J. Kelly Nestruck and Dash Corbeil-Nestruck attend a matinee of Wendy and Peter Pan in the Avon Theatre at the Stratford Festival, in June, 2024.J. Kelly Nestruck/Supplied
Having spent more than 16 years watching performers from up close as The Globe and Mail’s theatre critic, I’m moving on to a new stage of my career – watching performers from a long distance as the paper’s new television critic.
It’s curtains for a major chunk of my life spent rushing to make curtain times – an aspect of an otherwise dream job that has given me less of a rush since bedtimes have become more important to me. (I’ve got two kids, aged 5 and 1.)
Before I settle into my couch and my new position covering what my tough-to-follow predecessor John Doyle always called “the TV racket,” my editor has invited me to look back over my time covering show business.
I’m honoured to have covered the Canadian performing arts during this period: The past decade and a half or so has been, no hyperbole, truly historic.
Yes, I suppose I do mean this partly in a negative way.
The Great Recession arrived while I was being hired in 2008, the third economic gut punch in a row for, in particular, the Ontario theatre industry, which had already seen tourism patterns upended by 9/11 and the SARS crisis.
It marked the end of the final act of a financially comfortable but, in retrospect, artistically conservative era, for major Canadian not-for-profits; my first year on the beat saw the Stratford Festival land in its first deficit in 15 years.
Of course, the unprecedented financial disaster came near the end of my tenure with the shuttering of all live-performance venues around the world owing to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
J. Kelly Nestruck at Simon Fraser University’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts on Jan. 24, 2024, the day Christopher Morris’s play The Runner, directed by the late Daniel Brooks, was supposed to open as part of the PuSh Festival. In lieu of watching that cancelled play, Nestruck read a bit of Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia’s play The Noam Chomsky Lectures in the empty theatre.J. Kelly Nestruck/Supplied
That calamity briefly turned me into an obituary writer; I’m glad I didn’t have to write one for the performing-arts sector – though it continues to recover and, in a sense, reinvent itself.
Despite all the tumult, however, somehow I also happened to be around for a time that, as it turns out, Canadian playwrights, lyricists and composers created the greatest popular and financial successes in the country’s history.
It was historic in a positive sense then, too – and perhaps the disruption helped the hits happen, in a way.
I don’t want to spend too much space again rehashing the stories of the twin 2010s smashes that were Ins Choi’s comedy Kim’s Convenience and Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s musical Come From Away both still on stage in commercial runs even now.
It’s worth reiterating, though, that the old guard of gatekeepers at the large Canadian theatre institutions were not responsible for either’s world premiere.
Choi started writing Kim’s Convenience as part of fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company’s playwriting unit – and had to self-produce it at the Toronto Fringe Festival before Soulpepper and Mirvish Productions got into their bidding war over it.
Sankoff and Hein, meanwhile, were turned away by every theatre company they approached when they wanted to follow up their first smaller but successful musical. It was Sheridan College’s Canadian Music Theatre Project, sadly now defunct, that ultimately gave them a second shot and supported them in developing Come From Away to a point where American commercial producers got on board.
The talent was there but the theatres whiffed on it, initially. And yet, I think those two megahits, combined with financial insecurity and a desire to attract new audiences turning into a need to attract them, has ultimately woken up the big companies – the regionals; the rep theatres – and inspired them to rethink what they do.
Also shaking theatres out of their complacent ways was external pressure from social movements: Idle No More, #MeToo and the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd in the United States.
Canadian artists, who, when I started, would almost never publicly criticize artistic directors or respond to a bad review, stopped being afraid to speak up. Some examples: playwright Andrew Moodie’s Share the Stage campaign in 2008; the #CanStageSoWhite campaign of 2016; and the request from manidoons collective to have only IBPOC (Indigenous, Black and people of colour) critics review their work in 2020.
Certainly, there are some aspects of the current culture wars that drive me up the wall, places where thoughtful criticism turns into censoriousness and an impossibly perfect politics are demanded in sensitive areas.
But every time my inner reactionary starts to rear his head, I just look at what’s actually on stage and see that it’s much more exciting and distinct now. Large-scale productions, in particular, have taken a giant leap forward in ambition and quality in recent years as theatres have started to tap into the true depth and diversity of the country’s stage talent.
If I started listing all the shows that moved me or that I marvelled at, I wouldn’t be able to stop.
Three Canadian masterpieces that, miraculously, found the audiences that they did deserve (which hopefully I had something to do with): Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell’s macabre and (thanks to TikTok!) now much-produced musical, Ride the Cyclone; Jonathan Young and Crystal Pite’s gutting dance-theatre triumph about grief and addiction, Betroffenheit; and Cliff Cardinal’s epic troll of theatregoers that was his radical reimagining of As You Like It (a.k.a. The Land Acknowledgement).
As important as writing about this work, for me, was having written with enthusiasm about the work that preceded it by these artists – Legoland, Studies in Motion, Huff.
The one artist I just feel grateful to have been able to write about at all is the extraordinary and deeply poetic Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad; I saw so many of his French and English premieres in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Stratford, Avignon and Paris. He’s the most frequently “cancelled” Canadian theatre artist of my time (yes, more than Robert Lepage) – and he’ll be the first Canadian playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature one day, just you wait.
To illustrate the positive change that I got to chronicle as critic, I wanted to briefly revisit two plays that bookend my time covering theatre.
In 2009: Bioboxes by Vancouver’s ingenious Theatre Replacement, in which one audience member at a time was invited into a small theatre the size of a photo booth to watch one of six creator-actors perform a 10-minute show based on an interview with a Canadian immigrant.
You could reach out and flip a switch at any time to make the actor switch languages from English to German, or Japanese, or French, or Serbo-Croatian, or Italian, or Cantonese.
Bioboxes, directed by future Simovitch Prize winners Maiko Bae Yamamoto and James Long, was very much in conversation with our rich history of Canadian plays (collective creation, per The Farm Show; bilingualism, per Balconville) while also incorporating new aesthetic ideas (one-on-one performance; verbatim theatre).
It was also what exceptional new work often tended to look like in English Canada at the time: small, at times, tiny.
Flash-forward to 2024: Salesman in China, Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy’s brilliant new play about a Beijing theatre company putting on an Arthur Miller play in 1983. Staged in the 1,000-seat Avon Theatre, it’s wrapping up its run at the end of the month at the Stratford Festival ahead of a turn at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa – and The Globe and Mail’s rave has been followed by ones in the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune calling for it to be staged internationally.
Salesman in China also feels part of a continuum of Canadian work – a bilingual Mandarin/English production with a stunning central performance by Singaporean actor Adrian Pang (an imported star, like Maggie Smith was back in the day at Stratford); its themes and aesthetic are very much in conversation with this country’s intercultural work, especially that of Lepage.
The expensive show is backed by the National Creation Fund – a donor-funded arm of the National Arts Centre founded by the late Peter Herrndorf, that invests in big risky shows; I’ve found time and time again that all Canadian theatre artists need to impress on a grand scale is a little extra time and money for making art.
More cultural capital campaigns please – and record donations for art and culture, rather than bricks and mortar.
While there are serious challenges facing Canadian theatre – ironically, now, it’s the smaller new play theatres that are most in trouble and that, perhaps, need to be shaken up – I’m bullish about its future. I sense a momentum and look forward to continue to watch and applaud, just no longer from those plum aisle seats with a pad of paper on my knee.