Happy Thursday, internet!

I have a bunch of reviews coming up (I’m currently scheduled to see 15 shows before December!), but today I’m highlighting an up-and-coming musical theatre company in Toronto – The Playhouse Collective.

I recently spoke with Sydney Page, the co-founder and Marketing Director of Playhouse Collective, about her company’s history, their future goals, and upcoming projects. I love meeting new people from the theatre community, and I hope you’ll read my interview below and check out their next cabaret show, “The Parts We’ll Never Play 2.0,” this Sunday (Sept. 24, 2023), at Theatre Gargantua in downtown Toronto.

Lori: Hi Sydney! Thanks for sitting down with me today. For those of us unfamiliar with The Playhouse Collective, can you give a brief description of your company?

Sydney: Hi Lori! The Playhouse Collective is an indie musical theatre company founded in 2021 by four female/non-binary artists in Toronto. We aim to have a creative and production team that’s predominantly women/non-binary, and we often add a queer spin to our stories, since 3 of us are queer. We’re trying to open the door [for women and non-binary people] because of the way that we can get shut out of the industry, but obviously we’re not going to kick out qualified applicants if they don’t fit this exact mould. But it’s worked out so far because of course there are so many talented women and non-binary people in the industry.

Lori: Do you have a company motto or mantra?

Sydney: One of our mantras is that we want people to leave a little bit more complete than when they walked in the door. And that includes actors, the crew, the audience…everyone.

Lori: How did you decide to start your own company?

Sydney: It happened organically. My fellow co-founders – Callan Forrester, Deanna Mann, Annie Wang – and I [Sydney Page] met at Randolph College [a performing arts post-secondary school in Toronto]. We were in that weird time in 2019 when COVID interrupted our first year of school that the Greta Gerwig Little Women movie came out. We thought we had the perfect group to cast Little Women the Musical, but didn’t think that we would get the chance to play the parts we saw ourselves playing. It started this whole discussion about how other people see you versus how you see yourself. When we graduated school in 2021, we finally decided to put on the show, we recruited more people from school and beyond, and it ended up skyrocketing from there. We’ve put on two mainstage shows and a handful of cabarets, and we’re currently in the process of finalizing details for our next mainstage show.

Lori: So would you say that you’re aiming to do one bigger production a year, and then a bunch of smaller shows?

Sydney: Our timeline seems to be a large show in the spring, a cabaret in the fall, and a holiday show in the winter. We don’t know what’ll happen in the future, so we’re open to different possibilities, but we aim to do one big book musical a year.

Lori: For your mainstage productions, what sort of changes do you make to your shows, and why do you think they’re important?

Sydney: Well we didn’t go into Little Women thinking “we’re going to do a queer production.” It just seemed obvious to us that Jo was queer, and so many of us are a part of that community, so we decided to make Professor Bhaer a female. We felt that the ending of Little Women is more satisfying than Jo just ending up with another man, and we want people to come to our shows and see themselves represented in a different way.

For our second mainstage show, Ride the Cyclone [which we put on in March 2023], we didn’t feel that any of the characters were tied to a specific gender, so one of the roles traditionally played by a man was played by a woman. But it wasn’t a real conversation for us – it’s just so seeped into everything we do that it was a natural casting choice. It’s who we are, so it’s part of our work as well.

Lori: Are you operating as a professional theatre company, or community theatre?

Sydney: We call ourselves pre-professional, because we’re a profit-share company. For us, to be able to call ourselves professional would mean being able to pay people a full living wage. All of our actors are trained and professional, but I feel like we’re not quite at the level of Crow’s or Soulpepper. That’s the goal one-day!

As an aside, we also try to give to charities with everything we do. For our first cabaret, for example, we gave 10% of proceeds to the First Nations Emergency Services Society in B.C., to help fight the wildfires.

Lori: Getting a new company off the ground can seem daunting! How did you go about securing funding to produce your first show?

Sydney: In the fall of 2021, we performed an online cabaret to raise money, and we did a few other little things like that to get started. We did singing Valentine’s grams. We also got a generous sponsorship from Randolph, and they gave us rehearsal space and some financial support. We’re very grateful for their initial help.

Lori: Among the four founders, how do you divvy up the responsibilities – directing, producing, etc.?

Sydney: Callan has produced before, so they took the lead on that front. And for our first show, I said that I’d like to take a stab at marketing and assist-produce. Annie and Deanna were our co-music directors, which was a natural fit for them. One focused more on the vocal performances, and the other focused on orchestrations and the big picture. Annie helped with posters, Deanna did costumes – it was really a team mentality. We brought in our friend Carling Tedesco to direct Little Women, and our friend Lizzie Song to direct Ride by Cyclone, because we didn’t think that we could be both in the show and direct it. In the future, one of us may direct, but for now, we were happy to bring someone in.

Lori: How do you go about casting your shows?

Sydney: The cast of our first show was predominantly made up of our friends from school, but it was important to us to create a space that feels welcome to other people as well. Special shoutout to Kevin Forster, who came into [Little Women] later in the process. Kevin is this amazing professional actor more advanced in his career than the rest of us, and he stepped up to file a void in our cast. He fit in so well with the group and ended up doing our next show, too. For Ride the Cyclone, we held an open-call audition and added a larger ensemble.

Lori: So most people have probably heard of Little Women (even if they didn’t know there was a musical version), but Ride the Cyclone is a little more niche. Can you tell me a bit about the show and why you chose it as your second mainstage production?

Sydney: Ride the Cyclone is a Canadian musical written by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell. It tells the story of a group of teenagers in Saskatchewan that go on a school trip with their choir and die on a roller coaster called The Cyclone. The fortune-teller machine of the fair comes to life and tells the students that one of them will get to come back to life, but they’ll have to vote on it. Musical Stage Co. [in Toronto] did the show way back in 2015, but there was a production in Chicago that kind of blew up on the internet.

We loved this show for our company because it’s a true ensemble piece and every character has a big number. There’s hilarity, there’s sadness…we thought this was the perfect show for what we stand for, but when we picked it, we thought that it was a risk from a marketing standpoint. No one knows what this show is and it’s really weird and hard to sell to someone, but we agreed that it was most important to pick something that we love rather than looking at what was going to sell the most tickets. The universe was on our side, because this huge community of theatre kids on Tik Tok got obsessed with this show right after we decided to do it. When we finally announced the show, we got so much interest that it ending up selling out very quickly. We had people messaging us asking us to fit them in. It was really exciting to stumble into this show that so many people wanted to see live.

Lori: Where did you perform the show?

Sydney: We did it at the Red Sandcastle Theatre in Leslieville. We chose this venue because our first show was at the Attic Studio Theatre – it’s very small, maybe 30 seats maximum. And we sold out that space, so we thought we’d move a little bigger this time to a 50-seat venue.

Lori: Looking at the future of your company, do you see yourselves continuing to mainly focus on modern musicals?

Sydney: We know our audience and what they’re interested in seeing. That being said, we lead with our hearts and want to put on shows that we’re passionate about and something that we can add our unique flair to, so we wouldn’t necessarily rule out doing a Golden Age musical.

Lori: Can you tell me a bit about your upcoming cabaret, “The Parts We’ll Never Play 2.0”?

Sydney: Yes! We had a lot of success with this show last year so we decided to do a new version this year. Sometimes these miscast shows only focus on gender-bending casting, but for us, we thought bigger. We thought, “we could really nail these roles if all of these binaries of gender, age…everything else didn’t apply.”

Lori: Can you give me some examples of numbers from last years’ show to give readers an idea of what to expect?

Sydney: Sure! Last year, I performed “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man, because why can’t it be “The Music Woman?” Our finale was “Brotherhood of Man,” where we all pretended to be frat bros. We did a number from the musical Annie, where Annie Wang played Daddy Warbucks, and I played orphan Annie. And Kevin [Forster] performed “No Way” from SIX! The Musical. We let people choose their own songs to identify what they think they’d be good at. I can’t give away any of the songs in this year’s show, but I can say that if you enjoyed our cabaret last fall, you’ll definitely enjoy our upcoming version.

Thanks to Sydney and the rest of The Playhouse Collective team for this insightful conversation! If you’re interested, you can buy tickets to their next cabaret here. I look forward to following their journey and attending their future shows.😊