BRAVO! ENCORE!
I really do love theatre. However, like most students it’s not something I can really afford to see often. Last week I was able to purchase a ticket for only $12; the new uOttawa Theatre Club immediately blew it out of the park last week with their four-day run of The Great Gatsby and does not plan on stopping there.
According to the club’s president Sydney Williams, The Great Gatsby had a budget of roughly $6000 and made roughly $12,000 in sales. After three years of lacking any theatric extracurriculars at the U of O, we soon may have one of the most active theatre scenes out of any University in the country.
I went to both the opening show and the closing show of The Great Gatsby and one thing I noticed was the audience. It wasn’t just students, it was people from all over the city; that means as long as the club can keep a wide audience, the productions will only get more and more elaborate with even higher budgets.
Williams says the spring production (which has yet to be announced) will have a budget of over $20,000, and the uOttawa Theatre Club is expecting the show to rake in a whopping $50,000 in ticket sales.
This means students interested in theatre — no matter if it’s acting, costume design, stage management, choreography, set design or whatever — will have more opportunities at U of O than ever before, regardless of their program of study. Theatre buffs in Ottawa should get used to a show once a month, as that’s what the uOttawa Theatre Club intends to do. Heathers is set to run from Dec. 15 to 17 and Little Women in Jan. 2024.
And they are not just intending on performing English productions either; the club intends on debuting its rendition of Les Belles-Sœurs in Feb. 2024. This 1965 francophone drama takes place in Montreal and is considered to be one of the most well-known Quebec plays ever written.
While club funding is actively being slashed due to the passing of the University of Ottawa Student Union (UOSU)’s referendum to cut student levies, it’s refreshing to see some elements of student life not only surviving, but thriving. But it’s important to mention that the uOttawa Theatre Club only has $2000 dollars in funding from UOSU, that it has yet to receive.
It’s looking like student-run performing arts at the University of Ottawa has an incredibly rich and promising future. The uOttawa Theatre Club is not just making theatre accessible to students — it’s allowing them to fall in love with theatre.
