By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Shadow Theatre’s upcoming four-production 32nd season will launch with the premiere of a much-anticipated new Canadian musical.
In Morningside Road, by the remarkably versatile Edmonton artists Mhairi Berg (book) and Simon Abbott (music), a girl connects to her grandmother’s stories of growing up on the title street in Edinburgh — with the gathering complication that the old woman’s memory is being eroded and diverted by dementia. Can truth and fiction be unknotted?
To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.
The Celtic-flavoured musical breathed its first public air at Nextfest and a staged reading followed at Script Salon. Morningside Road received a Sterling Award nomination for its Fringe incarnation last summer. The Shadow production directed by Lana Michelle Hughes (Oct. 15 to Nov. 2), Shadow’s associate artistic director, is its expanded full-length premiere. Berg and Maureen Rooney are joined onstage by a three-piece band led by Abbott, Grindstone Theatre’s resident composer/musical director.
The lineup announced by artistic director/ Shadow co-founder John Hudson includes two American plays, both with classical antecedents and contemporary resonances. An Iliad, by the team of Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, is a modern re-telling of the Homer epic. “Our narrator is Homer,” says Hudson. “He’s been travelling and telling the story for 3,000 years. And he stumbles into our theatre with a suitcase,” says Hudson. “He arrives onstage at the (Varscona) theatre at a very specific point in a 10-year war” — you know, that famously infamous Trojan War.
The four characters in The Revolutionists, by the prolific American star playwright Lauren Gunderson (Christmas at Pemberley), are real historical head-strong women who lived on the knife edge of their time, the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The doomed queen Marie Antoinette, playwright cum feminist activist Olympe de Gouges, the Marat assassin Charlotte Corday, and the Haitian activist spy Marianne Angelle. “They interact, back and forth, in and out, during this very smart and witty play,” says Hudson, whose initial idea for his production (March 18 to April 5, 2026) is “period punk.” Alex Dawkins will play Olympe; other casting remains to be announced.
The English playwright Peter Quilter has been in touch with Shadow Theatre ever since the Edmonton company produced his play Glorious! (the story of the supremely untalented celebrity soprano Florence Foster Jenkins) in 2008. Quilter’s 2023 comedy Autumn is the finale of the upcoming Shadow season, “a beautiful two-hander about two eccentric sisters … lovely, full of heart, and very funny,” as Hudson describes. The play unfolds during their preparations for the wedding of the daughter of one of them. Hughes directs the Shadow production May 6 to 24, 2026.
Meanwhile, the current season continues with Kristen Da Silva’s Where You Are, through May 18. The review is here.
Further information and subscriptions for the 2025-2026 Shadow season: shadowtheatre.org.
