the 1980s and ’90s. Panych directs Jonathan Dove’s celebrated modern opera, with its airport departure lounge set designed by MacDonald. Leslie Dala conducts the Vancouver Opera Orchestra.
Women of the Fur Trade
The Firehall presents Frances Koncan’s mock-historical satire of colonialism. In a fort “somewhere upon the banks of a Reddish River,” three 19th-century women reverse the male gaze on history, sipping tea and talking in contemporary slang about life, love and Louis Riel. The cast includes A-list actors Kaitlyn Yott and Kate Besworth. Directed by Donna Spencer.
Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla
Ruby Slippers Theatre premieres Abi Padilla’s play inspired by the lives of her Filipina grandmothers and the female guerrillas who fought for Philippine freedom. The comical tale of “a butt-kickin’, bar-spittin’, tough grandma who escapes the care home to be with her family,” and the grandkids who set out to find her, the play also runs at Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre, Feb. 6-8. Directed by Leslie Dos Remedios.