THE 2000s: THE DECADE IN POP CULTURE
Setting the stage
The decade's most significant moments in the performing arts
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 | 1:24 PM ET
By Martin Morrow, CBC News
Actors Bob Martin and Beth Leavel in the Broadway production of The Drowsy Chaperone. (Joan Marcus/Associated Press) In the tumultuous first decade of the 21st century, creative forces in the performing arts chose to either engage or escape. Many artists wrestled with the trauma of 9/11, or the controversial invasion of Iraq. Yet it was also a boom time for nostalgia, as witnessed by the endless parade of musicals based on familiar songs and well-loved films. The following is a year-by-year look at some of the significant productions, trends and events we saw in theatre, opera, dance and classical music.
2000
Mamma Mia! and the rise of the jukebox musical. Technically, the ABBA-based blockbuster opened in London in 1999, before sweeping across the pond to conquer Toronto (2000), Broadway (2001) and points west. Its success opened the floodgates for a deluge of shows built on pop stars' back catalogues, from the hits Jersey Boys (The Four Seasons) and We Will Rock You (Queen), to misfires like The Times They Are A-Changin' (Bob Dylan).
Katherine Chi wins the Honens. Calgary native Chi became the first (and to date, only) Canadian to take the top prize at Canada's major classical piano competition.
2001
Cast members from the Broadway production of Monty Python's Spamalot. (Kathy Willens/Associated Press) The Producers and the rise of the cult film-turned-musical. This trend was born in the 1980s (see: Little Shop of Horrors) but really came into its own in the 2000s. Mel Brooks led the way by penning a song-and-dance version of his 1968 movie The Producers, which opened on Broadway in 2001, scooped up a dozen Tony Awards, and was then turned into a movie again. It was followed by musicals of Hairspray, Dirty Dancing, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (as Spamalot), to name but a few.
'Da Kink in My Hair. It was a banner decade for African-Canadian theatre, exemplified by this left-field hit from playwright-actor Trey Anthony. Starting life at the Toronto Fringe, her play ended up receiving a commercial run at the 2,000-seat Princess of Wales Theatre. From there, it became a TV series.
The Guys. The performing arts were quick to respond to the devastation of the Sept. 11 attacks, from Canadian choreographer Brian Macdonald's solemn Requiem 9/11 to U.S. playwright Neil LaBute's antiheroic The Mercy Seat. The first play out of the gate, however, was Anne Nelson's The Guys, a drama about the experiences of New York City's firefighters, which premiered in December 2001.
2002
Edward Albee's The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia? Forty years after the explosive Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the septuagenarian playwright proved he hadn't lost his talent to provoke. A wily examination of sexual intolerance and the nature of love, this much-talked-about comedy involved a middle-aged WASP who finds erotic fulfillment with a farm animal.
Jackie Maxwell takes the helm of the Shaw Festival. Irish-Canadian director Maxwell became the first woman to run Canada's second-largest theatre company, a shrine to the work of George Bernard Shaw. She quickly made her mark, injecting some welcome playwriting estrogen into a bastion of Dead White European Male Theatre.
2003
Members of Cirque de Soleil perform in Zumanity. (Paul Drinkwater/Getty Images) Magnetic North Theatre Festival debuts. Canada's flourishing English-Canadian creation theatres — small companies that write and perform their own work — gained a national showcase with the founding of this peripatetic festival. By 2009, the annual event had been staged in Edmonton (2004), St. John's (2006) and Vancouver (2008), with Ottawa's National Arts Centre hosting each alternate year.
Cirque du Soleil turns blue with Zumanity. The Montreal-based circus giant, which began sprinkling its child-like whimsy through the gambling dens of Las Vegas in the 1990s, finally created a show tailored to Sin City. Zumanity took human sexuality as its theme. Now Vegas punters could finally indulge their love of acrobatics and their sexy-schoolgirl fetishes at the same time.
Calgary Opera and the Banff Centre's Filumena premieres. New Canadian operas are a rare thing — successful ones even more so. Composer John Estacio and librettist John Murrell scored by taking their cue from Puccini and Verdi with this old-school tragedy about Italian immigrant bootleggers in Prohibition-era Alberta.
2004
Stuff Happens. Perhaps the best political theatre of the decade. Britain's premier journalist-playwright, David Hare, used documentary evidence and guesswork to re-construct the Bush administration's efforts to build a casus belli for the invasion of Iraq.
Hollywood comes to the Old Vic. The storied London theatre of Olivier and Gielgud acquired an unlikely new artistic director in Oscar-winning American actor Kevin Spacey.
2005
Harold Pinter wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. The British playwright and political activist, whose elliptical dialogue influenced a generation of dramatists, was dying from cancer when he received the award. That didn't stop him from turning his Nobel Lecture into a fiery condemnation of George Bush, Tony Blair and the so-called "War on Terror."
My Name is Rachel Corrie debuts. A little one-woman play that stirred up a mess of controversy, this piece based on the writings of the late American activist — killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip — premiered at London's renowned Royal Court Theatre. Initial plans for off-Broadway and Toronto productions were scrapped amid fears the show would offend Jewish audiences. It was eventually staged by a string of small companies across Canada.
2006
Alide Kohlhaas, right, takes photos as Joe Camilleri looks on at the opening of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. (Aaron Harris/Canadian Press) The Four Seasons Centre opens. The Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet finally got a venue of their own with the opening of architect Jack Diamond's elegant 2,000-seat house in downtown Toronto. Sadly, dynamic COC chief Richard Bradshaw, who led the drive for the new digs, died the following year.
The Drowsy Chaperone wakes up on Broadway. Finally: a made-in-Canada musical that not only made it to the Great White Way, but played more than 700 performances and won five Tony Awards. Now, can we put our inferiority complex to bed?
The Met simulcasts begin. New York's Metropolitan Opera came to the local multiplex, starting with a live transmission of Julie Taymor's coruscating take on The Magic Flute. The response was so good, other august arts organizations, from Britain's National Theatre to the National Ballet of Canada, followed suit.
The musical meets reality TV. Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber resorted to a TV talent contest to pick the star of his West End revival of The Sound of Music. Despite its detractors, the gimmick was a success and Lloyd Webber repeated it on the CBC for a Canadian production in 2008.
2007
Lipsynch and Scorched premiere. Quebec's theatre artists think big. Robert Lepage unveiled Lipsynch, his nine-hour play on aural themes, at Newcastle's Northern Stage in the U.K. Meanwhile, at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, Wajdi Mouawad gave us Scorched, the sweeping second instalment in his tetralogy about confronting the tragic past. Both were stunning.
Alberta Ballet and Joni Mitchell. The ballet's ambitious artistic director, Jean Grand-Maître, scored a crossover coup when he lured the reclusive folk icon to Calgary to co-create a new dance work around her songs and paintings. Joni Mitchell's The Fiddle and the Drum was a critical and box-office smash. Next up: a ballet with Sir Elton John.
The Royal Shakespeare Company and Margaret Atwood. The Queen of CanLit turned playwright to adapt her revisionist Greek myth The Penelopiad for Britain's RSC. The resulting play, a co-production with Ottawa's National Arts Centre, won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.
2008
Christopher Plummer, left, as Caesar, Nikki M. James as Cleopatra in the Stratford Festival's Caesar and Cleopatra. (David Hou/Stratford Shakespeare Festival/Canadian Press) Broadway comes to the Stratford Festival. Things got ugly when the festival's attempt at a three-way directorship collapsed amid acrimony. Des McAnuff, the Canadian exile behind big musicals Jersey Boys and The Who's Tommy, emerged as the sole artistic boss and showed his commercial roots with a hit revival of Caesar and Cleopatra, starring Christopher Plummer.
Judith Thompson wins the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The oft-controversial Thompson became the first Canadian to capture the international award for female playwrights with her searing Iraq-inspired monologues Palace of the End.
2009
Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch die. It was a sad summer for modern dance, as a pair of legends passed on. American choreographer Cunningham was 90; Germany's Bausch was 68.
Other notables who left us in the '00s: playwright Arthur Miller, 89; classical actor William Hutt, 87; theatre impresario Ed Mirvish, 92; tenor Luciano Pavarotti, 71; Stratford artistic director Richard Monette, 64; and Augusto Boal, Brazilian director and founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, 78.
Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
