Stage Door News
Stage Door News
In just 12 days, 7500 ticket-buyers were exposed to local, fiercely indie arts. Because of this, we are lucky enough to return over $89,000 to our 10 indie companies. The 2017 Next Stage Theatre Festival was one of our best-selling festivals ever, seeing 37 performances completely sell out.
Highlights
Twitter Love: We got some serious Twitter love from Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany who encouraged her fans to check out Blood Ties (which appeared in Orphan Black Season 2). Former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell herself responded to a Tweet from The Death of Mrs. Gandhi team. And #UrgentExchange was Toronto's #1 trending hashtag on the night of our first Urgent Exchange conversation.
#UrgentExchange: Our event about arts criticism in a digital age trended on Twitter and furthered the conversation about the roles and responsibilities of theatre critics in an age of social media, blogs, and decentralized media power. Our second event was on the topic of changing hiring practices in the arts to include more diversity. This event was attended by more than 50 people and demonstrated the desire for these conversations to take place in this community - in a year where 7 of the vacant artistic directorships in this country were filled by white men and the diversity ratios are just as bad as (or worse than) they were a decade ago.
NSTF in the Media: Next Stage shows received rave reviews from all corners of the media landscape. Now Magazine gave more "4 N" reviews than any other NSTF in recent years, with a grand total of 7 NNNN reviews. Robert Cushman at the National Post said the 2017 Next Stage Fest was "full of spirit and precision" in his review of festival hit Blood Ties. And The Globe and Mail gave our most emerging collective a great introduction to the community by previewing Silk Bath in their paper.
10th Birthday Party: We toasted 10 years of Next Stage on opening night with free cake, beer samples courtesy of Steam Whistle, sparkling wine courtesy of Barefoot Wine and yummy food courtesy of The Paddock. We were so pleased to be joined by so many of our NSTF alumni artists. We tracked memories and success stories through the hashtag #NSTFstories and on our website.
What's next?
There's no rest for the wicked, because up next we start to plan the 2017 summer Fringe Festival. And what a year it's going to be! It'll be the first year in our new Fringe Club at Scadding Court Community Centre, plus lots of exciting changes that we know will make your user experience much more pleasant and fun. See you at #FringeTO!
Save the date:
The Toronto Fringe Festival
July 5 - 16, 2017.
2017-01-16
Toronto: The 2017 Next Stage Theatre Festival was one of the best-selling ever