Big-name musicals and two Canadian premieres as Arts Club Theatre Company announces 2024-25 season

Waitress, Jersey Boys, Cambodian Rock Band, and more shows hit the Stanley

THE ARTS CLUB THEATRE Company announced its next season tonight, with programming that covers big musicals like Jersey Boys and Waitress, as well as the Canadian premieres of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band and Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust. The holiday shows consist of Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34th Street, and The Gingerbread Men: A(Nother) Holiday Cabaret.

In all, the 61st season features 11 shows, mostly at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, with four productions at the Granville Island Stage and one at the smaller Newmont Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre.

Things kick off in September at the historic Stanley with Jersey Boys, with Julie Tomaino at the helm of this story of the Four Seasons. Bobby Garcia returns to direct a remount of Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol at the same venue, with Daryl Cloran directing the swashbuckling comedy The Three Musketeers, in a coproduction with Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre. That’s followed, in early March 2025, by the long-awaited mounting of the comedic drama-rock-concert hybrid Cambodian Rock Band—postponed by the Arts Club once at the start of the Covid outbreak, and then postponed again for the 2023-24 season due to the high expenses that came along with a large cast “relative to the revenue capacity of the small venue”, which was originally the BMO Centre. Jivesh Parasram will direct it in this new bigger venue. Rounding out the season at the Stanley is Nick Green’s drama Casey and Diana. The season closes in the summer with the Tony Award–nominated hit Waitress, a musical inspired by the hit 2007 film, with music by Sara Bareilles.

Over at the Granville Island Stage, Miracle on 34th Street anchors the holidays, followed by Primary Trust in February 2025, and then, in the spring, Mieko Ouchi’s Burning Mom. The season wraps with Agatha Christie’s mystery The Mousetrap; Stephen Drover takes the director’s chair.

At the Newmont Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre, the only announced show is The Gingerbread Men: A(nother) Holiday Cabaret.

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