Lana Michelle Hughes, Shadow Theatre’s new artistic director as of July 1 2026.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
After 35 years, a torch is being passed at Shadow Theatre.
At the end of the 2025-2026 season, John Hudson, a co-founder of the company and its artistic director from the start, is retiring. Stepping into the a.d. role is Lana Michelle Hughes, the highly accomplished director/ actor/ playwright/ producer/ sound designer who’s been Shadow’s associate artistic director since 2024.
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Of the four productions in the 2025-2026 lineup, jointly programmed by Hudson and Hughes, each will direct two, starting with the latter’s premiere production of the Mhairi Berg/ Simon Abbott musical Morningside Road in October. And on July 1 2026 “a new generation with new ideas,” as Hudson puts it, takes over, at the artistic helm of one of Edmonton’s flagship theatre companies.
Shadow Theatre artistic director John Hudson
As its name implies, Shadow was born on the dark side of town, where the gritty plays live, three-and-a-half decades ago (Hudson jokingly calls the aesthetic “young man theatre”). He and his U of A theatre school classmate Shaun Johnston, newly minted U of actors, shared an appetite for dark and edgy, and a dream of starting a theatre company.
Hudson traces Shadow back to a 1989 Fringe production of Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love. The late great Jim DeFelice was in that show, and directed How I Got That Story for the new Hudson-Johnston venture. Hudson made his own directorial debut with the bizarre black comedy Some Things You Need To Know Before The World ends (A Final Evening With The Illuminati).
The budget? “Nothing!” laughs Hudson. “We put in our 800 bucks out of our pockets to be in the Fringe, and we paid ourselves back…. We all made 10 cents. We were young!”
The new company launched itself more officially at the old Phoenix Downtown, with Johnston’s own play Catching The Train (which won the first Sterling new play award) and The Day They Shot John Lennon. As Johnston left for the world of TV and film, the productions were a confluence of key Shadow players, including Coralie Cairns, John Sproule, and David Belke (whose own company ACME Theatre merged with Shadow in 1995). The debut Shadow season was a three-show lineup, with 32 subscribers.
Hudson doesn’t discount luck in the Shadow success story. When the Fringe decamped from Chinook Theatre to the Bus Barns across the street in 1993, suddenly there was an available theatre space, and a consortium of Shadow, Teatro La Quindicina and Rapid Fire Theatre snapped it up and renamed the ex-firehall the Varscona. “And we snuck in the back door with the Alberta Foundation of the Arts, when Union Theatre left town. They had a charity number and let Shadow have it…. So we could fund-raise. We were on our way!”
And that way was assisted by dexterous administrators in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Eva Cairns and Al Rasko among them, who secured “foundational funding” and taught the company the ropes. “We all learned; we’ve had solid administration,” says Hudson of a Shadow genealogy that now includes general manager Karen Brown Furnell.
Since those early days of “young man theatre,” the programming has expanded. Hudson, now 63, has directed some 110 Shadow productions, and more than three dozen new Canadian plays, “the most raucous comedy to the most serious drama,” as he says. His list of favourite Shadow productions includes The Comedy Company, Bloomsday, Sexy Laundry, Blithe Spirit, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And it includes “an exhausting 10 years” fund-raising for the $7.1 million Varscona re-build which opened in 2016.
“The timing is right for me,” he says of his exit from the artistic leadership. “I’ve had to put writing and acting on the shelf.” And he’s sure the company with the very flexible mandate — “the best of contemporary theatre” — has found in Hughes an ideal successor, with an impressive skill set.
In addition to her multi-faceted history as an artist, which includes directing and sound design, devising a solo show, and acting in an assortment of Promise Productions, Hughes was at Catalyst Theatre for 14 years — as managing director and producer, “a really challenging outside-the-box job, not at all cookie-cutter,” as she describes. “There was nothing I didn’t do,” at the unique theatre company that develops and tours original work. Grant-writing, marketing, administration…” Hughes has done it all. What she hasn’t done before, as she says, is “to be the face of a company.” And that’s what her new job will mean.
Not only did she pitch Hudson in 2017 an idea for an Artistic Director Fellowship Program for women and gender/ marginalized people, “as a stepping stone towards theatre leadership, she raised the funds, some $90,000, to support it for three years. Alexandra Dawkins and Amanda Goldberg were the first Fellows; in the second of her two years, Hughes became Shadow’s first-ever associate artistic director.
Developing new work is a particular focus for Hughes. Shadow has always developed and premiered Canadian plays, by Conni Massing, Neil Grahn, Darrin Hagen, and other Edmonton playwriting stars. But it’s been on a piecemeal project by project basis (Shadow, like their Varscona roommate companies, has never received any Canada Council funding). And Hughes will be working to make new play development and playwright outreach a more formalized and sustainable program at Shadow.
Meanwhile, the transitional season of joint-artistic directorship at Shadow is about to begin, when Morningside Road opens Oct. 16.
