Jeremy Webb at the Neptune Season Launch. Photo: Stoo Metz.
Halifax’s hottest new happening on Tuesday night was Neptune Theatre’s 2026-2027 Season Launch. Nestled in the ghost of an Urban Outfitters this theatrical surprise party had everything: vampires, Reeny Smith singing show tunes, Katie Kelly, three grumpy spirits, Parisian revolutionaries, Dan Bray, dark corners, lobster rolls, and even the Grinch.
In programming Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent as the Summer Season Opener and then capping the season off with Les Misérables in March, 2027 Artistic Director Jeremy Webb has bookended this season with some real visceral and personal nostalgia for me, and I know I am not at all alone in feeling this way. In the Spring of 1994 my mom took my friend Melissa and I to see Neptune’s production of Les Mis, directed by Linda Moore, after we had quickly become obsessed with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat after seeing Sara Hale, who took care of us in the after school program, play Joseph at Sacred Heart School. Although I have been told my Aunt Carol took me to see Alice in Wonderland earlier, Les Misérables was the first show that I remember seeing at Neptune and my only vague sense of the way the old theatre looked and was configured. I read and re-read the actors’ bios in my well worn programme over and over, and when, later, I did shows and took classes with some of the kids who had played Young Cosette and Gavroche in that production that was my own benchmark for success. That production of Les Mis was my gateway to becoming a Neptune Theatre School kid, a YPCo kid, a hang out in the office and keep Laura and Curran company because there was a good chance I’d get to see one of the many people I idolized at lunch and after school kid, which led to me to the Dalhousie Theatre Department and to then teaching at the theatre school myself, which has led to my entire life in the theatre. I say this not because this is in any way unique, but because it is such a familiar story for so many elder Nova Scotian Millennials for whom that 1994 production of Les Misérables at Neptune was a formative seminal experience that has led to them becoming actors, writers, designers, stage managers, directors, and Artistic Directors in this community- not to mention lifelong audience members.
I am not just excited and thrilled to see Les Misérables return to Neptune Theatre in 2027, but even more so I am excited for a whole new generation of kids, between the ages of eight and thirteen especially, to fall in love with the show, with the theatre, and for it to be a formative seminal experience for them too.
Similarly, I wasn’t the only elder Millennial who was nine when Les Misérables was produced at Neptune to become an ardent “Renthead,” as the fandom was called, just a couple years later when that phenomenon took Broadway by storm through 1996, 1997, 1998 and beyond. Set in the early/mid 1990s Larson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning rock opera Rent is loosely based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme. It tells the story of a group of artists in New York City struggling against a cost of living crisis, the AIDS epidemic, and the rapidly approaching technological revolution and the dot com boom. Rent is also remembered for launching the careers of international superstar Idina Menzel (Wicked, Frozen), Jesse L. Martin, Adam Pascal, and Taye Diggs, among others.
Following Rent on the Fountain Hall stage is Dracula: Comedy of Terrors by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen, just in time for Halloween. This show will be directed by Jeremy Webb, and is “an irreverent Mel Brooks inspired romp.” This show should be a bit of silly levity amid a more serious season.
Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade, directed by Keith Barker, will be on the Scotiabank Studio Stage this fall as part of the Prismatic Arts Festival. This play premiered at the Royal Manitoba Centre in 2020. It is set in a fort in Red River during the Red River Resistance, which led to the 1869 establishment of Louis Riel’s provisional government at the Red River Colony in what is today colonially known as Manitoba. This is a part of Canadian history that I know little about, so I am really excited to see this play and to learn more. Later in the fall Neptune will be producing The Villains Theatre production of Dan Bray’s play Deepwater directed by Burgandy Code. This play tells the story of Questa Bennett who is investigating the mysterious cold case involving a reclusive marine biologist whose young daughter went missing four years earlier. This show premiered right here at the Bus Stop Theatre last March and you can read the conversation I had with Burgandy Code and Dan Bray here. I’d recommend not reading my review before you see the show as I think the play works best if you go in without much more than the vague premise. This is a beautiful full circle moment for Dan Bray, who is teased by the rest of the theatre community (mostly out of envy and admiration) for just how prolific a writer he is, but he started writing Deepwater nine years ago while working at the Neptune Theatre Box Office.
Rhys Bevan-John, Simon Henderson and the team will return this Christmas for A Christmas Carol, and they will be joined by The Grinch on the Main Stage. Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas: The Musical comes to Halifax via Minneapolis. The Children’s Theatre Company first commissioned this musical, written by Mel Marvin and Timothy Mason, in 1994 and it’s a recurring family favourite there. It has also run at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego every Christmas since 1998, and it was produced on Broadway in time for Christmas in November of 2006. It is, of course, adapted from the book of the same name (1957).
Speaking of adaptions from classic works of literature, 2027 will begin with a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women by Anne-Marie Casey. Casey is a British writer and this new stage adaptation of Alcott’s 1869 novel dates back to 2011. After the huge success of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film it will be nice to see a fresh adaptation of this story for the stage.
Next in the Studio is Canadian Theatre royalty Daniel MacIvor starring in Simon Stephens’ one man production of Vanya, based on Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1897), which premiered at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 2023. Stephens is a British-Irish playwright who is nearly as prolific as Dan Bray, and MacIvor will be directed by the Highland Arts Theatre’s Artistic Director Wesley J. Colford. This is sure to be a tour de force. This is followed by local playwright Santiago Guzmán’s play Six Degrees in May, about Carlos, a young Mexican musician living in Newfoundland, being surprised by a visit from his mother, which leads to a heartwarming and fun tale of cultural clashes and misunderstandings.
Les Misérables is an adaptation of the 1862 novel of the same name by Victor Hugo. It was written by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Patel. It is set, not during the French Revolution as so many folks assume, but during the June Rebellion of 1832 when a group of young idealists attempt to overthrow the French government. The show, written first in French, premiered in 1980 in Paris, and the English-language adaptation has been running in London since October, 1985, making it the longest-running musical in the West End. The musical opened in the United States at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House in Washington D.C on December 27, 1986 and then transferred to Broadway on March 12, 1987 at the Broadway Theatre, starring Colm Wilkinson, who originated the role of Jean Valjean in London, and Frances Ruffelle, who originated the role of Éponine.
Les Misérables has been an international cultural phenomenon, inspiring theatre folks for generations, including, of course, Neptune’s own Artistic Director Jeremy Webb, who grew up in Cambridge, England, but who has been a Haligonian since 1998. At the launch on Tuesday evening he said of his connection with this particular show, the one he has wanted to program since before he even got the AD job at Neptune, that he would take the train from Cambridge to London “again and again and again” to see Les Misérables when it first opened. “The MTI rights holders got really fed up with me calling them,” said Webb, “Last year, in ’25, I wrote to them and said, ‘Come on, Richard (his name is Richard), I could die at any moment. Do you want to take that away from me?’… and he said, ‘fine, I’ll check again, Jeremy,’ and he went away, and a week later he called me and said, “You’re not going to believe this but they are starting to talk about the fact that it’s the 40th and… what’s the next 40 years for Les Mis [going to be]?’ and I held my breath for a week, and then two weeks later he called and said, ‘You Got It,’ and I wept like a baby.”
From Jonathan Larson’s musical which centres on Mark and Roger’s inability to pay their rent and being priced out of a neighbourhood on the brink of gentrification to Les Misérables, which is set during a widespread outbreak of cholera which disproportionally affects the poor and disenfranchised in Paris, Neptune’s upcoming season features two works that have been heralded for giving voice to those whose voices were ignored or silenced in their own time: from Angel suffering from HIV in Rent, to Fantine being forced into sex work in Les Mis, in both cases because the ruling classes were only focused on amassing power and enriching themselves. It is not at all difficult to see reflections of our current political reality in both these stories. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya captures the frustration and, frankly, despair, that we feel when progress feels elusive and impossible, and we feel trapped in a vicious cycle of sameness and mediocrity. Chekhov’s dark humour, I think, is familiar to us here on the East Coast, as a coping strategy that provides nuanced levity to the play’s melancholy themes.
Even Little Women, set of course with the backdrop of the United States’ Civil War, seems almost too on the nose as we continue to watch in horror as that country devolves into more and more authoritarian chaos and cruelty, but we also see heartening showcases of bravery and resistance, especially from people in the great state of Minnesota. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol too gets sadly more and more relevant and more and more oddly controversial every year.
This is not a season that allows Haligonians merely to escape our jarring political reality, but one that invites audiences to engage with it, to think critically about it, to learn more, to empathize, to ask questions, to be surprised, to feel inspired, to laugh, and definitely to cry, and to, hopefully, feel empowered to jump up upon our own proverbial (at least for now) barricade and hoist our own flag as high as we can to exert our rights and our freedoms and ideals, and in hopeful anticipation that “even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
Subscription Packages went on sale yesterday, January 14, and single tickets for Rent will go on sale in March. For more information about subscription packages, including Spotlight, Radiant, Ultimate, and Flex options, check out neptunetheatre.com or call the kind folks at the Box Office at 902.429.7070.
