New theatre company brings blockbuster musicals to Toronto

[JasonParis]

New theatre company brings blockbuster musicals to Toronto
CBC Arts

Canada's newest theatre impresario launched a company in Toronto on Monday, with plans to bring six big-name productions to the city, including The Drowsy Chaperone.

Aubrey Dan — the Toronto philanthropist who is also the founder and president of Dancap Global Asset Management and Dancap Private Equity — made the announcement Monday at Toronto's Elgin Theatre.

Bob Martin, left, as Man in Chair in the opening night of The Drowsy Chaperone in New York in 2006. He will play the same starring role when Dancap Production Inc. kicks off its season in Toronto in September.
(Tina Fineberg/Associated Press)

Dan is not new to the theatre business — he previously produced the musicals Urinetown (2004), Ain't Misbehavin' (2005) and Hair (2006) with Canadian Stage Co. in Toronto.

He is also producer of the current Broadway musical The Pirate Queen and the North American touring production of Marion J. Caffey's 3 Mo' Divas.

"We want to play a part in Toronto's cultural renaissance," Dan said as he unveiled the new company.

"Our colleagues in the visual arts, ballet and opera are making great contributions to the revitalization of this city and we're eager and determined to bring more exceptional theatre to Toronto audiences."

The Dancap season will begin in September with the return of Bob Martin to the Toronto stage in The Drowsy Chaperone, which is headed to London's West End after a successful run in New York.

The show stars Martin as Man in Chair who introduces the audience to his favourite 1920s musical, The Drowsy Chaperone, while the show bursts to life in the background. It won five Tony Awards and six Drama Desk Awards on Broadway.

The season continues with five more shows:

• The 25th Putnam County Spelling Bee: A Tony Award-winning musical about six adolescent spellers and the adults in their lives.

• 3 Mo' Divas: A Musical Celebration of Class, Sass and Style: Three divas present a night of music that stretches from opera and gospel to jazz, blues and soul.

• My Fair Lady: The Lerner & Loewe musical based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion will be coming to Canada directly from its 50th anniversary tour in the U.K.

• Avenue Q: A 2004 Broadway hit about people, and puppets, trying to make it in New York.

• Jersey Boys: The musical about how four blue-collar kids, Frankie Valli, Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi, went on to pop stardom as The Four Seasons. Toronto's Des McAnuff will direct the Tony Award-winning musical.

All are to be staged at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres in Toronto, except My Fair Lady, which will be presented at the Toronto Centre for the Arts in North York.

Season tickets and memberships to the theatre company go on sale April 28 and individual ticket sales begun June 18.

Musical theatre has traditionally done well in Toronto, with Mamma Mia! enjoying a five-year run and Phantom of the Opera, which ran for 10 years, set for a revival.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Avenue Q is coming? About time!

*humming Schadenfreude*...

AoD

 

[gbelan]

i think aubrey dan is the son of leslie dan(pharmacueticals)

six big name productions- its good to see someone giving the mirvishs some healthy competition and more top notch theatre for toronto.

 

[afransen]

Hopefully this will put a fire under the asses of the rest of the theatre companies to be a bit riskier.

 

[AndreaPalladio]

Riskier? Anything would be riskier than Jersey Boys or Putnam County Spelling Bee. I've seen riskier margarine commercials.

 

[syn]

^I was thinking the same thing. These musicals don't seem very "risky" at all, though they are welcome.

 

[afransen]

I didn't mean that the productions themselves are risky, but rather that some serious competition will force existing players in the industry to try harder to ensure they are still relevent and have good shows.

 

[adma]

Well, I've noticed that Menopause Out Loud! has replaced Blue Man Group at that Panasonic.

What next? Nunsense?

 

[AndreaPalladio]

Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding?

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

From the Globe, Toronto Section:

ARTS: IMPRESARIO
Where angels fear to tread
Aubrey Dan is either the Toronto theatre scene's new great white hope, or a dilettante with hard lessons ahead

JAMES ADAMS

Even before the premature exit of The Lord of the Rings last year, there was much hand-wringing about the listless state of Toronto's for-profit theatre scene. Where, wondered cabbies and chamber maids, restaurateurs and tour operators, were thePhantoms of the Operaand the Lion Kings for the 21st century?

The answer, or at least the promise of one, may have been found this week at the Elgin Theatre. There, before an applauding crowd of 1,200, the 43-year-old son of a pharmaceuticals billionaire, Aubrey Dan, held a glitzy party to launch a company he thinks can make Toronto Broadway North - again.

We were last here in 1989, when Garth Drabinsky, Myron Gottlieb and their Livent crew unleashed their big-budget wave of "proven hits" (The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard), revivals (Show Boat) and Broadway-bound originals (Ragtime, Kiss of the Spider Woman). The flood abruptly abated nine years later with the collapse of Livent. Since then, Mirvish Productions, founded in 1964, has been the only big-name player in commercial theatre in town.

At the Elgin, Mr. Dan, second-born son of Novopharm Ltd. founder Leslie Dan (2005 personal net worth: $1.1-billion) and, since 2002, head of Dancap Private Equity, seemed keen to at once invoke and diminish the spectre of Livent.

Yes, the hors d'oeuvre (gourmet mini-burgers, Chinese dumplings) and the refreshments (Freixenet) were as plentiful as they once were at a Livent opening. Rumours were circulating that at least 15 producers, union officials and booking agents had been flown in from New York, Boston and Chicago. But would Mr. Drabinsky have said, as a shambling, chapeau-wearing Mr. Dan did, "Gee, this is bigger than my wedding, bigger than my bar mitzvah"?

One thinks not.

On stage, the impresario wannabe rotated an impressive array of acting, musical and directorial talent that either talked up or presented scenes from the six musicals Dancap Productions Inc. is scheduled to run in 2007-08, starting in late September with an almost month-long run of The Drowsy Chaperone at the Elgin.

Among the pitchmen were Des McAnuff, the Scarborough-born helmsman of the Tony-winning Jersey Boys (which Mr. Dan hopes to mount in Toronto next year); England's Lisa O'Hare, who was flown in from London, where she's starring in Mary Poppins,to sing I Could Have Danced All Night from My Fair Lady; and 80-year-old Cloris Leachman, the Oscar-winning actress who last trod the boards here in 1994 for Livent's revival of Show Boat in what is now the Toronto Centre for the Arts.

Located on Yonge Street north of Sheppard, the centre is as much an element in the Dancap vision as it was for Livent. The company has already booked My Fair Lady into its 1,727-seat main space for a two-week run in May, 2008. But that's not all Aubrey Dan has in mind for the facility, which is owned by the city. Last year, he proposed a five-year management deal to its board, wherein Dancap would run all three spaces in the centre, including a 1,000-seat concert hall and a 250-seat studio theatre.

The board nixed the proposal. After all, Livent had had a 10-year contract, reportedly worth $10-million, to do just what Mr. Dan is proposing, when the building was known as the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts. But Mr. Drabinsky and company had to renege on the arrangement in 1998 when Livent filed for bankruptcy protection. Since then, the centre's studio and concert hall have become a popular rental for community groups, a situation its board is reluctant to tamper with, even though the centre continues to lose about $1-million a year.

More recently, Mr. Dan gave the TCA board another proposal, this time to rent its heretofore money-losing main space for a minimum of six months, primarily to house Jersey Boys,whose run Mr. Dan would like to start in July, 2008. (Mr. Dan owns the Canadian rights to Boys, a retelling of the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons story, and in 2005 purchased a small stake in the Broadway production.) The board responded by striking a risk-assessment committee, which is scheduled to present its report on May 15.

If Mr. Dan doesn't get the okay, he says he will postpone the launch of Jersey Boys until January, 2009, and put it in the 1,561-seat Elgin, where he has already booked half the shows (The Drowsy Chaperone, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Avenue Q) of his inaugural season.

In the meantime, Mr. Dan, like Garth Drabinsky in his heyday, is juggling a brace of venues for the shows ahead. Besides the TCA and the Elgin, he has rented the Elgin's sister theatre, the 1,000-seat Winter Garden, for 3 Mo' Divas next March, and announced his intention to buy another former Drabinsky playpen, the 2,200-seat Canon (formerly the Pantages), as well as the 1,000-seat Panasonic. Both Yonge Street venues were put on the block by U.S.-based Live Nation this year, and no one is going to be surprised if Mr. Dan ends up paying at least $150-million to own them.

Right now, most theatre observers are willing to give Mr. Dan the benefit of the doubt and let him spend tens of millions of dollars on something resembling content rather than the erection of pricey cultural palaces.

As one woman said at the launch: "We need this to happen, we really need this to happen."Season tickets and group sales for the 2007-08 Dancap Productions season are on sale today. Sales of single admissions start June 18.

Mr. Dan's biz philosophy

Aubrey Dan likes to say he has been a theatre buff for 20 years. He claims his first date with the woman who became his wife was at a CanStage play. But no businessman ever got rich embracing his sentimental side. "From a business perspective, you know that out of 10 deals, three will break even, two will do okay, four will lose money and one will be the home run," he said.

"There is no formula to what I'm doing, no guarantee" to showbiz success, he acknowledged. Indeed, "proven hits" such as The Producers, Hairspray and Blue Man Group all had shorter-than-expected runs in Toronto in the past four or five years. Still, he argued, you "can mitigate risk ... right off the bat by working with creatives who are award winners [and] with shows with proven track records."

Mr. Dan thinks "a disciplined selection process with choosing our shows - like I do in my investment side, in private equity" - will help ensure his longevity.

Already there's grousing about the lack of Canadian content in his opening season (The Drowsy Chaperone aside), as well as a bias toward touring shows or using Toronto as "a pre-Broadway vehicle." Mr. Dan, however, counsels patience. Yes, "the show mix" for 2007-08 "is mainstream commercial; it isn't too much outside the fringe." But, he stressed, "you've got to develop the infrastructure. It's a process in time that will evolve. ... How can you risk all that capital to start out small?" James Adams

AoD