The Play’s The Thing

Live theatre is taking centre stage in Southern Georgian Bay

by Emily Worts

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

The sun dips closer to the Escarpment ridge, and a horn from the Sidelaunch sailing regatta bellows across Collingwood Harbour, interrupting Oberon mid-soliloquy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Dozens of people of all ages are gathered at the Collingwood outdoor amphitheatre for tonight’s Bard on the Bay performance – Southern Georgian Bay’s version of Shakespeare in the Park – performed by Theatre Georgian Bay against the real-life backdrop of the harbour, grain elevators and the Bay beyond. Some have packed picnic dinners, others are licking ice cream cones from a local vendor, and all are enjoying the midsummer breeze, the warmth of the early evening sun and the opportunity to immerse themselves in local, live theatre at its best.

Our communities in Southern Georgian Bay may be small, but when it comes to live theatre, our offerings rival those of any grand city. The diversity of performances, along with the high calibre of talent, mean live theatre sits centre stage as part of the growing arts and culture scene in Southern Georgian Bay.

Locally, live theatre – both community-based and professional – includes everything from outdoor summer Shakespeare performances to annual pantos, fringe theatre and musicals. It goes beyond just entertainment, offering an opportunity to engage, connect and have fun, all while building an appreciation for the arts.

Nadia Mear, a professional actor by trade, moved to Southern Georgian Bay from Vancouver four years ago. She was looking for any opportunity to work in her field, but jobs were limited. Of all places, she found an ad on Kijiji, posted by Stephanie Fowler, creator and founder of Sandcastle Theatre. Mear was hired and a friendship and partnership were born. Together they created Theatre Georgian Bay and set it up as a profit sharing collective four years ago.

The six people who are currently part of the collective are all professionally trained actors who work alongside community members to provide a combination of original professional content and adapted classical theatre. They tour from Cookstown to Orillia to Saugeen Shores and everywhere in between.

Theatre Georgian Bay also brings Shakespeare to the Collingwood amphitheatre through Bard on the Bay each summer, with 15 performances on Sundays and Mondays along with the odd Saturday evening show.
“It’s BYOS … bring your own seat,” says Mear. “There is raked seating on stone platforms, so people bring beach chairs, cushions or blankets. And they usually bring a picnic lunch or dinner.”

With the stunning scenery of the Shipyards and Georgian Bay providing the backdrop, there’s no need for complicated sets.

As our population grows and diversifies, more opportunities are opening up for those who like to engage in live theatre.

“We use the terrain in the amphitheatre,” explains Mear. “We have to wait between lines for the sailing horns to go off; the same thing goes with seagulls and swans. We never know what natural occurrence is going to happen; its beautiful.”

Local vendors sell ice cream and drinks. Performances are pay by donation, with the suggested amount of $10. “Some feel comfortable giving $5 and some give $50. Some people come back two or three times in a season and some just come once a year. It’s all rewarding to us,” says Mear.

The atmosphere is casual, as it should be on a hot summer day. All ages are tuned in to the performance and the audience interaction. You might find yourself sitting next to an actor without knowing it, until they jump up out of their seat and start acting their part. Every summer, Theatre Georgian Bay puts on a different show. In the past they have performed Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. This year’s production is The Comedy of Errors – one of Shakespeare’s more hilarious shows, according to Mear – which will run in July and August.

One of the mandates of Theatre Georgian Bay is to make Shakespeare accessible. Attracting close to 100 people for each show demonstrates they are achieving that goal. “We adapt the shows by cutting the length in half and making the scripts accessible,” says Mear. “They are not the epics of Stratford.”

Another goal of the collective is to pass on their professional expertise in the area of live performance – a critical role in our small towns, where community members don’t have local access to professional theatre schools.

“They are getting hands-on training as opposed to going to theatre school,” says Mear of the opportunity for community members to work alongside professional actors. “We pride ourselves on that.”

Veteran local actor Dean Hollin agrees that creating theatrical opportunities for all ages is crucial in our communities, and with that in mind, the Marsh Street Centre in Clarksburg hired Hollin at the beginning of 2019 to take over its programming.

“I’m getting such a charge, giving back the experience I’ve gained,” says Hollin of this latest role culminating 30 years as a professional actor. “I’ve learned so much and I feel at this point I am eager to pass that on and honoured for the opportunity to give it back. This is how we create the beautiful craft I adore.”

Known as the cultural heart of Clarksburg, The Marsh Street Centre has always been a very active facility, with all the right elements to promote local live theatre. With Hollin at the helm, the goal is to draw more families and youth into the mix, giving them access to live, musical entertainment.

The Marsh Street Centre is dedicated to the cultural enrichment of the community and offers acting instruction through summer theatre camps and private instruction.

“Just like there are people who like to run, exercise, and curl, there are people who want to get up and move on stage,” says Hollin. “There are a bunch of people out there who want to exercise their performance muscles. You can see it in their eyes. They’re hungry for it.”

Known as the cultural heart of Clarksburg, The Marsh Street Centre has always been a very active facility, with all the right elements to promote local live theatre. With Hollin at the helm, the goal is to draw more families and youth into the mix, giving them access to live, musical entertainment.

“For the last 27 years I have been steeped in musical entertainment,” says Hollin. “The vast majority of community theatre groups perform plays which are non-musical. I’m doing something a bit different.”

The space at the Marsh Street Centre is smaller than what Hollin is used to, and as a consequence the shows are more intimate but also more interactive. There is a spattering of tables, the stage is lower and there is not much separation between the audience and actors.

“It’s more cabaret style instead of rows and rows of seats,” explains Hollin.

While sipping on a glass of wine, guests can expect actors to weave in and out of the audience, making the whole experience a little more engaging and a lot more casual. With an industrial kitchen on site, Hollin sees a future for dinner theatre as well.

This summer Hollin is directing a show geared towards families based on Aesop’s Fables. It’s a fast-paced, engaging musical comedy with a bacon, egg and pancake brunch served on the back patio before the show. Shows start June 22 and run until July 14.

“This is what I’m bringing to the table: more musical entertainment,” he says. “This is a beautiful fit for me; this is how I can be most valuable. I am just darn giddy about the whole thing.”

Sandcastle Theatre, a non-profit that strives to build children’s self-confidence through drama, also facilitates youth drama classes. The 10-week programs, which run in Meaford, Owen Sound, Saugeen Shores and Collingwood, focus on the drama skills children need when getting into full-scale theatre productions, like the annual pantos Sandcastle puts on in early December.

“Pantos are large-scale musicals that are a parody version of an already beloved story,” explains Laura LaChapelle, of Sandcastle Theatre. “They turn the plot upside down and take current pop songs and change the lyrics. We like doing our own projects in different ways.”

All the pantos LaChapelle has produced, including Peter Pan, Potter the Panto and Narnia, use original scripts written by Sandcastle founder Stephanie Fowler. The pantos are performed at various venues, including churches and sports complexes, and cast five or six adults in addition to 30 or more children and teens. The theatre company also travels to various schools performing mini versions of the Pantos, allowing students to see, first-hand, what live community theatre is all about.

LaChapelle says local theatre that is community based and community run is essential to a thriving arts and culture scene. And it’s her passion. She admits the local theatre community is small, but everyone comes together to make their productions possible. “It’s a team effort between cast, parents and the community.”

Anke and Rick Lex, considered cultural ambassadors of Collingwood after transforming Simcoe Street into the town’s arts and culture hub, believe live theatre helps make a community vibrant.

Four years ago, the pair asked community members what they wanted to see on Collingwood’s cultural landscape. What they heard was a resounding call for an intimate and affordable community performance space. With a lot of vision and hard work, the Simcoe Street Theatre was born. An intimate 100-seat black-box studio theatre, the theatre provides a perfect venue for live theatre productions, concerts and lectures. The demand is so great, the couple has turned the management of the theatre over to the Town of Collingwood.

“People are connected within this space,” says Anke Lex. “People are comfortable coming here alone because everybody knows each other. They can come out and be a part of it.”

This year marks the 35th anniversary of Theatre Collingwood as a mainstay in the local theatre scene. After recently finding itself without a home after many years of performing at the Gayety Theatre in downtown Collingwood, the theatre company turned challenge into opportunity. This year, rather than staging performances on a single stage, venues will change with each production.

“There are great collaborations happening and it’s what our year is all about this year,” says Erica Angus, executive director of Theatre Collingwood. “It’s kind of inspiring.”

This year, Theatre Collingwood is mounting its productions throughout the region – in churches and hotels, at the Marsh Street Centre and Simcoe Street Theatre, and even at the Great Northern Exhibition (GNE) fairgrounds. Angus can’t imagine a better place for audiences to experience a tribute show to the Grand Ole Opry than at the GNE.

“It’s a perfect location,” she says. “Certain venues work with particular shows.”

But as amazing as it’s been to have so much community support and uptake, she hopes Theatre Collingwood’s latest predicament will be a catalyst for the opening of a Centre for the Arts in Collingwood.

“I fundamentally believe theatre can be performed anywhere, but we are greatly lacking a proper facility in this area,” she says. “Southern Georgian Bay is so full of artists and creative people, it’s mind-blowing that there isn’t a proper centre for the arts.”

Decades ago, Theatre Collingwood started with locally produced community theatre but, for various reasons, it now focuses on bringing professional regional theatre to the area.

“It is so expensive to produce live theatre,” says Angus. “You can fall into financial issues and Theatre Collingwood was struggling.”

Angus arrived in 2013 to breathe new life into the company, and as a result Theatre Collingwood is now affiliated with other regional theatre companies who produce travelling shows, visiting two or three locations in a season. For example, this season’s first show, Where You Are, was a production of Theatre Orangeville and the next show in the Summer Season, Summer of ’69, will come from The Victoria Playhouse in Petrolia. The theatre companies collaborate with Theatre Collingwood to ensure the sets work in both spaces.

The end result is top-quality regional theatre performed at a local level, compared to the large investment required to mount a 100 percent local production. “It’s so much work and money for three to four weeks. Then it’s over and once again the actors are unemployed,” says Angus of how Theatre Collingwood used to operate. “Now the plays get longer runs and it supports the actors. The recipe is working.”

Though large-scale, in-house, professional productions have become prohibitive because of their immense cost – from handcrafted sets and costumes to booking actors and theatres for hours of rehearsals and performances – the theatre community of Southern Georgian Bay continues to find creative ways to delight audiences.

Through collaborations with regional theatre companies, the vision of community members who see the need for performing arts space, and the vast bank of knowledge and expertise in our area, community and professional theatre are thriving in Southern Georgian Bay.

As our population grows and diversifies, more opportunities are opening up for those who like to engage in live theatre, either on the stage, behind the scenes or in the audience. Offerings span the spectrum from smaller operations, like Collingwood’s Gaslight Community Theatre Productions, which sells out its annual fall historical production every year, to larger roadhouse-style theatres like Meaford Hall, which hosts a professional theatre series, including this summer’s Alice’s Restaurant.

Some local theatre troupes bring us classics like Wasaga Community Theatre’s upcoming production of Sleeping Beauty, while others like Quarter Century Theatre experiment with original creations or new spins on old favourites.

Clearview Community Theatre places an emphasis on young people’s theatre but is committed to bringing all age groups together, putting on large-scale productions with all ages on stage and in the audience. Their wildly popular productions have included Anne of Green Gables and The Little Mermaid; their upcoming fall production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat is now casting actors ages six and up.

Local live theatre is a prime example of community members working together to create a shared experience … one that brings magic to the stage. With so much variety, there’s always a role to play on stage or behind the scenes, and there’s always room in the audience for those who just want to sit back and enjoy. Everyone is welcome and you’re sure to be entertained while connecting with your community through music, comedy, drama and everything in between. ❧

Coming to a Stage Near You!

To find out more about local theatre companies and upcoming performances, visit the following websites: