What’s next for Crow’s Theatre – after an industry-bucking year of success that included endless extensions of the American musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812; a sell-out smash Canadian comedy about Toronto’s stagnancy, The Master Plan; and a large-scale remount of its sublime version of the Russian classic Uncle Vanya?
Chris Abraham, artistic director of the Toronto east-end theatre company, is announcing his 2024-2025 season on Monday – and the common denominator is productions designed to fill the 200-seat main stage at the company’s HQ Streetcar Crowsnest, with the potential to overflow into extensions or transfers to larger theatres.
“We’ve started to commission a lot more plays – and we’ve invited people to write plays for us – at scale,” says Abraham, highlighting Canadian playwright Michael Ross Albert’s new farce with a self-explanatory title: The Bidding War. What he means by “at scale” are dramas and especially comedies with big casts and ambitions that could eventually fill bigger spaces.
This has been the formula for Crow’s success – which is projecting that it will end the current 2023-2024 season well in the black with a total attendance of 60,000 on site, and another 15,000 at shows that have toured or transferred elsewhere.
That 75,000 is essentially a doubling of its overall attendance year over year – and puts Crow’s up in the league of the larger not-for-profit theatres in Toronto such as Canadian Stage.
Next year, Crow’s shows will likely be seen by more than 100,000 thanks to the previously announced Mirvish Production pick-up of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 (a co-production with Musical Stage Company) for a Royal Alexandra Theatre run as part of it subscription season; as well as its previously announced co-production of the Tony-winning musical A Strange Loop with Soulpepper and, again, Musical Stage Company; plus a remount of Michael Healey’s The Master Plan at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton (which seems highly likely to resurface again in Toronto).
As for that brand-new slate of production that Abraham hopes will lure audiences to Crow’s home base next season, what’s great is none of what is being announced is an obvious blockbuster. He’s trusting the audience he and executive director Sherrie Johnson have built up, with no pandering or apparent anxiety about matching past achievements.
Crow’s 2024-2025 season launches in its larger 200-seat Guloien Theatre in September with a classic: Henrik Ibsen’s masterpiece Romersholm. Abraham will direct a starry cast that includes Virgilia Griffith, Jonathon Young, Ben Carlson and Diego Matamoros in an adaptation by the British playwright Duncan Macmillan that he says emphasizes Ibsen’s exploration of “polarization as a phenomenon” – in a tiny fishing village in 1868, not North America in 2024.
Next, the Guloien will be see the world premiere of the aforementioned topical The Bidding War about a 12-hour one for “the city’s last affordable house.” Paolo Santalucia, associate artistic director, is set to direct.
The most (and longest) anticipated main stage show is the Canadian premiere of Trident Moon, a play by playwright Anusree Roy set amid the partition of India about three Muslim women abducted by three Hindu women. It was a finalist for a major international prize six years ago but could not find a producer in her home country owing to the perception of it being too big for smaller risk-taking new-work companies and too challenging for bigger Canadian regionals.
Crow’s, which ably bridges the gap between those two categories of not-for-profit theatres, is bringing Trident Moon to the stage in co-production with the National Arts Centre English Theatre, whose artistic director Nina Lee Aquino will direct. “It’s an amazing play, a 90-minute nail-biter,” says Abraham.
Other plays in the Guloien next season include the world premiere of Wights, set at Yale University and delving into the thorny subject of critical race theory on American university campuses, written by a New York-based Canadian playwright named Liz Appel (a grandchild of the late Toronto arts patron Bluma Appel who has a theatre named after her across town); and the Canadian premiere of Flex, a play by Candrice Jones about young, Black and female basketball players in rural Arkansas at the dawn of the WNBA (directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu of Obsidian Theatre, which is co-producing)
Meanwhile, the Crow’s 90-seat studio will be home to Comfort Food, a new work by Zorana Sadiq (Mixtape); Big Stuff, an improvised storytelling show created by Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus; Dinner with the Duchess, a new play by Nick Green (Casey and Diana), which is first premiering at the growing Here For Now festival in Stratford, Ont.; and A Public Display of Affection, a solo piece by Jonathan Wilson that’s a companion to My Own Private Oshawa, produced by Studio 180.
There are two other Crow’s projects in 2024-2025 that Abraham is letting partners announce later on. “The shows that are successful for us generate profits that we put back into the work that we do,” he notes, adding that the budget last year and this coming year is $8-million. “Mirvish has been a great partnership for us. We love that they’re continuing to look more and more into what’s happening in our city as work that they want to expose their larger audience to.”
“We love the idea that the city has the potential to have a more robust commercial theatre expression.”
In terms of the success of his last two seasons, Abraham says the number-one contributor to it was a $1.5-million donation from the Slaight Family Foundation, money the company has used to rehearse every show for an extra week, to hire larger casts and to invest more in design to produce theatre at “scale,” as well as for extra marketing.
That money is now gone and – like all theatre companies – Crow’s is dealing with inflation that contributed earlier this year to the shutting down of its tenant restaurant Gare de l’Est (it’s now in the process of seeking a new one). “It’s a big job every year to raise the money to do the work – and next year’s going to be a challenging year for us,” he says.
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J. Kelly Nestruck