Opinion | From Soulpepper to Stratford, here are the Star’s top theatre picks for 2022

Live theatre came back blazing to Toronto and the GTA in 2022.

After the long hiatus of COVID-19 lockdowns and continued frustration as the Omicron surge slowed things down again, many theatres started presenting in-person shows in March. And by summer, the scene was at high velocity with full seasons at the Stratford and Shaw festivals and a Toronto Fringe Festival that, while still somewhat limited in size, was notable for the quality, variety and vibrancy of its shows.

You could feel it in the work: the creativity and energy of theatre artists and artisans that had been pent up over the pandemic exploded onto stages. New work, classics, adaptations, musicals, storefronts, big commercial venues: #theaTO was back, baby, and so was the Star theatre team, grateful to have real live shows to write about again.

When we met up to hammer out this Top 10 we found that we could have filled the list nearly three times over with our individual picks, a reflection of the strength of this theatre year as well as our varied tastes and perspectives. In recognition of this we’ve included a bonus three shows: individual picks we each felt deserved honourable mention.

Cockroach (Tarragon Theatre)

Fresh, unsettling, exhilarating. Three superb actors performed Ho Ka Kei’s dense and poetic text in a kinetic production helmed by Tarragon’s new artistic director, Mike Payette, and choreographed by Hanna Kiel. As the actors crawled and slid around Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart’s post-industrial set delivering Ho’s blistering monologues, a story emerged about a Boy (Anton Ling) whose identity is fractured between his immigrant past (represented by the title character who was, indeed, a cockroach and played by Steven Hao), colonial legacies represented by the Bard (Karl Ang) and a traumatic intimate experience. The superb production launched Payette’s Tarragon programming with a bang, and further cements Ho’s reputation as one of the most exciting voices in Canadian playwriting.

A Perfect Bowl of Pho (Toronto Fringe)

Every bit living up to its title, “A Perfect Bowl of Pho” was cooked up to soup-slurping perfection this summer at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Full of heart but never cloying, with a dash of clever humour on the side, the musical by Nam Nguyen and Wilfred Moeschter was a love letter to Vietnamese culture, stringing together a series of vignettes — some solemn, others joyfully exuberant — that chart the history of the titular dish. The musical’s young ensemble, under Steven Hao’s sharp direction, deftly portrayed multiple characters whose stories somehow, sometimes rather cheekily, involve a warm bowl of pho. Here’s hoping there’s more life for this exuberant new work because anyone who tasted this delectable concoction knows that one bowl is simply not enough.

The Antipodes (Coal Mine Theatre)

Annie Baker’s audacious play about the dangers of storytelling took my breath away as one of Toronto’s first in-person theatrical productions of 2022. Coal Mine Theatre’s vibrant, intimate, seductive production of “The Antipodes” took Baker’s text and ran with it, injecting it with new life and a perfect ensemble of actors. Ted Dykstra’s direction created a distorted sense of reality on the tiny Coal Mine stage, but the show never felt untethered from the here and the now of telling a story and creating a world. Coal Mine’s take on one of the most brilliant new plays of the last 10 years was a marvel. I’ll be clamouring for a remount for years to come.

Death and the King’s Horseman (Stratford Festival)

Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece of modern theatre, Nobel winner Wole Soyinka’s 1975 play is seldom staged in the West because it is epic in scale and rooted in the specificity of Yoruban culture. Stratford committed significant resources to get this production right, with a top-drawer cast of acting talent, cultural and language consultants ensuring representational precision and sensitivity, and a lavish physical production directed by Tawiah M’Carthy that looked gorgeous on the extended thrust of the Tom Patterson stage. Set in colonial Nigeria, the story of the tragic consequences of British intervention in a local death ritual still felt stingingly fresh. May its success pave the way for more Canadian productions of great plays from the global South.

Human Measure (Cassils/Canadian Stage)

“Human Measure,” the powerful movement-based piece created by multimedia artist Cassils and choreographed by Jasmine Albuquerque, felt like an act of resistance. Perhaps, even defiance. Presented at a time when some seek to erase the very existence of LGBTQ individuals, the work’s aching meditation on the notion of visibility — specifically that of non-binary and transgender individuals — moved in its stillness and spoke volumes in its many moments of silence. There was a languid beauty in how the six trans and non-binary performers, all almost entirely naked, developed in real time a jaw-dropping cyanotype print. Equally striking was Albuquerque’s kinetic choreography, blinding with its intensity in certain moments and softly beguiling in others. Altogether, the work leaves an imprint, both visually and emotionally, that’s hard to erase.

Boy Falls From the Sky (Mirvish/Past Future Productions)

Jake Epstein’s solo show about a life lived onstage was riotously funny and surprisingly sweet, the rare production to which I purchased a second ticket immediately following the media night. In “Boy Falls From the Sky,” Epstein let Mirvish audiences in on a secret: showbiz? Not that easy. Epstein survived the Broadway run of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” — but not without damaging his joints. He’s too tall to be cast in things, he told us, bending his knees with superb comic timing. Yes, he attended Drake’s bar mitzvah. And, yes, after years of uncertainty, he got the girl. “Boy Falls from the Sky” was that pearl of a solo show without a hint of self-indulgence and, as with “The Antipodes,” I’m dreaming of a remount.

Kamloopa (Soulpepper/Native Earth Performing Arts)

Written and directed by Kim Senklip Harvey, “Kamloopa” is an irreverent road trip comedy that transforms into something stirring and profound. Harvey, a member of the Syilx and Tsilhqot’in nations with ancestral ties to the Dakelh, Secwepemc and Ktunaxa communities, is a legal scholar as well as an award-winning playwright (“Kamloopa” won the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language drama), and understands her creative work to be both artistic ceremony and an assertion of the legal rights of her people. She also takes seriously the imperative to entertain, and her production delivered on this through three brilliantly calibrated performances from Yolanda Bonnell, Samantha Brown and Kaitlyn Yott.

Uncle Vanya (Crow’s Theatre)

This was an “Uncle Vanya” that managed to preserve the stakes and esthetic of Czarist Russia but with none of the dustiness. Liisa Repo-Martel wrote a beautiful adaptation that felt right at home in the mouths of Chris Abraham’s actors, and Julie Fox’s and Josh Quinlan’s set was simply out of this world, transforming the theatre at the Streetcar Crowsnest into an antique-looking drawing room. Tom Rooney and Bahia Watson, too, were magnetic to watch onstage. This production showed the work of Chekhov at its best, with nuanced characters and moody atmosphere to boot. A winner.

’da Kink in My Hair (TO Live/Soulpepper)

Few Canadian plays are as iconic as “’da Kink in My Hair,” the 2001 Toronto Fringe Festival hit that was picked up by Mirvish Productions and subsequently turned into a prime-time television sitcom. Joyous, wildly hilarious and profoundly moving, Trey Anthony’s play exalts the lives, challenges and triumphs of a group of Black women who call Toronto’s Little Jamaica home. This 20th-anniversary production, brilliantly directed by Weyni Mengesha (who helmed the original Fringe production), featured a top-notch ensemble of actors, most of whom are alumni of various other productions of the play, and bring with them a deep reverence for and understanding of the material. Stunning, too, were Joanna Yu’s set and the musical compositions by Corey Butler, which evoked the sights and sounds of the vibrant Eglinton West community.

Wildfire (Factory Theatre)

This deceptively simple romp through familial legacy swept the Dora Awards this year and it’s not hard to see why. Soheil Parsa’s direction of David Paquet’s text was mind-bogglingly sharp, achieving much with little. “Wildfire” didn’t need fancy sets or elaborate choreography; between Paquet’s hauntingly spare text and Parsa’s ultraprecise direction, the play felt meticulously realized and deliciously complex, asking big questions about what we owe our families and what they might owe us. “Wildfire” was a master class in dramaturgy, a testament to the magic that happens when a play text meets its match in a director. This production challenged Toronto theatre to do more with less. It’s my hope the community continues to heed that call.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Two Minutes to Midnight and The Huns (Assembly Theatre/One Four One Collective)

I’m cheating a little here; these two plays aren’t really a set. But with a mutual playwright, venue and some cast members, performed back to back within the space of a few weeks, Michael Ross Albert’s plays felt like a diptych of millennial malaise, a peek behind the curtain of young person nihilism and corporate burnout. Albert is one of Toronto’s most exciting playwrights, with a firm handle on comedy but a robust understanding of human interaction, and both “The Huns” and “Two Minutes to Midnight” showed immense promise. Assembly Theatre is a tiny space run by a tiny creative team, but what they and the folks at One Four One accomplished in 2022 was no small feat. I’m desperately looking forward to what Albert writes next.

The Doctor’s Dilemma (Shaw Festival)

In her first crack at helming a play by George Bernard Shaw on the flagship stage of the festival that bears his name, actor-turned-director Diana Donnelly announced herself as a confident creative force. She set the play in the present, changed a central male character to female, and elicited gorgeous work from a top-notch company of actors and designers. The production leaned into the topicality of the subject matter — medical ethics — and included any number of bold staging moves, including breaking the fourth wall and slyly commenting on the windbagginess of one of the characters. Some Shaw purists weren’t amused. I can’t wait for what Donnelly does next.

The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff (Harbourfront Centre)

The true story of a working-class hero from a long forgotten war was retold to stunning effect in “The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff,” the deceptively simple new musical that turned out to be the biggest surprise of the fall theatre season. This co-production between England’s Northern Stage and Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre was always going to be a gamble. On this side of the pond, few likely were familiar with the Young’uns, the English folk trio who wrote and composed the musical. Even fewer had likely heard of Johnny Longstaff, the man whose journey forms the basis of the show. But after viewing the production, you’re certain to want to learn more about both the man and the band. The production’s success largely hinges on its toe-tapping numbers, Lorne Campbell’s spare direction and the ingenious way Longstaff’s own voice — from interviews he conducted in the 1980s — has been integrated into the spoken word sections of the narrative. It’s some haunting, soul-stirring stuff.

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