London Road wends it way to Canada

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/nov/28/london-road-canada-production-musical

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Ipswich might be a long way from Ontario, but the distance will shrink in just over a year when Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork's verbatim musical London Road, an unlikely hit at London's National theatre, receives its Canadian premiere.

The musical, which opened in 2011 inside the NT's smallest space and went on to win best musical at the Critics' Circle awards, will receive a new production by the Canadian Stage Company under the direction of Jackie Maxwell, artistic director of the Shaw Festival theatre in Ontario. After opening on 19 January 2014, the production will run for three weeks.

The musical, originally directed by Rufus Norris, is based on the responses of local residents to the serial killings that took place in Ipswich in late 2006 and was the subject of some controversy prior to its world premiere in April 2011. It was subsequently revived in the much bigger Olivier auditorium last summer, during the tricky Olympic period.

London Road will be joined in the Canadian Stage season by another British production, Akram Khan's Desh, which started life at Sadler's Wells six months afterwards. Guardian dance critic Judith Mackrell described Khan's piece as "the most urgent, beautiful and confident work of his career"; high praise for a man who was involved in Peter Brook's Mahabharata, and who has run his own company since 2000. Khan played an integral part in the Olympic opening ceremony, dancing to Emile Sande's rendition of Abide with Me.

The other two productions of international note headed for CSC next year are a reimagined staging of Robert Lepage's 1980 piece Needles and Opium – a look at the relationship between addiction and art – and Venus in Fur, a Broadway success in 2011 for playwright David Ives, which is also being adapted for film by Roman Polanski.