The following is pulled from a Globe & Mail article written by Marsha Lederman published on June 25th. Click here to read the full article.

Shakespeare in the Park

Last Thursday morning, a week before the scheduled opening, the brand-new sets for the Mount Royal University/Theatre Calgary production of Romeo and Juliet were moved out of the rehearsal hall and over to Prince’s Island Park. By that night, the sets were under water, as were the dressing-room trailers. The financial loss amounts to about $50,000, but it could have been much worse; quick-acting staff managed to get $200,000 worth of sound equipment out of the park before it was lost. The cast and production staff are now regrouping. On Monday, they were rehearsing in a donated space in a strip mall in a dry part of town – no sets, no props (props are locked up at Theatre Calgary’s offices, which have been evacuated) – where director (and Soulpepper Theatre founding member) Joseph Ziegler made an impassioned plea: We don’t need all this stuff, he told his cast, all we need is each other. By Tuesday, they had moved to a proper rehearsal space. The cast is planning to perform an intimate show somewhere – possibly a high school – for family and friends on Thursday night, which would have been opening night, and will later open to the general public. A new site has yet to be confirmed, but the production is working with Mount Royal University to stage the show there – without sets.

Les Misérables

Cameron Mackintosh’s new 25th-anniversary touring production of Les Misérables opened Tuesday night as planned at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium. With parts of the TransCanada Highway closed, the company took alternative routes from Vancouver (where the show closed on Sunday) – travelling up through Jasper and down through Edmonton – to get the sets and costumes to Calgary by late Monday night. For Calgarians who can’t make it to a performance for which they’ve purchased tickets, exchanges are being offered for a show later in the 16-performance run.

EPCOR Centre

The EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts remains closed, and all of its events are cancelled for now. The flood affected the parkade and elevator shafts at the more than 400,000-square-foot complex; repairs will be required for the elevators, and the parkade requires significant cleaning, which can’t occur until water bans are lifted.