The first showings of Alberta Theatre Projects’ (ATP) brand new production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are nearly a month away, but already there has been unprecedented demand by theatre goers for tickets in the show.
Part of that is due, of course, to the show being the perfect fit for the season, being a spooky Gothic tale right through Halloween.
But even more so, the collaboration between the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Old Trout Puppet Workshop, and ATP is promising that this new and fresh take on Sleepy Hollow, written by Anna Cummer and Judd Palmer, is set to be one of the most spectacular stage shows of the 2025–26 season.
“I think it’s the collaboration that’s really bringing attention to the show. But it’s also the time of year. We’re doing it during October. There’s a little bit of Halloween coming up as well, last time I checked. So, I think it’s right in the pocket of this time in the year,” said ATP’s Artistic Director Haysam Kadri.
He said that the collaboration had led to a feast for the senses with puppetry by Old Trout, along with lighting design by Sonoyo Nishikawa and sound by Andrew Blizzard.
“The audience sees things that they’ve never seen before, absolutely jaw-dropping puppetry, stage magic through from the Old Trout, a Gothic story retold with humor, beauty and theatrical imagination, a play that shifts from laughter to goosebumps in a heartbeat,” said Kadri.
“I think it covers a range of a demographic of humans that we want to experience theatre. So, tickets are going really fast, and this is not a marketing ploy. I literally am going ‘tickets are out of the gates, just that they’ve shot out of the gates.’ So, many reasons for people to jump in now.”
Three years in the making
The world premiere for the new take on Sleepy Hollow has been the result of three years of work and incubation to bring the project to life, said Kadri.
“I think what Amiel Gladstone at the Banff Center is doing is really exciting. We’ve been in talks about how we can collaborate in new works,” he said.
For his part, Gladstone—the Director of Theatre Arts at the Banff Centre—said that working with ATP and Old Trout was exactly the kind of work that the centre was hoping to do for the Alberta arts.
“This is a dream team of Alberta theatre organizations creating a modern take on an iconic story – I’m incredibly excited to play a part in this world premiere before it travels on in our province and, hopefully, across the country and beyond,” he said.
What audiences will get is a very different take than the one created in popular consciousness by film adaptations, most likely in the minds of Calgarians through the 1999 version that starred Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci.
Kadri said the fresh story honours the original work by Washington Irvine.
That The Legend of Sleepy Hollow also takes place in a tumultuous time in American History, where the threat of violence is ever present and the wounds of divisive politics sting, makes it more relevant to audiences.
Something that Kadri said was more coincidence than planning on the part of ATP.
“It’s timeless. It’s fear, it’s folklore, and the unknown are kind of universal, and they just have to happen to be amplified right now. It gives us the chance to kind of explore what haunts communities and individuals in ways that feel both thrilling but also relevant,” he said.
“Now, in terms of the political landscape of what’s happening, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and I don’t know what’s going to happen in two weeks, and I don’t know what will happen during the run of the play. But yeah, today it’s timely. In today’s world, it’s a community reckoning with like, belief, truth, fear, imagination, superstition, all those kinds of things.”
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow runs at the Banff Centre from Oct. 11 to 17, and at the Martha Cohen Theatre at the Werklund Centre (formerly Arts Commons) from Oct. 22 through Nov. 9.
For more details and tickets, see albertatheatreprojects.com.
