Prepared to be “swept away” by Centaur Theatre’s 48th season

A rite of spring in the Montreal arts and culture scene took place on March 16, as the Centaur Theatre unveiled the lineup for its 48^th season.

Roy Surette, the Centaur’s artistic and executive director (pictured below), promised the gathered media and Montreal theatrical community members that the Centaur in 2016-2017 will soar to new heights with its six main stage productions and Beyond the Main Stage series, and will guarantee theatergoers will be, as the theme of the 48^th season suggests, be “swept away”.

“This will be an adventure that will transport audiences to an array of diverse worlds where anything is possible, where new ways of thinking and feeling exist,” he said.  “We invite Montrealers to come fly with us, be swept away to new and different realities where treasures of humour, empathy and wisdom abound.”

Centaur Theatre artistic & executive director Roy Surette (right) and communications director Eloi Savoie announce the 2016-2017 line-up

This year’s selection of the six main stage productions will consist of three international hits (one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner) and three successful Canadian productions, in which three of them will have their Quebec English-language premieres, and they are:

“Constellations” (October 4-30), the Broadway and West End hit in which a physicist and a bee keeper fall in love over and over again in so many different ways;

“The Watershed” (November 8 – December 4) by Anna Soutar (who wrote the critically-acclaimed and award-winning docudrama “Seeds”), which deals with a family summer road trip with a very different twist, as they traverse across Canada to Fort McMurray, Alberta in order to investigate the issues that surround the Alberta oil sands, as well as the Experimental Lakes Area of Ontario;

“You Will Remember Me” (March 7 – April 2, 2017) centres around a professor who can remember so many historical facts, but can’t remember what he did the day before. And thanks to a cell phone-obsessed young girl, he manages to call up some repressed memories and heal some old wounds;

“Clybourne Park” (April 4-30, 2017) won the Pulitzer Prize for its spin off of the classic stage drama “A Raisin in the Sun”, which takes place in a certain Chicago neighborhood in 1959, when a Black family buys a house in an all-white neighborhood, and then 50 years later, when a White couple buys the same house in the same area, which has now become an all Black neighborhood;

“Bed and Breakfast” (April 25 – May 21, 2017) is Mark Crawford’s rollicking comedy (in which its two lead actors perform all of the dozens of roles – both male and female -- in the play) about a gay male couple from Toronto who move to a small tourist town and try to turn an old family home into a trendy bed & breakfast.

As well, the Centaur will feature the following offerings as part of its Beyond the Man Stage series: the based-on-a-true-story drama “Chlorine” as the 2016 Brave New Looks selection (October 19-29); the twisted Christmas tradition “Urban Tales” (December 8-17), which will be devoted to the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future; the hottest two weeks in winter, also known as the Wildside Theatre Festival, which will celebrate its 20^th anniversary (January 5 – 15, 2017); and as a special presentation in celebration of Montreal’s 375^th anniversary, the Centaur and Just For Laughs will team up to present a special remounting of the award-winning production of Michel Tremblay’s comedy/drama “Hosanna” (July 6-23, 2017).

Top it off with the Saturday morning children’s series and the Sunday chat-ups and post-show talk back group discussions, and the Centaur Theatre is ready to lift off for its 48^th season that will have Montrealers who enjoy quality theatre be truly swept away.

For more information about the Centaur’s upcoming 2016-2017 season, go to www.centaurtheatre.com, or call 514-288-3161.

(This post originally appeared in the March 26, 2016 edition of the Montreal Times)