Stage Door News
Stage Door News
The Stratford Festival is sending a play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the first time, a new work called Hirsch that received its Canadian premiere as part of the 2012 season.
The Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest theatre and comedy festival, hosts theatre groups from around the world. This year’s Canadian entries include Around Miss Julie, which has played at the St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe, and The Canadians of Comedy, starring a trio of Just for Laughs comedians.
Hirsch, created by Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson for the Stratford Festival, tells the story of inspiring and influential theatre figure John Hirsch, an artistic director at Stratford in the 1980s.
Hungarian-born Hirsch was a Holocaust survivor, brought to Winnipeg by the War Orphans Project of the Canadian Jewish Congress. That wrenching early experience seemed to leave him both ambitious and subject to demons. Vibrantly creative, he founded the Manitoba Theatre Centre, ran CBC Drama, directed on and off Broadway and on stages across Canada, influencing a generation of actors and fellow directors.
Nashman, who played Hirsch during the 2012 run of the play in Stratford, Ont., is to reprise the role in Edinburgh and in a Toronto production this July.
Hirsch plays at the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto beginning July 19 and at the Edinburgh Fringe from Aug. 1-25. It is the first time a Stratford production has continued its run in Edinburgh.
Hopegrown Productions is bringing Harry Standjofski's Around Miss Julie, about a director and three actors struggling to put on Julie In A Snowstorm, a new adaptation of Strindberg's classic play Miss Julie.
Standup comedians Tim Rabnet, Allyson Smith and Paul Myrehaug star in the Edinburgh Fringe as The Canadians of Comedy.
From: www.cbc.ca.
Photo: Alon Nashman as John Hirsch. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2013-07-04
Toronto: Alon Nashman’s “Hirsch” and other Canadian plays head to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival