Marcus Nance, left, and Hailey Gillis perform in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at Crow's Theatre.DAHLIA KATZ/Crow's Theatre
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 was a hit with Toronto theatre audiences this season – and has hit home with the city’s stable of theatre critics as well.
The much-extended production of the electro-pop musical based on a snippet of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace was named best production of a musical in the 2023-2024 season by the Toronto Theatre Critics’ Awards, announced Tuesday.
Cast members George Krissa and Heeyun Park also received awards recognizing their outstanding supporting performances in the show, produced by Crow’s Theatre and Musical Stage Company.
Together, the three awards make director Chris Abraham’s production – which will return in upsized form at the Royal Alexandra theatre in July, 2025 as part of the Mirvish subscription season – the most-lauded play or musical of the just-concluded season by the TTCAs.
“Tolstoy’s timeless insights into the human heart, given a contemporary musical sheen by composer-librettist Dave Malloy, burned brightly in this splendid Canadian-premiere production, which was movingly acted, cleverly staged and altogether as exhilarating as one of Balaga’s troika rides,” wrote Globe and Mail contributor Martin Morrow, one of the 13 local reviewers who voted on this year’s awards, in a citation.
The TTCAs were resurrected this spring after a three-year hiatus precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Toronto critics participating in the awards, who contribute to a mix of print and online publications (including myself), also felt it was a strong season for productions of original Canadian musicals.
De Profundis: Oscar Wilde in Jail, a new work inspired by the Irish playwright’s time in prison that premiered at Soulpepper in February, received two awards: one for Damien Atkins’s lead performance as Wilde, and another for Gregory Prest’s assured direction of the musical fantasy.
Meanwhile, the cast of Kelly vs Kelly, an exciting new musical inspired by a 1915 court case by Britta Johnson and Sara Farb that Musical Stage Company premiered with Canadian Stage last June, was named the best ensemble of a musical.
In the play categories, a highly competitive year for new dramas led to two “best” Canadian play awards being handed out.
The first went to The Master Plan, Michael Healey’s play based on Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane’s book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy that opened the Crow’s Theatre season in the fall. The second went to Casey and Diana, Nick Green’s play set in a Toronto AIDS hospice in 1991 that premiered at the Stratford Festival ahead of a run at Soulpepper.
Sean Arbuckle, who played a patient patiently awaiting a visit from Princess Diana, received an award for his lead performance in the latter, while the entire cast of The Master Plan was named best ensemble of a play.
Both plays will return to the GTA swiftly. Crow’s production of The Master Plan will be at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton from Oct. 30 to Nov. 16 ahead of an encore Toronto run at Soulpepper from Nov. 24 to Dec. 29. Casey and Diana will run at Theatre Aquarius from Feb. 18 to March 8, 2025 (then travel to the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg from March 19 to April 12).
Bad Roads, a 2017 play by Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit (translated into English by Sasha Dugdale), was named the best international play to have its Toronto premiere this season, while Andrew Kushnir, who staged the brutal wartime drama at Crow’s in the fall, was given an award for his direction of it.
The TTCAs, unlike many other theatre awards, do not announce nominations, only winners – and, in recent editions, have allowed one to three winners in each category. As such, Leora Morris was also lauded as “best” director of a play for her next-level work on The Sound Inside late last spring at Coal Mine Theatre.
The best production of a play award, meanwhile, went to Canadian Stage artistic director Brendan Healy’s marathon of Matthew López’s The Inheritance, a contemporary two-part reimagining of E.M. Forster’s Howards End set among gay men in New York.
Other acting awards went to Amaka Umeh (lead, in Soulpepper’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead), Jadyn Nasato (supporting, in Studio 180′s production of Four Minutes Twelve Seconds) and Oyin Oladejo (supporting, Soulpepper and Obsidian’s production of Three Sisters).
Best design of a play or musical went to the team behind Outside the March and Soulpepper’s production of A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney: Nick Blais (lighting), Heidi Chan (sound), Anahita Dehbonehie (set) and Niloufar Ziaee (costumes).
Last but not least, Daniel MacIvor – who gave a haunting, stand-out performance in The Inheritance – received a special citation “in recognition of exceptional artistic achievement” for a season that also saw his solo shows, Monster and Here Lies Henry, with new creative teams and stars at Factory Theatre.
“The 2023-24 season was a showcase for Daniel MacIvor’s momentous past, present, and future contributions to Toronto and Canadian theatre,” wrote Karen Fricker, a Toronto Star contributor and Intermission Magazine editorial adviser, in a citation.