Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Theatre Erindale’s “Power of Performance” Anniversary Season continues with a Canadian First World War story that literally blew sky-high. And the Opening Night of this World Première – already sold out – is set for Remembrance Day! 1917: The Halifax Explosion will run at the Erindale Studio Theatre until November 20th.
On December 6, 1917, three years into WWI, a French ship laden with explosives collided with another in Halifax harbour and created the greatest man-made catastrophe before the atom bomb – causing unparalleled destruction to the unsuspecting city and its people. A 1994 team of scientists and historians determined that the cataclysm “remains unchallenged in … number of casualties, force of blast, radius of devastation, quantity of explosive material, and total value of property destroyed.” Nearly two thousand people died, and many more were left homeless and severely injured. The recovery and rebuilding would take years, but within minutes of the blast hundreds of survivors had dropped everything to take part in the relief efforts.
Nimbus Publishing of Halifax, the “go to” source for everything about the Halifax Explosion, has given special permission for the company to draw directly on Mary Ann Monnon’s Miracles and Mysteries and Janet Kitz and Joan Paysant’s 1917 for the collective creation of this show. Monnon’s remarkable collection of contemporary documents and survivor recollections and Kitz’s masterful illustrated chronicle of events is being woven into a colourful dramatic account – tales of confusion, injury, loss, and the eventual resurgence of hope.
Director Meredith Scott is a graduate of Theatre Erindale and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London (England) whose credits stretch from the Atlantic Theatre Festival to the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. “There was so much I did not know when we began this process,” she says. “Until I picked up the books we’ve used to create this show I (like many Canadians, I suspect) did not truly understand the devastation that befell Halifax on December 6, 1917. I did not know, for example, … that Robert Oppenheimer studied the explosion in order to create the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor did I fully understand why Halifax, a city I know well, looks so different when one travels from the South End to the North.”
The play will mark the ensemble debut of the third-year class of the Sheridan-UTM Theatre and Drama Studies Program. Speaking for the entire company, Scott goes on “these are tales of great courage, perseverance and loss. Our goal in creating this show has been to bring these captivating stories to life while trying to convey the scope of the disaster; a challenge in any case, and especially while creating the piece as we go!”
1917: The Halifax Explosion previews November 10, opens November 11, and runs weekends to November 20 in the intimate state-of-the-art Erindale Studio Theatre on the campus of University of Toronto Mississauga. Tickets are still only $15.00 – just $10.00 for students and seniors! Curtain time Thursday is 7:30, Friday and Saturday 8PM, with 2PM matinees Saturday and Sunday. On Thursdays use the CCT Garage accessed from the South end of campus, for other performances use Lot 1 at the North end. Parking is $6.00. For tickets and information or to receive a free colour brochure, call the Box Office at 905-569-4369 or visit www.theatreerindale.com .
2011-11-02
Mississauga: Theatre Erindale World Première Explodes!