Lots of Canada, Hamilton, even a Heated Rivalry actor, in Aquarius’ next season
The 2026-2027 lineup will feature Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, The Musical, and three new Canadian plays, two featuring Hamilton playwrights.
Four female directors. Three new Canadian plays. Two Hamilton playwrights. Two blockbuster British musicals. One national bestselling novel. One actor from smash hit Canadian TV series Heated Rivalry. This is the newly announced 2026-2027 season from Theatre Aquarius.
Up first is Sisters of 78 by Hamilton resident Kristen Da Silva.
“I'm really excited to be opening the season with a female Hamilton playwright,” says Mary Francis Moore, artistic director at Theatre Aquarius.
Da Silva is best known for her plays Where You Are, Beyond the Sea, Hurry Hard, Sugar Road, The Rules of Playing Risk and By the Light of a Story, which have been produced across Canada, in the U.S and Europe. She is a two-time recipient of the Playwrights Guild New Comedy Award, first in 2016 for Gibson & Son, and then in 2019 for Hurry Hard.
Sisters of 78 was commissioned by the Blyth Festival. Moore, who had long wanted to stage something by Da Silva at Aquarius, approached Blythe artistic director Gil Garratt to ask about the play. They struck a deal in which Moore would direct the debut for Blyth, which opens June 9 and runs for two months, and then the play will come to Aquarius at the end of September.
Sisters of 78 is described as a “fierce, funny, and deeply moving new ensemble drama inspired by the Fleck Strike in Centralia, Ontario.”
In 1978, women at a small auto-wiring plant faced unsafe work, sexual harassment, and a company that refused to listen. The factory was full of rats, lacked heat, and had machinery that wouldn't work. The women called it the butcher shop. When they went on strike, tensions spilled beyond the factory gates, dividing neighbours and testing friendships.
The strike is widely recognized as a pivotal moment in both Canadian women’s history and Canadian labour history.
It’s an eight-person play, with each actor playing multiple parts, says Moore.
“I think it's just gonna be really fun from a design perspective. The costumes and the music and lighting from 1978.”
Next up is the holiday show Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It will feature Hamilton native Kaleigh Gorka, who starred as Elsa in Frozen. Kolton Stewart, who is hockey player Carter on the smash hit Heated Rivalry (largely shot in Hamilton) will play Joseph.
“He did this show here years ago,” says Moore. “He played a different part, but this is a dream role for him, so we're really excited to get him back.”
Robin Calvert, who has worked as a choreographer on many productions at Theatre Aquarius, will direct and choreograph Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
“Robin's got a really good, fresh take on it. It's sort of Vegas style. It's really fun.”
That will open in mid-November for a run into the holidays.
In the new year comes All’s Well, a co-production premiere with Crow’s Theatre and Soulpepper Theatre co-production. It is based on the third novel of the same name by Canadian Mona Awad, and adapted for the stage by Hamiltonian Erin Shields.
All’s Well, published in 2021, was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror and a national bestseller. It’s about a theatre professor whose burgeoning acting career was ended by an accident that left her with chronic pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. She’s on the verge of losing her job when she decides to stage Shakespeare’s most maligned play, All’s Well That Ends Well, and suddenly and miraculously recovers thanks to three powerful benefactors.
Margaret Atwood described All’s Well as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged . . . genius” and Moore says, “It's very darkly funny. It's cerebral, but, darkly funny and there’s a mysterious element.”
All’s Well at Aquarius will be directed by Jackie Maxwell, who is former artistic director of the Shaw Festival and will star acclaimed actor Maev Beaty, a veteran of the Stratford Festival and many other Canadian stages.
Next up is the multiple award-winning Roald Dahl’s Matilda, The Musical, which features a precocious and rebellious girl with the gift of telekinesis, who develops a love of reading despite her abusive parents and headmistress of her school. The fun family musical, directed by Moore, will run over the March Break and star Addison Wagman who charmed Theatre Aquarius audiences with her roles as Young Anna in Frozen, and Randy in A Christmas Story.
“It was a no-brainer to do this when we have Addison to star in it. It’s just going to be a lot of fun for families.”
Closing out the season is Heist by Calgary playwright Arun Lakra, which debuted in 2024.
“It’s a double-crossing buddy movie. It’s very theatrical and very cinematic. The first time I saw it I found there was something very heightened about it, which I really liked,” says Moore.
Heist is described as a “sizzling, twisty-mystery, popcorn-munching, edge-of-your-seat, heist-whodunnit, Clue meets Oceans 11 kind of show. A criminal mastermind reassembles his squad to heist a diamond from the lair of an international jewel thief, but what he’s really doing is setting an elaborate trap for whoever double-crossed them last time.”
Moore says she had worked to have a season of plays directed by females but when Haysam Kadri, who directed King James at Aquarius in 2024, was available for Heist, she jumped at the chance. Kadri was the original director of Heist at Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre.
Lakra, who is a trained and practising eye surgeon, also wrote the multi-award winning Sequence, which has been published and produced across North America.
Moore says the upcoming season will have something for all kinds of theatre-goers, from blockbuster musicals to thrillers to a Hamilton-born story about a labour milestone.
“We’ve got the new works, Canadian works, and they're all very different in terms of design elements, the story elements, the settings, the eras, the genres. So I'm really excited about the season.”
