Akosua Amo-Adem's comedy Table for Two will have its world premiere at Soulpepper in February.Supplied
Even more than most performing arts companies, Soulpepper has undergone a complete reboot since COVID-19 first shuttered stages around the world.
And so, the Toronto not-for-profit theatre’s 2024-2025 season, being announced on Thursday, will introduce the new audiences that artistic director Weyni Mengesha has been cultivating to some of the 27-year-old company’s greatest hits.
Kim’s Convenience, the Ins Choi comedic drama about a Korean-Canadian family and their corner store that first played at Soulpepper in 2012, will return to the main stage in early 2025 – with playwright/performer Choi taking on the role of Mr. Kim rather than his son in the play that was the basis for a CBC sitcom.
Before that Alligator Pie, a family-oriented musical show based on Toronto poet Dennis Lee’s beloved poems for children, will return as a holiday show at the end of 2024 – with new contributions from members of the Soulpepper Academy.
Billie, Sarah, and Ella: Revolutionary Women in Jazz, a more recent success created by Divine Brown, will also be back, in October – while another of Soulpepper’s successful docu-concerts, The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience, will tour to the Segal Centre in Montreal in December.
Kim's Convenience, a comedic drama by Ins Choi (pictured) about a Korean-Canadian family and their corner store, first played at Soulpepper in 2012, will return to the main stage in early 2025.Supplied
Mengesha, who is set to direct Kim’s Convenience once again, notes that 55 per cent of audiences at Soulpepper are new since reopening – and the average age of audience members has dropped to 42.
“There’s a young audience that doesn’t know the play Kim’s Convenience at all, they only know the television show,” she notes.
In addition to reprising its own hits in the first eight months of its 2024-2025 season, Soulpepper will introduce its audiences to a recent Crow’s Theatre smash.
The Master Plan, Michael Healey’s comedy that explores the Sidewalk Labs fiasco, will play in a co-production with Crow’s Theatre directed by Chris Abraham from Nov. 24 to Dec. 29.
Ben Carlson is starring in The Master Plan, a comedy that explores the Sidewalk Labs fiasco.Supplied
There are brand-new productions in the Soulpepper season, too, of course – the biggest being the Canadian premiere of Michael R. Jackson’s Tony-winning meta-musical A Strange Loop. This previously announced co-production with Crow’s and the Musical Stage Company will grace the Baillie Theatre from April 22 to June 1, 2025.
But first, in the fall, Soulpepper will produce a short run of the Broadway play What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Shreck (from Nov. 1 to 9), a meditation on American history timed to run in the lead up to the presidential election. Shreck is adapting the show for this Canadian run.
In February, Soulpepper will also produce the world premiere of Table for Two, a comedy by Akosua Amo-Adem that will be directed by Djanet Sears. Table for Two will be programmed in the winter and opposite Kim’s Convenience with which it shares themes about the differences in perspective between first and second-generation Canadians.
Ladies of the Canyon: Joni and the California Scene, a Soulpepper concert by Hailey Gillis and Raha Javanfar, will round out this season's schedule.Supplied
Rounding out Mengesha’s announced 2024-2025 programming is Ladies of the Canyon: Joni and the California Scene, a Soulpepper concert created by Hailey Gillis and Raha Javanfar that was postponed from the current season because of financial difficulties related to the depressed attendance and inflation that has afflicted many theatre companies.
Mengesha is forthright that Soulpepper has run a deficit in the past two fiscal years – notably a $800,000 one in 2022 – and that, while all of this winter’s programming has been exceeding its box-office targets, the company is still working to rebuild itself. “It’s not just the pandemic for us,” she notes.
Indeed, Soulpepper has been through a pair of tumultuous transitions. Originally devised as an ensemble-based classics-oriented company, its founding artistic director Albert Schultz was only a few years into pivoting its mission to what he called a “national civic theatre” in 2018 when he and the company were sued by four former company members alleging sexual harassment on stage and off. (He resigned; the case was settled out of court.)
Mengesha took the reins soon after as artistic director – but just as her initial programming was hitting the stage in 2020, the pandemic hit.
At its largest, Soulpepper had an annual budget of about $12-million and was claiming a yearly attendance of around 100,000. Its 2024 season, by contrast, is budgeted at $7.1-million – and is forecasting paid attendance of around 60,000 (with 25,000 to 30,000 more participating in free and community programs), according to executive director Gideon Arthurs. The company has a “small” accumulated deficit that Arthurs expects will be retired in four years.
J. Kelly Nestruck