2018 Season at the Chemainus Theatre Festival
2017 was a banner year for the Chemainus Theatre Festival. After all, it was our 25th Anniversary and we had a wonderful community celebration with music, tours, dress-up, ice cream and more! Our summer show, ‘Rock Legends’ broke a 9-year box office record and we explored classic love stories, children’s adventures, distant galaxies, and tales full of love and laughter.
It is hard to not get excited about the 2018 season; it’s easy to imagine yourself in your favourite seat of the theatre for any of these shows. To kick off our season perhaps you will enjoy a special escape to watch a young couple find love in a Dublin bar in ‘Once’, or share cross-cultural family challenges in ‘Kim’s Convenience’, or laugh with/at the delightful ‘Glorious!’ Florence Foster Jenkins. 2018 will mark the 40th anniversary of the movie ‘Grease’ and many of us have a happy memory of bopping along with the tunes, whether it was during the original movie theatre release or perhaps at a pajama-clad sleepover in high school. Theatre can take you away and we invite you to come along for the whole 2018 season – maybe back to Ireland, in a rural county this time, in ‘Outside Mullingar’ or to a familiar but distant time with ‘Little Women’. There will even be a bonus show this year – we are re-launching our hit show ‘ Million Dollar Quartet’. Are you inspired yet? Don’t forget about the little ones – the summer run of our Kidzplay ‘The Little Prince’ will plant a seed for the lifelong love of theatre for many children this summer.
We welcomed a new Executive Chef in our kitchen, Nick Caulford, in late 2017 and if you have dined in the Playbill Dining Room recently we are sure you will agree that his dishes are inspired. For our 2018 season, we are trying something new, on Friday nights only we will have a new service, Table d’Hôte. For this special service, you will enjoy a multi-course dinner with your choice of four special plated entrees inspired by the season and the show. The salad and dessert buffet will remain the same and we promise not to judge if you go back for a second piece of cake!
With tickets starting at $25 and an option to get 4, 5 or 6 show packages you can customize your season to suit your tastes, budget, and calendar. Call soon to get your choice of seats and dates and best of all, if you purchase a season ticket subscription by December 8 and you be entered to win a Theatre Extravaganza Trip for 2 to New York.
The Chemainus Theatre Festival is saddened to announce that its founder, Kenneth O. Smith, passed away peacefully on November 14th, 2017 at the age of 90.
The Cornwall Family are true Canadians and the art you can explore throughout the theatre will be too. Richard Brodeur played for seven seasons as a goalie for the Vancouver Canucks and is now exploring his greater Canuck identity through his art. By utilizing oils, acrylics, and watercolours to create abstract paintings as well as images of ‘Canadiana’– fishing villages in Haida Gwaii, lakes and orchards of the Okanagan, and ports and coves of Nova Scotia.
Brian Scott has a well-recognized style on Vancouver Island and beyond. His use of colour is well-known – wild and wonderful mixes of fanciful, fun and exciting hues that bring the west coast fishing boats, architecture and tumbledown buildings of our beloved coastal British Columbia into a new perspective.
Garry and Bly Kaye are a husband and wife set of talented artists living on Saltspring Island. Garry is a third-generation Islander and Bly hails from the countryside of Quebec. Garry prefers painting and works twists the often overlooked mass of impenetrable underbrush to focus on the intricate detail yet subtle beauty the island has revealed to him. Bly is currently immersed in an exploration of the effects of layering hand painted archival tissue papers fairly painstakingly onto canvas to form landscape images.
If you have ever perused through the ‘Gallery Gift Shop’ in the lobby of the Chemainus Theatre before a show or during intermission you know there is no shortage of selection. You have probably even been tempted to buy something. It’s easy to see why.
onday 9:30 – 4:30