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SummerWorks Festival’s Theatre Successes
Actors Antonio Cayonne, Akosua Amo-Adem, Jessica Greenberg, and Kevin Walker use anonymous interviews to portray the viewpoints of shelter residents and workers in The MIddle Place. Photo by Aviva Armour-Ostroff.
So you may have heard: the annual SummerWorks Theatre Festival was denied government funding this year, losing about 20 per cent of its operating budget, without warning or explanation. Many took this as a direct affront to the artistic community, punishment by a conservative/Conservative goverment for last year’s purported “terrorist love-in,” but if the Cons really wanted to start a fight with Canada’s theatre makers they’ve sure chosen a worthy opponent. It’s taken a hit, but with overwhelming support, both financial and moral, from SummerWorks fans and alumni, it looks likely the fest will pull through (albeit, with a slightly steeper ticket price).
But why exactly was such outcry and outrage warranted? SummerWorks is beloved by directors, actors, producers, technicians, and audience members in Toronto, and as its national series continues to grow, by many across the country too. As Canada’s largest juried theatre festival and a forum supporting new and experimental work, SummerWorks has been praised as being the launching pad for countless careers—including some of our favourite local artists like Kathleen Phillips, Brendan Healy, and Hannah Moscovitch; and some of our favourite productions, like The Russian Play, If We Were Birds, and Paper SERIES, along with many, many, many others.
In fact, here is a list of just a few of the shows that took off to bigger and longer runs after appearing at the last two annual SummerWorks festivals:
Ride the Cyclone
Ride the Cyclone features some very creepy children, who’ve been exhorted by a mechanical fortune teller to tell their stories, through song. Photo courtesy of Atomic Vaudeville.
SummerWorks may be the only festival that can give a musical tragicomedy about a group of choir children in a final recital after their recent and untimely demises from a freak carnival roller coaster accident the chops for an international tour. But that’s exactly what happened to Victoria’s Atomic Vaudeville with Ride the Cyclone. After an extremely positive critical reception at last year’s festival (The Globe‘s J. Kelly Nestruck called it “the most uproarious and outrageous piece of musical theatre Canada has ever produced” and was named NOW‘s Best of Fringe), it just finished a run at Victoria’s Belfry Theatre, before moving on to Vancouver, the Yukon, and back to Toronto this year. After seeing last year’s festival, producer Morris Berchard even bought the rights for American, Canadian, and UK tours, with the intention of going Off-Broadway. Thanks to SummerWorks, this ride is far from over.
The Middle Place
Playwright Andrew Kushnir was originally commissioned in 2007 to write a play based on the members of a Rexdale youth center as part of Project: Humanity De-Shelter Initiative—to incorporate drama workshops into shelter activities as a way to de-stress and build confidence. What resulted has not only given a voice to a group of individuals commonly held silent, changed a city’s perceptions of the workers and inhabitants of youth shelters, and inspired a rare co-production between two major Toronto theatre companies this season between Theatre Passe Muraille and Canadian Stage Company. It also spurred a trend in Canadian theatre in the form of verbatim scripts, plays written word-for-word from lengthy interviews with real-life subjects. That method itself wasn’t exactly new, but The Middle Place‘s success at the 2009 festival certainly gave it new life. Since then, the show has also traveled to Ottawa’s Great Canadian Theatre Company, reached countless more at-risk youth, adult audiences, and youth workers, and was even named Best Production by the inaugural Toronto Theatre Critics’ Awards this year.
Erin Shields and Maev Beaty strip away layers of clothing, and obfuscating decades, to tell the story of two life models in 1920s’ Montparnasse. Photo by Aviva Armour-Ostroff.
Erin Shields and Maev Beaty were already well-known around town before their contribution to the 2009 festival, Montparnasse. But we certainly felt a lot more acquainted after they bared it all on the SummerWorks stage, and again more recently at Theatre Passe Muraille. Under the direction of Andrea Donaldson, the play sought to do exactly what good theatre should: give a voice to those often overlooked—in this case, the nude models of the great artists in 1920s’ Paris—in a bold, honest, and brave way. There’s no denying Montparnasse was bold and brave, but without an independent festival to prove that it could handle the choice of onstage nudity so well, who knows if a major theatre would have taken the risk. And even beyond clothes, Montparnasse‘s remount at TPM continued to break boundaries by reaching out to new audiences, through selected clothing-optional and American Sign Language-integrated performances. Who knows where Montparnasse will go from here, but this kind of groundbreaking thinking should definitely stick around.
Impromptu Splendor
Could we imagine Toronto’s comedy scene without The National Theatre of the World? The answer is—we don’t want to. And because of their super-successful run of their one-act improvised play series Impromptu Splendor in 2009, where they won the RBC Arts Professional Award, we don’t have to. Since then, co-founders Matt Baram, Ron Pederson, and Naomi Snieckus have racked credentials at the Canadian Comedy Awards, international comedy festivals, and were tour-de-forces at this year’s Fringe Festival, behind crowd and critic favourites Love Octagon and The Soaps. Baram, Snieckus, Pederson, and friends are leading the crusade to legitimize improv as a real art form, and heck, that makes them a Hero in our books.
These are just a fraction of the shows and people that received much more, well-deserved work following on their participation in SummerWorks. In about a week, the 21st annual festival will begin, and Toronto audiences will have another chance to see next year’s hits before they hit.