March 26, 2015
The Montreal GazetteMarch 26, 2015
By Victor Swoboda
Read the article
The Broadway musical Funny Girl will open the Segal Centre’s 48th season in October, the first of three musicals – one in Yiddish – included in the theatre’s 2015-2016 lineup. Also in the lineup, which artistic director Lisa Rubin announced on Wednesday, are four dramas, a solo show about baby boomers by comedian Rick Miller, and a new program of video screenings of Shakespeare’s plays transmitted from Britain’s Globe Theatre.
Director Peter Hinton is staging Funny Girl in October with Gabi Epstein as vaudeville star Fanny Brice, memorably portrayed in the 1968 movie version by Barbra Streisand. An 18-member song-and-dance cast performs what is touted as Montreal’s first production of Funny Girl, whose famous songs include People.
Another smash Broadway musical, The Producers, will get its world première in Yiddish (with English and French surtitles) performed by the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre. Mel Brooks’s tale about a couple of showbiz bumblers was the Broadway hit of 2001, winning 12 Tony awards. The Producers closes the Segal Centre’s season in June 2016.
Joe DiPietro’s musical comedy I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change became the second-longest-running Off-Broadway musical in 2008, with just over 5,000 performances. This satirical look at romantic relationships has been staged around the world in more than a dozen languages. It finally comes to Montreal in May 2016, in a production directed by Wade Lynch and co-produced by Copa de Oro, which teamed with the Segal Centre for Ain’t Misbehavin’ and other successful musical productions.
British playwright Nina Raine’s critically acclaimed play Tribes, about a deaf man’s romance with both a woman and the sign language that she teaches him, will run for three weeks starting Nov. 29. Jack Volpe plays Billy, who discovers that there’s life beyond his deafness and his parents’ home. First seen in London in 2010, the play’s Off-Broadway production won the 2012 New York Drama Critics Circle award.
The Secret Annex by Alix Sobler puts a fantastic twist on the sad fate of Holocaust victim and diarist Anne Frank. In Sobler’s dramatization, the teen is not killed in a Nazi concentration camp but survives, emigrates to Brooklyn and seeks to become a published writer. Romance enters the picture. Sara Farb, who will play Anne Frank the teenager in the Diary of Anne Frank this year at Ontario’s Stratford Festival, will play her as a 25-year-old at the Segal Centre for three weeks starting Jan. 31.
Whether Bad Jews by Joshua Harmon is a comedy or a tragedy is open to debate. This five-character play pits family members spewing anger at each other following a death in the family. It sounds grim, but New York and London critics agreed that Harmon’s snappy dialogues were hilariously funny. Directed by Lisa Rubin, Bad Jews has its Montreal première on May 1, 2016.
Multi-talented Rick Miller brings his latest solo show, Boom, to the Segal Centre in March 2016. Backed up by a multimedia setup, Miller looks with whimsy at the events that shaped the baby boom generation as well as the famous people behind them. A romp in time.
The new Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen series will take place in the Segal Centre’s 77-seat CinemaSpace. Titles of plays and screening dates will be announced later.
For further information about the Segal Centre’s next season, see www.segalcentre.org.