Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Luminato, Toronto's international festival of arts and ideas, returns June 7 - 23, 2019 to venues across Toronto. Led by newly-appointed Artistic Director Naomi Campbell, Luminato continues to commission, develop and present distinctive art from Toronto, Canada and around the world.
Luminato is thrilled to announce five sensational shows from the 2019 program:
Hell’s Fury: The Hollywood Songbook
Tickets for these productions are on sale now and more information is available below.
New to Luminato this year is all inclusive ticket pricing. The price advertised is the final price paid, including all taxes and service fees.
The full Luminato 2019 program will be announced in spring 2019.
Asah Productions in association with Luminato
Obeah Opera
A Nicole Brooks Vision
June 13 - 22, 2019 | Fleck Dance Theatre
Experience a brand new iteration of this critically-acclaimed production. Obeah Opera is a hand-clapping, foot-stomping, spirit-lifting, musical sensation. Steeped in Black music and sung entirely a cappella by a powerful all-female cast, the production tells the story of the legendary Salem witch trials from the perspective of the first woman accused, the young Caribbean slave Tituba.
In February 1692 the people of Salem, Massachusetts fell into an hysterical paranoid state which led to the town’s infamous witch hunt. Hundreds of people were arrested and tried for witchcraft, and over the course of a year, 14 women, 5 men, and 2 dogs were executed for their supposed crimes. Although many operas, films, plays, and novels have been written about the Salem witch trials, Tituba’s story has never been told.
Blending spirituals, jazz, ska, Calypso, traditional African and Caribbean folk music, and dance, Obeah Opera is a rhythmically infectious take on an incredible story.
Obeah Opera is commissioned by Luminato.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools
June 12 - 16, 2019 | Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs
The 2018 Dora Award-winning Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools brings together two powerful storytellers as they map new territory, giving voice to the histories, cultures, and climate we’ve all inherited.
Inuk artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and queer theatre-maker Evalyn Parry met on an Arctic expedition from Iqaluit to Greenland. Now they share the stage in Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, a concert, dialogue, and symbolic convergence between the Northern and the Southern parts of our country.
Williamson Bathory and Parry, accompanied by cellist Cris Derksen, combine their artistic arsenals to convey the complexity of the North and its past through folk songs, throat-singing, storytelling, historical and autobiographical material, and uajeerneq (Greenlandic mask dancing). Used together these tools create powerful moments that challenge the audience to confront their lack of knowledge and chase the opportunity to learn.
Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools was originally developed and co-produced by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille.
*World Premiere*
Hell's Fury:
The Hollywood Songbook
Co-presented with Soundstreams and Pinkhouse Productions
June 19 - 23, 2019 | Harbourfront Centre Theatre
Following a sold-out work-in-progress presentation at Luminato 2018, Hell’s Fury: The Hollywood Songbook makes it world premiere at the 2019 festival. Internationally-renowned baritone Russell Braun portrays the rise and fall of Hanns Eisler, the famed Oscar-nominated composer who fled to the United States from Nazi Germany only to become blacklisted by Hollywood film executives and banned from his adopted country at the beginning of the Cold War.
Exiled from Germany in 1933 after the Nazi party censored his music, Eisler settled in Hollywood and where he composed some of the most significant film music of the decade, including the score for Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die, which he received one of his two Academy Award nominations. Eisler’s close collaborator and fellow-exile Bertolt Brecht’s poetry cycle Hollywood Elegies, forms the basis of the Hollywood Songbook, using songs of exile to convey the mixed emotions that both artists felt for Hollywood, a place Brecht described as “paradise and hell in the same city”.
The production’s creative team is led by acclaimed director Tim Albery, who devised the show’s original concept, and the award-winning Canadian designer Michael Levine, whose original concepts bring Eisler’s world to life. Braun is accompanied on stage by Juno Award-winning pianist Serouj Kradjian.
Electric Company Theatre in association with
the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity
The Full Light of Day
Co-presented with Canadian Stage
June 7 - 13, 2019 | Bluma Appel Theatre
From award-winning artists Daniel Brooks and Kim Collier, The Full Light of Day is a provocative film theatre hybrid that follows the story of Mary, a wealthy aging matriarch who must contend with her family’s corrupt legacy before she dies.
As the end of her life draws near, Mary refuses to keep turning a blind eye to the misdeeds that helped her family amass their great wealth. The story reflects on the tough moral choices facing Canadians today and forces the audience to confront the systematic corruption and ethical paradoxes that underline most of modern day society. Does our ignorance also make us complicit?
The production blurs the boundaries of media and theatre, using live film and video projections which combines to create an integrated and visually-stunning experience.
The cast includes Jim Mezon, Gabrielle Rose, Jillian Fargey, Dean Paul Gibson, John Ng, Jenny Young, Jonathon Young and others.
Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia
Masquerade
Presented in association with Show One Productions
June 9 - 10, 2019 | John Bassett Theatre
Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia, one of Moscow’s oldest theatre companies, returns to Toronto with Masquerade, a production based on the writings of Mikhail Lermontov, one of Russia’s most important 19th century poets.
The tragi-farce uncovers the real moralities of modern society, peering behind the masks that everyone wears. Visionary Lithuanian director Rimas Tuminas, whose critically-acclaimed Uncle Vanya sold out at Luminato in 2017, applies his signature style with a large cast and joyous music to tell Lermontov’s story, full of scandalous love affairs, squandered opportunities, exposed lies, truths, and a discovery that words that can kill. Literally.
In Russian with English surtitles.
Photo: Gabrielle Rose, Scott Bellis and Jenny Young in The Full Light of Day. ©2018 Brian Johnson.
2018-11-08
Toronto: Five productions at Luminato 2019 are on sale now