CANDIDE, AMADEUS and More Set for Talk Is Free Theatre's 16th Season

Artistic Producer Arkady Spivak announced today the 2017-2018 season. It will feature a forgotten musical theatre masterpiece, a world premiere of a new Canadian play, a re-imagining of a 20th Century Theatre classic and a site-specific production of a play written, directed and starring Indigenous Canadians.

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Details for the season are as follows:

November 23 to December 2, 2017
Opening Night on November 24
CANDIDE
(A Satirical Musical)
Book by Hugh Wheeler adapted from Voltaire
Lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John Latouche and Stephen Sondheim
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Directed by Richard Ouzounian
Musical Director Lily Ling
Choreographer David Ball
Designers Joe Pagnan and Andrew Cleveland
Starring Mike Nadajewski as Candide, with Thom Allison, Holly Chaplin, Gabi Epstein and Michael Torontow

Candide takes the audience on a round-the-world romp of idealistic optimism as it clashes with a series of absurdly unfortunate events. Throughout the course of the story, however, this hopefulness is constantly called into question as Candide is exiled, forced into the Bulgarian army, caught up in the Spanish Inquisition, cheated out of a fabulous fortune, shipwrecked on a remote island, and generally torn apart from his love. Featuring a splendid score by the unparalleled Leonard Bernstein and a charming book by Hugh Wheeler, Candide is a witty and wacky satire of a musical. It will be given an intimate production with only five cast members, re-imagined by Director Richard Ouzounian in celebration of Bernstein's 100th Anniversary.

February 15 to 24, 2018
Opening Night on February 16
AMADEUS
(Internationally Renowned Drama)
By Peter Shaffer
Directed by Esther Jun
Designed by Joe Pagnan
Starring David Coomber as Mozart and Craig Lauzon as Salieri

This popular play is a highly fictionalized account of the lives of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. Mozart, a rowdy young prodigy, arrives in Vienna determined to make a splash. Awestruck by his genius, court composer Salieri has the power to promote his talent or destroy it. Seized by obsessive jealousy Salieri begins a war with Mozart, music, and ultimately, with God.

April 12 to 21, 2018
Opening Night on April 13
FOR BOTH RESTING AND BREEDING
(World Premiere)
By Adam Meisner
Directed by Brandon Crone

In the year 2150, humans have become gender neutral and use the pronoun 'Ish' to identify themselves. This story centers around two historians, ISH56 and ISH62, who want to transform an old residence built in 1999 into a living museum commemorating Millennials for the upcoming sesquicentennial. As the museum is being created, members of the group become too enamored with their gendered counterparts and eventually start to re-enact the dangerous behaviour of their ancestors.

May 3 to 12, 2018
Opening Night on May 4
TALES OF AN URBAN INDIAN
(Back by Popular Demand, Staged on a Moving Bus)
By Darrell Dennis
Directed by Herbie Barnes
Starring Craig Lauzon

TIFT's sell-out production, staged on a moving city bus, is back for its second revival in Barrie. Tales of an Urban Indian is the story of a young Indigenous man's journey from the reservation to downtown Vancouver. A tour de force for one performer, Tales of an Urban Indian conjures up an array of characters that come in and out of Simon Douglas' life, all the while the bus shakes its way throughout the streets of Barrie visiting the real settings of the plot. Starring Craig Lauzon from Royal Canadian Air Farce. After the Barrie run, the production will launch a national tour with the goal of visiting every Canadian province and territory over the next four summers, particularly concentrating on remote regions of the country without existing theatre presence.

Other projects to be released at a later date will include a remount of a production in Toronto, and a revolutionary immersive rendition of a major musical.

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Early-bird subscriptions for the 2017-2018 Season will be available until Friday, June 30, 2017. Single tickets will be available as of Monday July 24, 2017.

Talk Is Free Theatre (TIFT) was founded in 2002 and is based in Barrie, Ontario, a smaller city of 160,000 residents located in the centre of Simcoe County. We are Central Ontario's only professional Equity company with a full winter season. Talk Is Free Theatre's vision is to produce cutting edge theatre works, such as are typically only presented in major urban centres, and connect them with a non-urban audience. We produce a wide range of work from the periphery of mainstream, concentrating on new writing, forgotten classics and drastic re-examinations of established repertoire. Our central programming priority, and by extension the main contribution to the Canadian theatre ecology, is the development and production of new and experimental works of musical theatre.