The cast of the Toronto Production of SIX. (L-R) Maggie Lacasse, Elysia Cruz, Jaz Robinson, Julia Pulo, Krystal Hernández, Lauren Mariasoosay. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus.Joan Marcus/Supplied
The Dora Mavor Moore Awards, Toronto’s theatre, dance and opera awards, are announcing their nominations a week from today.
But we know already that there won’t be any for director Jeremy Webb’s fine production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, one of the most attended play productions of the year, or the Toronto cast of Six: The Musical, the best-selling musical of the season.
That’s because commercial producer Mirvish Productions quietly left the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts, the industry group that organizes the awards, in the fall.
As such, it did not – and cannot – submit any of its shows for Dora Awards this season, as was first reported by the Toronto Star last week.
This is bad news for Toronto theatre. The Doras will have less awareness and be of much less interest to local theatregoers without Mirvish shows competing – and that’s not great for a local industry that’s either “recovering” or in “crisis” depending on who you talk to.
This is just a numbers thing. In the 2022-2023 season, Mirvish Productions sold about two million tickets to all its shows, which was, by some counts, a record for the commercial company.
It’d be unfair to tally the depressed not-for-profit scene over the same period – but a fair estimate of pre-pandemic numbers for all the charitable companies that produce plays and musicals in Toronto would be somewhere around 400,000 to 500,000.
I think it’s safe to say that for more than 80 per cent of the theatregoers in Toronto, theatre is synonymous with Mirvish. (Tell a local cab or ride-share driver you’re a theatre critic – and, of those who don’t ask you what movies you’ve seen lately, almost all will say something like, “You write about Mirvish?”)
In terms of the actual Dora competition, Mirvish’s absence will be most felt in the musical theatre category. The company has only ever submitted its local productions of shows or pre-Broadway runs for consideration, not the Broadway and British-imported tours of musicals or plays that can, some seasons, make up the bulk of its programming.
The off-Mirvish series, meanwhile, often involves commercial transfers of local not-for-profit shows that have already competed at the Doras and so are not eligible.
For instance, Crow’s Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya, though seen by many more people this year than last, would not have been eligible for the 2024 Doras even if Mirvish were still a member of TAPA because Crow’s main stage shows compete in the same “general” division.
This gives you an idea of why Mirvish made a French exit out of TAPA, however. The days of the large, mid-sized and small theatre Dora divisions where like competed against like in the 1990s – think Livent’s Ragtime battling Mirvish Production’s Jane Eyre with maybe a Canadian Stage show at the Bluma Appel thrown in – are long gone in favour of competition in niche divisions such as theatre for young audiences.
Now, any production with a budget greater than $125,000 in a venue with 150 seats or more is automatically considered to be in the general division; smaller budget shows or shows in smaller theatres can choose to compete there, too.
In musical theatre, meanwhile, all musicals are up against other. This is why it was possible for Talk is Free Theatre’s site-specific production of Sweeney Todd, which could play to no more than 44 people a night, to compete against (and beat) at the 2022 Doras the Broadway-bound & Juliet, which played to 2,000 people a night at the Princess of Wales (more than the entire run of Sweeney Todd).
According to Mirvish Productions regular spokesperson John Karastamatis, it seems the reason producer David Mirvish dropped out of TAPA and the Doras is that the competition between commercial and not-for-profit is an uneven one. There’s also the sense that juries lean toward rewarding the not-for-profit sector.
I’m not sure that’s always true in terms of nominations. Mirvish is often very well recognized in nods in the musical theatre division – and, though less so in the play categories, the field there is genuinely very competitive and lots of good work gets left out each year.
However, I have voted on other Toronto theatre awards and am well aware that, all things considered, folks would rather give an award to a Canadian director who created a production from scratch and will show up at the ceremony, than an international director who might have just flown in a for a few days to check on what their associate director has done on their big hit that’s playing in multiples cities around the world.
Arts awards are bogus as true competitions, of course – no performance is measurably better than another.
But they can be great at promoting talent – see the impact of the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre on so many careers – and raising awareness of the overall theatrical ecosystem of a city.
Everyone in Toronto knew about the Mirvish production of Harry Potter and Cursed Child in 2022, but they might only have heard of Factory Theatre’s production of Wildfire – or maybe Factory at all – because that David Paquet absurd comedy won for best production over the JK Rowling-inspired play.
Even before Mirvish left, the Doras had become more and more inward facing or, as TAPA executive director Jacoba Knaapen calls them, “industry awards.” There are too many divisions for even avid performing arts patrons to really wrap their head around.
At the same time, there are too few awards in each division – because of the cost of the statuettes and TAPA’s modest budget – for a really coherent competition in some areas.
The individual acting awards that audiences are traditionally highly interested in, for instance, have been whittled down, first by eliminating gender distinctions, and then, this year, by eliminating the distinction between leading and supporting in all the divisions. Hamlets now compete against Ophelias in each division for a single acting prize.
My first instinct was to write in this newsletter that David Mirvish should reconsider and, out of noblesse oblige, keep his shows in the running, but actually Toronto theatre needs to start thinking a little more about its legibility and visibility to new audiences and maybe this will be a push to do so.
The larger issue here is that the not-for-profit theatre companies that make up TAPA are laser-focused on the equitable division of their (maybe) 20 per cent of the pie – and not enough on getting more of the bigger pie (or growing the pie) so that more artists can make a living in this city. More on that another day.
Opening this week
My Fair Lady opens for review at the Shaw Festival this week. I recently interviewed Tom Rooney, who is playing Henry Higgins, about the big season he is having. You’ve got plenty of time to catch this Lerner and Loewe classic in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. It’s running all the way to Dec. 22.
You’ve got to run, however, to catch Hamlet (Solo), Raoul Bhaneja’s long-touring one-man version of the Shakespeare tragedy, at Soulpepper. It’s on in Toronto only from May 23 to 25.
Come Home: The Legend of Daddy Hall, a music-filled play by Audrey Dwyer about a Black loyalist who fought in the War of 1812, closes the season at Tarragon Theatre (to June 9).
Meanwhile, The Wrong Bashir, a farce about mistaken identity by Zahida Rahemtulla that made a splash on the West Coast, closes out the season at Crow’s Theatre in a production directed by Paolo Santalucia (to June 9).
Three more to see across the country
Late Company, one of Jordan Tannahil’s most produced scripts, is at Kitchener’s Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts in a Green Lights Arts production to May 26. The fine actor Kwaku Okyere is making his (solo) directorial debut with this dinner-party play – with a cast that, notably, features a couple of artistic directors: Tanisha Taitt (Cahoots Theatre) and Matt White (Green Light Arts)
Guys and Dolls, the classic singing-gangster musical by Frank Loesser, open this week at the Arts Club in Vancouver. Artistic director Ashlie Corcoran directs a cast headed by Jonathan Winsby as Sky Masterson and Chelsea Rose as Sarah Brown. It runs to June 30
The Festival TransAmériques – a favourite, I’m so sorry to miss it! – kicks off Wednesday in Montreal (to June 5). Among the shows on this week, Nigamon/Tunai is a collaboration between rising Montreal-based star Émilie Monnet and Waira Nina (from the Inga Nation in Colombia). The title means song in Anishinaabemowin and Inga – and the show unites Indigenous voices from the North and the South on the subject of the effect of mining companies on the land.