A pair of Shaw Festival productions will cross Lake Ontario later this year as the repertory theatre prepares to launch a new residency at Harbourfront Centre, marking the Niagara-based company’s first foray into the Toronto scene in nearly three decades.
“Sleuth,” a cat-and-mouse psychological thriller by Anthony Shaffer, will kick off the residency with a two-week run from Oct. 16 to Nov. 1. The production, directed by Peter Fernandes, is currently running at the Shaw Festival’s Court House Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where it opened to positive reviews earlier this spring. Actors Patrick Galligan and Sepehr Reybod will continue with the production when it transfers to Toronto.
Later in the fall, the company will then remount its staging of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” which will run from Nov. 12 to Dec. 23. Adapted and directed by Shaw Festival artistic director Tim Carroll, the production has become a perennial favourite at the festival, where it was most recently presented last year. The cast will include Sanjay Talwar as the grouchy Ebenezer Scrooge, along with Madelyn Kriese and Qasim Khan as the ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, respectively.
“To launch our residency at Harbourfront Centre, we wanted to begin with two very different but equally compelling stories: ‘Sleuth,’ an award-winning modern thriller, and ‘A Christmas Carol,’ an iconic tale of transformation,” Carroll said in a press release. “These performances will be specially adapted for Harbourfront Centre stage, offering Toronto audiences a glimpse of the Shaw’s artistry in a new setting.”
The Shaw Festival, which typically presents about a dozen shows each year across three theatres in Niagara-on-the-Lake, first announced the new three-year partnership with the Harbourfront Centre in December. The residency will see the festival present a series of shows in Toronto each fall and winter.
This is not the first time that the festival has attempted to enter the Toronto theatre market. In the 1980s, the company’s Toronto Project saw the company present a series of shows in the city over six seasons. But the project ended in 1988 due to a lack of funding (though it was briefly revived in the late ‘90s).
