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 association with Obsidian Theatre; and why a play written by an American offers a powerful opportunity to interrogate what it means to make distinctly Canadian art.

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.

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 follows closing night, and much more!

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 also seen.

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.

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 bringing this solo horror play to the Halifax Fringe Festival, and why choosing the kitchen as the setting for a haunted house story was a deliberate and unsettling choice.

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, and what it felt like to walk into rehearsals for Wind in the Willows and find Fiona Sauder, André Morin, and fight director Jack Davidson Rennie - all artists she had mentored at George Brown College, now in positions of leadership.

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 English Bay and the mountains beyond.

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 literal bonfire in rural Nova Scotia to the thrust stage at Bard.

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.

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 between the big Mirvish productions most people know and the rich, underserved world of indie and community theatre that most audiences don't even know exists.

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 honed as a magic practitioner. The terror of stepping into a new role, the joy of being trusted with it, and the surprise of discovering how much his illusion work shaped his directorial instincts.

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-drenched language of the Jazz Age. It's a project Natalie has been quietly nurturing for at least a decade, and hearing her describe its journey from a single translated sonnet to a fully staged musical is genuinely thrilling.

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 makes Fringe such a unique and exciting event, share their personal histories with the festival, and break down what their coverage will look like across podcasts, written reviews, and social media throughout the run.

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.

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 decades as a World of Warcraft player, but don't let that fool you into thinking you need to know anything about the game. At its heart, this is a show about how people use online spaces to find community, explore identity, and connect with each other across the divides that increasingly define our world.

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 Sullivan is bringing the show to Toronto Fringe, and the timing couldn't feel more apt.

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 Irish mythology of changeling babies, Siofra is the second in a trilogy of folklore-inspired horror plays that Kathleen has written with Spindle Collective co-founder Natalia Bushnik.

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 quietly unresolved.

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 what the words inherently mean but what meaning is being created in this specific theatre, for this specific audience, right now.

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 deceptively simple setup that promises real emotional depth.

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.

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 can learn from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe model. They also discuss the journey of An Atlas, A Necktie, and Other Concerns — the acclaimed 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival production that eventually became the filmed adaptation And Other Concerns, now streaming on CBC Gem.

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 artist crashing into the hard realities of the industry — and what happens when you refuse to take the path of least resistance.

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. She also speaks candidly about the realities of sustaining an arts career in Canada, the value of collaboration over competition between theatre companies, and how COVID reshaped, and in some ways reinvigorated, the work she wanted to do.

What happens when a sports medicine physician rediscovers her inner theatre kid during a global pandemic? In this episode, Phil sits down with Dr. Janet McMordie — a physician, actor, podcast host, and Team Canada Paralympics doctor — for a wide-ranging, warm, and genuinely surprising conversation about what it means to pursue two very different callings at once.

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What does it mean to move with intention? For Alexis Milligan, movement is everything — every breath, every blink, every shift of weight tells a story. As the Resident Movement Director at the Shaw Festival, Alexis works at the intersection of physical storytelling, design, and performance, helping actors inhabit their roles from the inside out.

Logan Robbins is one of those rare theatre artists whose work sits at the intersection of science, storytelling, and a deep love for the natural world. As the artistic director of the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Logan has built a practice rooted in environmental themes, puppetry, site-specific work, and creating space for emerging artists to find their footing in the professional theatre world.

Bryn Kennedy returns to Stageworthy to talk about directing Riot King's production of The Moors by Jen Silverman — a darkly comic Victorian Gothic play about isolation, power, and the cost of giving up community. Bryn shares why this unsettling tale of spinster sisters, a mysterious governess, a mastiff dog, and a moorhen feels urgently relevant in our age of individualism and loneliness.

In this episode, Phil sits down with Miriam Cummings, a playwright, performer, and educator who creates deeply personal solo theatre.

Creative producer Alexis Eastman joins Stageworthy host Phil Rickaby to explore what it really means to be a creative producer in Canadian theatre. From her early days making work at the Toronto Fringe to her current role supporting artists through long-term development processes, Alexis shares insights into how she bridges the administrative and creative aspects of theatre-making.

What happens when three goblins discover the complete works of Shakespeare and decide to stage Macbeth? Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak, the creative minds behind Spontaneous Theatre and the Goblin Empire, join Stageworthy host, Phil Rickaby to share the wild origin story of Goblin:Macbeth.

This week on Stageworthy, Phil Rickaby is joined by the vibrant and multifaceted Tika McLean. In a conversation that is as funny as it is profound, Tika reflects on her journey from a self-described "shy kid" who once froze during a church solo to becoming a bold, multidisciplinary artist who uses her voice to challenge the status quo.

This week on Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby sits down with Emily Jeffers for a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation about artistic identity, collaboration, and carving out a sustainable life in theatre.

In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby speaks with Virginia Woodall, producer at the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival. With the festival entering its 21st year, Virginia shares the story of how she moved from volunteer to producer, how 164 submissions become a 12-day lineup of 78 troupes, and why sketch comedy deserves recognition as its own artistic discipline.

In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby speaks with acclaimed playwright, actor, and screenwriter Anusree Roy about her newest play, Through the Eyes of God, now onstage at Theatre Passe-Muraille. The conversation explores Roy’s evolving artistic process, the deeply personal roots of her storytelling, and her journey between theatre and television writing.

In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby sits down with Dienye Waboso Amajor — a Dora-nominated Nigerian actor, writer, and interdisciplinary artist living and working in Ontario. With an academic background in theatre and performance studies and ongoing doctoral research, Dienye’s practice bridges performance, scholarship, and cultural storytelling.

In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby sits down with Tim Porter, founding Artistic Director of Tweed & Company Theatre, to talk about what it means to build a sustainable professional theatre company outside of major urban centres.

In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby speaks with Jack Burrill, actor, director, acting coach, and Artistic Director of Unchained Theatre. What begins as a shared nerd-out over Shakespeare quickly becomes a wide-ranging conversation about why these 400-year-old plays still matter - and how indie theatre is often where their most exciting reinventions happen.

In this solo Stageworthy episode, host Phil Rickaby takes a deep dive into the idea of “nation-building” — and why Canada keeps getting it wrong. Sparked by post-election rhetoric around pipelines, railways, housing, and AI infrastructure, Phil argues that these are construction projects, not nation-building ones. Part rant, part cultural history lesson, and part call to action.

In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby sits down with Gabrielle Martin, Artistic Director of Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Gabrielle discusses her unconventional path into arts leadership, the realities of curating large-scale interdisciplinary work, and the responsibility of presenting challenging, global performance within a local context.

In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby sits down with theatre producer and arts leader Reid Vanier for a candid conversation about producing, leadership, and building sustainable theatre ecosystems. Reid reflects on his path into the industry, the realities of working behind the scenes, the theatre scene in Whitehorse, and the evolving responsibilities of producers in today’s cultural landscape.

In this episode of Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby sits down with Joe Szekeres, founder of Our Theatre Voice, for an in-depth conversation about theatre criticism, community theatre, and why live performance still matters. As Stageworthy enters its tenth year, this discussion reflects on the changing landscape of Canadian theatre journalism, the responsibilities of reviewers, and the importance of constructive, thoughtful criticism.