Stageworthy

In this episode: Jay Northcott is a director, educator, and multidisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in joy, specificity, and a deep commitment to centring the full humanity of Black and queer artists. In this conversation, Jay joins Stageworthy host, Phil Rickaby to talk about Bootycandy, Robert O'Hara's wildly funny and emotionally complex play running at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in ass...

About This Episode: Playwright Erin Shields joins Phil for a wide-ranging conversation about To a Flame, her loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, a production fifteen years in the making that features both deaf and hearing performers and is performed in spoken English and American Sign Language. Erin also reflects on a remarkable year of productions, from Mary, Mar...

Jacklyn Francis has been making theatre in Canada for more than three decades, and in this conversation she brings the kind of hard-won perspective that only comes from years of navigating the industry's rhythms, disappointments, and genuine joys. In this episode, they talk about what it really feels like to work at a major festival like Stratford, the art of understudying, the strange grief that...

In this episode Curtis Campbell joins host Phil Rickaby to talk about AI in the theatre. In the lead up to this summer's Toronto Fringe, it was noticed that a number of shows were using AI generated posters, which sparked a discourse on social media about whether Generative AI should be used in the Fringe and beyond. This conversation spread to the Edinburgh Fringe, where AI generated posters were...

About this episode Sara Farb is a veteran of the Canadian theatre stage, having made her debut at the age of 9. Now she's bringing the role of Fanny Brice to life in Shaw Festival's Funny Girl. In this conversation, Sara joins host Phil Rickaby to reflect on the show, writing for the theatre, and what keeps her going. This episode explores What it takes to perform a show like Funny Girl Joining th...

About This Episode: What happens when a self-described field mouse - someone who jumps at a cat's sneeze - decides to write a horror play? You get Passed Down, a one-person horror show about a woman who inherits her great aunt's house and discovers she may have inherited a little more than just the property. Performer, producer, director, and grant writer Madelaine Rose joins Phil to talk about br...

About This Episode: Sharry Flett has spent 34 seasons at the Shaw Festival - long enough to have watched the company evolve through three artistic directors, raise a daughter who appeared on its stages, and welcome back former students she once coached as the people now directing her. In this conversation with host Phil Rickaby, Sharry reflects on what keeps drawing her back to Niagara-on-the-Lake...

About This Episode: Christopher Gaze is the founder and artistic director of Bard on the Beach, Vancouver's beloved outdoor Shakespeare festival now in its 37th season. In this conversation, Christopher talks with Phil about how a $35,000 co-op startup in 1990 grew into one of Canada's largest theatre companies, drawing 80,000 people a season to a pair of tented stages in Vanier Park overlooking E...

About This Episode: Director Ming Hudson joins Phil Rickaby to talk about bringing Antigone to Bard on the Beach in Vancouver - a production seven years in the making, created collaboratively with playwright Kate Besworth. It's a minimalist, intimate reimagining of a 2,500-year-old story about a woman who does the right thing even when told not to, and Ming shares how it came together from a liter...

About This Episode: Tim Carroll has been the artistic director of the Shaw Festival for a decade, and in that time he's reshaped the festival's mandate, expanded its reach into the community, and built a company culture grounded in playfulness, humility, and genuine artistic ambition. This episode explores: How Tim balances directing two major productions, Heartbreak House and Amadeus, in a single...

About This Episode: Ryan McCollom is a Toronto-based theatre content creator behind the popular TikTok and Instagram account Plates and Playbills, and he's on a mission to get more people through the doors of indie and smaller professional theatres across the city. What started as personal documentation of his own growing love of theatre has evolved into a platform dedicated to closing the gap bet...

About This Episode: Peter Fernandes is many things at once: an award-winning actor, a magic and illusions designer, and now a first-time director at one of Canada's most celebrated theatre festivals. In this conversation, Peter joins Phil to talk about what it's like to make your directing debut with Sleuth at the Shaw Festival, a mystery that demands the same sleight-of-hand thinking Peter has ho...

About This Episode: Playwright and writer Natalie Kaye joins Phil Rickaby to talk about her wildly ambitious new musical, 1920s Walking Around in a Dream, playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival. The show is a screwball comedy set in an imagined 1920s Jazz Age Chicago, and it's a retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, translated not into modern English, but into the heightened, slang...

About This Episode: As the Toronto Fringe Festival prepares to launch, Phil Rickaby gathers four of Toronto's most dedicated theatre content creators (Janine Marley from A View from the Box, Ryan Borochovitz from The Cup Podcast, Alexandra Lean from Being Dramatic, and Ryan McCollom from Plates & Playbills) for a lively live stream preview of the 2026 festival. Together they dig into what make...

About This Episode: In this episode, Phil sits down with Marla Torgerson, a Calgary-based singer-songwriter and classically trained vocalist who has written and performs her debut theatrical work, Sinner, a one-woman musical tragic comedy about growing up in the evangelical Bible Belt of central Alberta and the long, often painful process of leaving fundamentalist religion behind. What starts as a...

About this episode: Chris Cracknell is a Hamilton-based composer, musician, performer, and web series creator who has channelled a pandemic-era creative crisis into something genuinely extraordinary: a non-canonical musical adventure called Pookumhura Mistress of B-Roll, playing at Theatre Passe-Muraille as part of the Toronto Fringe's Musical Theatre Hub. The show draws on Chris's nearly two deca...

Read transcript About This Episode: What would happen if a newly elected Premier of Ontario was forced to live on minimum wage? That's the provocative (and deeply funny) question at the heart of Minimum, the political satire written and performed by Victoria Sullivan. After winning Best in Venue at the 2025 Hamilton Fringe Festival, Victoria is bringing the show to Toronto Fringe, and the timing c...

Read transcript About This Episode: Kathleen Welch is a playwright, composer, director, and actor, and one of the founding members of The Spindle Collective; the Toronto-based company making some of the most compelling horror theatre in Canada right now. She joined Phil to talk about Siofra, Spindle Collective's latest show, which opens at the Red Sandcastle Theatre on June 17th. Rooted in the Iri...

About This Episode: What do we really know about our dads — and what have we never been able to say out loud? Taylor Trowbridge joins Phil to talk about her new solo show Dads, playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Part stand-up, part storytelling, part audience game, the show invites people to sit with the full range of their experiences with their fathers: the funny, the complicated, and the q...

Read transcript About this episode: Stephen Drover has directed Macbeth before; twenty years ago, the day after it closed, he wanted to do it again. Now, as both adapter and director for Bard on the Beach in Vancouver, he's finally getting that chance. In this rich conversation, Stephen talks about approaching Shakespeare not as a sacred text to be served but as a living collaboration, asking not...

About This Episode: What happens when an engineer decides to write a play? If you're Rymn Wadhwa, you end up with one of the most inventive premises at this year's Toronto Fringe Festival. Assembly Sϋggested follows two women building an IKEA chair (and maybe, just maybe, a relationship ) guided by an instruction manual that gets increasingly, wonderfully absurd. It's a debut play with a deceptive...

About This Episode: Chantel Winters is a Toronto-based actor, playwright, and producer who has built a career by refusing to wait for permission. In this conversation with host Phil Rickaby, Chantel talks about how the realities of the audition grind pushed her toward making her own work. The conversation also digs into & Other Concerns, the film adaptation of the 2019 Fringe hit An Atlas in a...

Read transcript About This Episode Blythe Haynes returns to Stageworthy for a wide-ranging conversation with host Phil Rickaby about indie theatre, artistic process, community, and the evolution of a Fringe hit into a feature film. Blythe reflects on how Toronto’s theatre scene has changed since the pandemic, why she believes artists need spaces to experiment and fail, and what Canadian theatre ca...

About This Episode: Playwright, director, and theatre maker Susanna Fournier joins Phil Rickaby fresh from rehearsal to talk about take rimbaud , her ambitious new production at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in association with the Howland Company. Inspired by Arthur Rimbaud's iconic prose poem A Season in Hell, the play is a decade-plus labour of love that explores what it means to be a young arti...

About This Episode: Lisa Marie DiLiberto, Artistic Director of Theatre Direct, joins Phil Rickaby for a wide-ranging conversation about one of Canada's most enduring theatre companies for young audiences. With the company approaching its 50th anniversary in 2026, Lisa Marie shares how she's been preparing to honour that legacy — from digging through decades of archives to planning a celebration at...