Leah Doz plays a captive sex worker in La Ronde 2013 Soulpepper Theatre.
This is a Soulpepper Theatre debut for Leah Doz, which means she just joined the company this year. The twenty something actor was born in Edmonton Alberta, the only child of a single mom. Now she’s a bright light on stage in the Toronto Distillery District and is burning up the big city theatre reviews.
Leah Doz Has Been Performing All Her Life
Leah Doz was enrolled in ballet at age three and has the Dancer’s Turnout to prove it. “I am so grateful to my mom for enrolling me when I was young. Ballet taught me discipline, devotion, and physical awareness that has served all my work on stage.” Leah spent her childhood at a number of different performing arts schools, all over Canada, and today her educational credentials are impeccable. She’s a safe bet for Canadian film and TV producers primarily because she has natural talent, and also because she has great training; Leah studied at the National Theatre School in Montreal, and the Seacoast Theatre Centre in Vancouver, and in the Nightwood Emerging Actors Program and has won a Hnatyshyn Award for Developing Theatre Artist, and a Queen’s Golden Jubilee Performing Artist Award, and a Sterling Award Nomination. Its really impressive for such young talent. This girl is going places.
Leah has already performed at Stratford in 2012, in The Matchmaker, Much Ado About Nothing (Stratford), and before that in the Dora award-winning play Tomasso’s Party (Rooftop Creations). She’s appeared in A Raisin in the Sun (Black Theatre Workshop), and The Laramie Project (Citadel Theatre). Leah recently completed a BRAVO Fact short called ‘Issues’ (Insomniac Productions) which will air next year. She will be joining the National Arts Center’s English Acting Company in Ottawa this fall.
La Ronde is a play written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1897 that scrutinizes the sexual morals and class ideology through a series of encounters between pairs of characters (shown before or after a sexual encounter). By choosing characters across all levels of society, the play offers social commentary on how sexual contact crosses class boundaries.
Schnitzler’s play elicited violent critical and condemnation because of its subject matter and treatment in 1920 performances, which were shocking and became rather sensational failures that left the playwright very unhappy. The titles of the play—in German Reigen and in French La Ronde—refer to a round dance, as portrayed in the English nursery rhyme Ring a Ring o’ Roses.
Directed by Alan Dilworth, La Ronde takes a circuitous route through ten different sexual liaisons to question the nature of human contact, love and fidelity.
Leah confessed to me this play is incredibly challenging for her, because it’s so incredibly emotionally demanding. And she’s nude on stage for a brief spell but, as she describes it, “…every actor has to do something physically revealing and emotionally revealing. I have gotten used to the nudity, but the stakes for the emotionally revealing parts are stomach-turning every night, but I could not have asked for a more amazing cast. The mentorship I have encountered from Soulpepper’s founding stalwarts has been moving; I bike home every day counting my blessings. They are unconditionally generous and supportive of the younger company members; it is truly a gift to experience such a sense of camaraderie and equality here at the Young Centre. The company sets a high standard for an ensemble-based environment. It is a true theatre company. Everyone feels like family. And La Ronde requires that level of trust.””
You can buy tickets for La Ronde online at Young Centre for Performing Arts Theatre website or show up at box office and take your chances – you can buy $22 tickets a 1/2 hr before the show right at the box office which is a little known local secret.
Young Center for Performing Arts is the perfect springboard for Leah Doz into Canadian Film and TV. La Ronde ends May 4th 2013, after which Leah preps for Great Expectations at Soulpepper this summer. “I’m so excite to spend the summer here. The Distillery is an amazing location to spend time creatively. Great Expectations will also be a period piece, so it feels fitting to spend so much time in Toronto’s oldest locale.” at the other end of the Soulpepper Theatre’s 2013 Season.
Post by Robert Campbell on Apr 16, 2013
Now Joel has discovered there’s more awesome here yet. He’d made arrangements to meet Katie Saunoris, the publicist for 
Then I snapped these shots of Joel just hanging out at Soulpepper Theatre, getting his first look at the brickwall lineup of plays, so the many great stories that are waiting to be seen and experienced and retold with awesome sauce online.
Albert Schulz and Diego Matamoros are outstanding as Oscar and Felix, two newly-divorced men hiding their loneliness behind forced personalities of Ladies Man and Mother Hen, respectively. Schulz’s Oscar is a pleasure to watch as he amiably welcomes friends to his grimy apartment, dropping potato chips as he plods about; backwards baseball cap and a boyish smirk complete his portrayal as a sports-writer living on his own. He’s even more of a pleasure to watch after he begins to share his space with Matamoros’ neurotic but self-aware Felix, a man of countless idiosyncrasies who whines with a whisk in his hand.
relationship between them were it not for some help from their very old friends, onstage and off: Vinny (Derek Boyes), Roy (Kevin Bundy), Murray (Oliver Dennis) and the sarcastic Speed (Michael Hanrahan). These pros are sly scene-stealers whose vivid portrayals of minor characters serve to shape and strengthen the surprising friendship between Felix and Oscar. The impressive set, designed by Lorenzo Savoini, is another highlight, particularly after Felix moves in and starts to tidy it up a little.
Billy Bishop Goes to War is a war story as much about Canada’s involvement in WWI as it is about its title character’s endearingly flippant attitude towards his considerable contributions to the war effort. The play is patriotic, but never corny or jingoistic, as war productions sometimes go. Instead, Bishop’s Canadian heritage is explored best through song when he, at war, sings simply and sincerely of his hope to die in Canada, not in a trench. It is at moments like these that the audience gets it–how fortunate we are to live in Canada, in peace.