Fiona Sauder
About This Episode:
This week on Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby welcomes Fiona Sauder, co-founder and Artistic Director of Bad Hats Theatre. Known for their inventive, musical, family-friendly adaptations of classic literature, Bad Hats has become one of Toronto’s most celebrated indie theatre companies. Fiona shares the origin story of the company, beginning with a serendipitous brewery production of Peter Pan and growing into a long-standing partnership with Soulpepper, as well as their upcoming production of Narnia.
This episode explores:
- The origins and evolution of Bad Hats Theatre
- How Fiona approaches adapting iconic children’s literature
- Theatre as a space of joy, presence, and shared imagination
- Fiona’s artistic journey from Ottawa to George Brown to Soulpepper
- And much more!
Guest: 🎭 Fiona Sauder
Fiona Sauder is a Director, Writer, and Performer from Ottawa, ON. The co-founder, and Artistic Director of Bad Hats Theatre, Fiona is a multi-Dora Award winning artist whose writing has been presented across Canada. Select Directing credits include: Narnia, Alice In Wonderland, (Asst.), Life In A Box, Piper (Bad Hats Theatre); The Wind In The Willows, Holiday Inn (Asst.) (Shaw Festival); Every Brilliant Thing, Bed And Breakfast(Orillia Opera House); A Year With Frog and Toad (Capitol Theatre); Uncovered: The Music of ABBA, The Music of Dolly Parton (Musical Stage Co.).
Connect with Fiona & Bad Hats Theatre:
🌐 Website: badhatstheatre.com
📸 Instagram: @badhatstheatre
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Transcript
Transcripts are auto generated and may contain minor errors.
[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast.
And on this podcast, I talk to theatre makers of all kinds, from actors to directors to playwrights and stage managers and more. Some people you will have heard of because their household names and others. I really think you should get to know.
I’m going to get to the guests this week, but before I do that, I have a favor to ask you. If you’ve been enjoying this podcast and you’re listening on Apple Podcast or Spotify, could you go to your favorite platform and rate and review this podcast? Those ratings and reviews help new people to find the show.
And I would love for more people to find this show. Stay tuned to the end of this episode to find out who my guest is going to be next week. This week on the podcast, I’m going to be talking to Fiona Sauder.
Fiona is the artistic director of Bad Hats Theatre and the writer and director of Narnia, which you can see in partnership with Soulpepper at the Young Center in Toronto, November 18th to December 28th. Fiona Sauder, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.
Bad Hats has been on my radar as a company that I really want to talk to for quite some time. The shows that you produce as a company are whimsical. And the kind of thing that you can enjoy is as both an adult and a child.
And you’re you’re you’re sort of retelling these these amazing stories. How did Bad Hats come together? And how did you come up with the this the way that you perform these shows?
[Fiona Sauder]
I mean, an excellent place to start. Bad Hats started as an umbrella under which friends at theatre school could create new works. A lot of us met, maybe not all at the same time, but over a sort of three year span at George Brown Theatre School in the Distillery District here in Toronto.
And we’re training as classical actors. And that was really rich and interesting work. And at the time for all of us and still is.
But but there was this craving to create our own stuff. And so that’s exactly what we did when we started to emerge into the world of the actual Toronto theatre scene. And, you know, the start of what Bad Hats is now really came from, as many great things in art and life do, a sort of happy accident.
I think we’re very well known for these adaptations of classic novels turned into new musicals. And the beginning of that was in theatre school. I had met this wonderful person named Landon Doak, who you would know as a composer from most of our our work.
And we were put on a contract together out in Sudbury, Ontario, and we’re hardly even familiar with each other. But working on that show immediately fell into a deep friendship. And Landon saw that I was dressed one day, particularly like Peter Pan, the Disney character Peter Pan, and said, my God, you look just like Peter Pan today.
And we both launched into a conversation about how much we love the original book by J.M. Barrie. And Landon’s family happens to own a brewery called the Old Flame Brewery. And their original location at the time, their only location was in Port Perry, Ontario.
And Landon suggested that we create an annotation of Peter Pan and take it out to Port Perry and do it in that brewery. And so we did. And I think a lot of people in that show thought it would sort of live and die out in Port Perry.
And a fun week we spent there sort of living in Landon’s parents’ basement. And a few of us in the show thought this should have a future life. So we brought it to Toronto and we took it to five local breweries here.
And then, you know, the right people saw it and picked it up and it got brought to Soulpepper, which sort of started our relationship that now has been, oh gosh, going on almost 10 years. And in 2017 was when we were first there. So that was why we started on this path of of continuing to create these these adaptations of beloved children’s novels into new work for all ages.
[Phil Rickaby]
So you sort of got your start in that old trope of my folks have a place we can perform. I got a costume kind of thing. And then you’ve grown into the Soulpepper partnership.
Actually, before I get into the shows, I want to ask where the name Bad Hats comes from. Well, I will say this.
[Fiona Sauder]
It comes from long ago, a night out with a friend of mine, and we both were wearing matching hats. And my friend’s head is a rather small head. And we kept laughing our asses off.
And whenever they would laugh, the hat would fall over their eyes and they would hit their head and say, bad hat, bad hat. And it just sort of fell out of my mouth at the time. You know, Bad Hats Theatre, that’s got a ring to it.
And it had no other meaning attached to it. And now, years later, we’ve discovered things like, you know, there’s a sort of common Britishism for what’s the word I’m looking for. There’s a there’s I know in in Britain at times that a bad hat has been a reference for someone who sort of does no good or gets up to mischief, which I think suits us just fine.
And then on top of that, you know, people often remark how we all at the company, we’re a very small team. We wear many hats. And so we, you know, swerve into each other’s lanes in terms of producing and writing and directing and movement work.
And we all do many, many things at the company. So it sort of suits in many ways. And but it really just started from a sort of satisfying turn of phrase.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. So Peter Pan was the first production and it came out of what you happen to wearing and sort of like was a happy accident. How did you decide to do Alice as the next production that you were going to work on?
[Fiona Sauder]
Well, we knew we wanted to make another one and we started tossing around ideas. And, you know, this is while Peter Pan had been running for years. You know, that was about a six year span of continuous productions, whether at Soulpepper or out in Winnipeg or in other places across Canada, touring around Ontario, we did that show hundreds of times.
And so we sort of started to watch the clock run down going, we better come up with another idea here. And interestingly enough, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland reference each other a lot. Or Peter Pan references Alice.
And often you’ll find or we found that the two stories appear places together. So we someone gave us a book that had Peter Pan on one side. You get to the end of the story of Peter Pan, you flip it upside down.
And then on the other side is Alice. There’s also a record that someone gave me that has one side is at least Disney’s version of Peter Pan. And the other side is Alice in Wonderland.
So they appear as complementary pieces often. We sort of realized that in tandem with the idea blooming in our minds, but it continued to be underlined that it was a really smart successor to Peter Pan. And and now, you know, with Narnia on the horizon, we realized after creating Alice that Peter really represented a specific age.
Being the one where you realize childhood has to end. And that’s a really painful and complicated time for all these reasons. Alice ended up being about adolescence and realizing that you’ll have to become an adult at one point.
And we realized we wanted something to kind of complete it as a trilogy. And that’s what brought us to Narnia, which is really about life cycles and end of life and saying goodbye to chapters that you have to leave behind and people that you have to leave behind. So they now exist as as sort of a trilogy.
We’re really excited to premiere the third and not final, but the final of this, what feels like sort of a book ending of a bit of a journey for us.
[Phil Rickaby]
Did you have a connection to the Narnia books When the Witch and the Wardrobe and and the other books before going into this product project?
[Fiona Sauder]
I think Narnia appeared in my life as a kid, as a book, and I didn’t really find myself grabbed by it. I I watched I remember my sister and I really loved watching the BBC short series that they had of the Chronicles. And I can only really remember The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe one.
But it wasn’t a big part of my childhood. But I know I know what happens in it. It was familiar to me when it was suggested that it be the third.
And which was it was suggested to be the third when we were looking at a commission from the Manitoba Theatre for young people who were the original people who asked us to make a new work for them. They’ve done our Peter Pan out there. They did our Alice out there.
And they said, OK, what’s next? And we together came up with Narnia being the third. And that’s where we first did it out in Winnipeg.
And I yeah, I didn’t I would say like as a child, I didn’t really care about Narnia as an adult. I’ve now fallen completely in love with it and sort of thought to myself, how did I miss this?
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, it’s one of those things where if I think if you didn’t have it read to you or didn’t have an exposure to it as a kid, you don’t have the connection to it because maybe you fell into Lord of the Rings and that sort of thing a little later because the Narnia books are for a much younger audience than those than say the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I was my parents read the Narnia books to us all the way through. And I think we must have done it like three times or something like that.
The whole cycle. Oh, that’s so fun. So when you when you approach something like this, because there are so many books in the Narnia series, are you just concentrating on the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or are you like taking elements from all over that series?
[Fiona Sauder]
I would say if you’re a huge Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe fan, that’s the story primarily you’re going to witness. As with all our adaptations, we muck about and do what we like. So there’ll be things that are sort of canon to that book and to the Chronicles at large that you won’t see or you will see changed or expanded.
But it does pull in elements and characters from the other Chronicles. But as we we zeroed in on what we wanted to do, originally we thought maybe we’ll make this about the broader, you know, whole fantastical world of Narnia and all its lore and all its sort of the time that it stretches that really spans all these generations. Such a beautiful series.
And as we we sort of zeroed in on what we wanted to do, we find the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There’s a reason it gets told so many times again and again is that it’s a great story. So we ended up sticking pretty closely to the fabric of that original narrative.
And then we made our own Bad Hats twist.
[Phil Rickaby]
It is the best of the books, really. I mean, every people, different people have their favorite ones, but it’s the most well known. And is the one that, like you said, is the most retold.
And you don’t have to deal with the quote unquote problem of Susan later on, which is when she grows up and she decides that she likes makeup and boys and all that sort of thing. And for some reason, she doesn’t get to come with the rest of the family into the into paradise or whatever, which is a weird choice. But yes, how do you approach adaptation of a of a known such such well known classic children’s stories?
How do you approach the adaptation of each one? It’s an excellent question.
[Fiona Sauder]
It has a lot to do with finding out what you love the most about it and really, I mean, in practice, opening the book and I marked the book up to pieces, you know, underlining the things that move me, lines, everything from moments in the story to turns a phrase to style of writing that might influence the sort of candor of the characters a little bit. So it’s it’s a lot of pulling out what you love and a lot of really quickly identifying what doesn’t need to be there. In a lot of cases with these adaptations, these are dated novels that were written in a different time.
And so there’s plenty of problematic pieces that we have no need to keep in our story. And so those are pretty easy to identify right away. And then you have to identify what from what you love about it, what you want to say and what the show is for.
And it always has emerged that each of these pieces we create is about something that, you know, unsurprisingly, we, the writers, are going through ourselves or managing or contending with. We have sort of, in a way, grown up with our own adaptations. Peter Pan had this energy of like bombastic, free, spirited childhood energy.
You know, sleep on my parents’ couch. Let’s have a beer and do the show in the brewery. And this real want to to keep the freneticism and the joy of that perfect childish moment alive.
Alice was about realizing that we as artists, as people, were growing into a more responsible age of our lives. And we were asking questions whether we knew it or not when we started writing the adaptation. You realized already, you know, we’re asking questions from the perspective of Alice that we’re asking ourselves, such as, you know, how do I maintain the essence of myself and the essence of my curiosity as the world tells me to fit into a certain thing and become one thing and assimilate to all kinds of rules that exist in, you know, adult society?
And then, you know, Narnia is really has revealed itself to be about. What do we do when the people who taught us how to be ourselves, who showed us the way, have to leave us and what happens? You know, we’re at an age where our parents are nowhere near the end of their lives, but it’s the conversations we’re starting to have.
And our lives are being dictated by big, big life events that are really challenging. And in a lot of ways, you know, Narnia, our Narnia has has a cast of siblings who in this adaptation aren’t actually blood relatives. They’re a found family of kids.
And it’s become a love letter to the found families we’ve all discovered in our work. This is obviously very resonant for artists and like arts communities where people really find their people amongst their practice, but also a love letter to the people who taught us how to be ourselves and make the work that we’re now known for making. So they’re very self-referential.
You pull out what you like and you make it about what you know.
[Phil Rickaby]
There is, I mean, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there is the devastating moment in that story, The Stone Table, when when Aslan dies. And as a child, I was devastated.
[Fiona Sauder]
Oh, yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
And given that this this I recall that as being one of the heaviest moments in any book that at that time I’d encountered how given that this is for younger people, this show, and I’m sure people from all ages, how do you handle or how without giving too much away, how do you handle that devastating moment in the story?
[Fiona Sauder]
Yeah, the simple answer is you you lean in and you make the play need that moment and you don’t create necessarily a payoff. You don’t necessarily create a piece around how painful that is, but you create a piece around how wonderful it is to love something or love someone that much, that it is this painful to lose them. And so it’s a matter of I find, especially in a fantasy world like Narnia, you could make an argument in a way that, you know, Neverland and Wonderland are fantastical places.
But Narnia has an epic sense to it. So a big moment like that, it requires it. It’s not something we ever considered removing, but it was exactly to your question, how do you take care of that and make it, you know, not just bowl people over and make them want to leave the production or leave the kids crying in the seats?
I mean, we haven’t launched it, so it remains to be seen whether that’ll happen. But certainly in Winnipeg, when we did the first production and it’s grown since then, I think we managed to take pretty good care of it. But it’s it’s it’s a matter of it’s a really delicate balance, I’d say.
But the play itself, you know, is is in its way about. Grief and about the seasons of our lives in which it feels like we won’t escape, like in Narnia, these bleak winters, these feelings of all encompassing, be it, you know, challenge or sorrow or whatever might befall you, whether it’s an event or just a chapter that you’re in, a phase of growth that feels like it’ll never end. And the idea of the eternal nature of losing someone.
And the show sort of proposes that, in fact, the cycle continues and the world goes on and the spring comes again. And we have to live every season, including those winters, those painful times in order for the springs to be as bright as they are.
[Phil Rickaby]
That’s a really beautiful answer. Thank you. I want to go back to Alice in Wonderland just for a second, because you have revisited it and refined it.
And you’ve done that with Peter Pan as well. I’m sure you you’ve gone back, revisited, rebuilt them, like done new things. How do you approach these revisiting of the plays?
And do you ever feel like they’re done?
[Fiona Sauder]
Oh, you have hit the nail on the head in terms of the constant crisis of my life. No, no, I never feel like they’re ever done. And it’s a beautiful, challenging, mucky reality to live in, because we have this great gift of having these shows that because of their appeal to a really broad audience, that we get the gift of doing them again and again.
And we have the gift of working with artists and our sort of core writing team and anyone else who we bring on for production, who contributes to the sort of backbone in writing in the show, who are really excited by the idea of revisiting and reinventing. So what you do is is basically look at it again and meet it as the person you are now. As Alice says, when I asked her, who is she?
And she says, well, I’ve been ten different people since I woke up this morning. And that’s how I feel sort of as an artist, is you have to pick something up and put it down. And if you look at it tomorrow, you may be smarter than you were yesterday.
Same is true if you did a production at Christmas last year and you’re bringing it back this year. I’m a smarter, different person and artist. And so you really go on trusting your gut.
Or there are things that you also may have put a pin in and said, you know, we’re in tech and we can’t solve this, but this is a really good option. And we have the gift of saying to each other knowingly, we’ll fix it next time. You know, ideally, that list is a shorter list.
But there’s things that also work different space to different space. When we did it in Winnipeg, Alice, for example, we did it in Proscenium and we had a very, very, very large stage that felt a little bit empty with the amount of stuff that we we had in terms of set. Great set elements, but just a really wide open space.
When we brought it to Soulpepper, we wondered, should we do it in Proscenium again? And we opted to do it in the alleyway, which allowed for a smaller playing space and for what we did have in there to make it feel very, very, very, very full. And so you then change the blocking around that, which changes the characters, which changes the whole flow and dynamic of the piece.
I mean, that reveals all kinds of things. It means, oh, it actually don’t feel like I need music to come in on that entrance because it’s really interesting to have the music from the previous scene play out and we don’t need something to bridge that gap. And it’s just constantly evolving, evolving discoveries.
The other thing that massively changes the shows, it’s my favorite part of the work, is the actors who we get. We build it around them. So, you know, Alice in its original version had, you know, banjo and I think upright bass.
And it had, you know, a bunch of spoons and auxiliary percussion elements. And then we took it to Winnipeg. We were auditioning actor musicians out there and we met two incredible artists who were both very highly skilled clarinet players.
So we said, why not? We put two clarinets in the musical in Winnipeg and we just fell in love with the tone of that instrument for the score. And so when we took it to the next round, we wrote in clarinet parts and we hired a clarinetist.
We knew we couldn’t do the show unless we found someone who could play that instrument. Similarly, that year we also had a trumpet in the show. The next year we didn’t have a trumpet player, but we had a Wicked New Keys player in a different part.
So we switched characters and we switched tracks around. And so you build it around the people. The same is true for Narnia.
We’re building the show around this cast and their specific gifts. So, yeah, it’s a really lucky and sometimes challenging because you can constantly be in a state of questioning. Way to work.
[Phil Rickaby]
Being in a state of questioning, though, is there is a gift that that gives you in that nothing ever feels played out. Like, especially when you’re like, if you’re building the show around the actors, you have the freedom to like, like rediscover the play every time, which is a wonderful gift to have.
[Fiona Sauder]
Yes, yes. And it’s, you know, Peter Pan is a great example. He ran that show so many times.
A lot of people came in and out of the cast of Lost Boys, as it were. And so you you have different versions of these characters that you’ve known and loved and lived with for many years. This past spring, we did a tour of Alice in Wonderland across Ontario.
And one of my dear friends was playing the role that I used to play, Tweedle Dee. And I was just associate directing on the tour and understudying like six of the parts. But it was so fun to watch what he did as that character and and and as a director working with them to go, oh, I really want to know what your version of this is.
But also, I know what’s not broken, so we don’t need to fix it about the choices I made because we built the show in the rhythms around that. It’s also the gift of being the writer in the room. If something’s not working, I can just go, don’t do that.
Do this instead. I also, you know, can change the lines to suit what’s funny or, you know, sparkly about a certain actor. You know, this is their rhythm is a bit more like this.
So we’re going to change the cadence. I was just today had a conversation with an actor saying, I don’t know if you would have such a British lilt to the way you speak. Maybe we’ll take this out of this tense and we’ll put it into this way.
And that’s so much fun to to have them feel that sense of ownership over the the text and the material. And I think I often have actors coming to me saying, oh, I’m sorry, I can’t do it this way, or actually, I don’t know if I can walk around with my violin at that part, but I could do it later. And it’s so fun to go, well, that’s a creative limitation that we get to build things around.
And that’s a gift. What we can and can’t do or what extra skills we have are what make the show the show.
[Phil Rickaby]
Limitations are such a gift, like like that’s what makes theatre so magical in that, like you can’t. You don’t have like special effects like they do in in the movies. You have to do things that work in the room with the tools that you have.
And the fact that those things limit you forces you to be more creative and to create something even a bit more magical than you could have otherwise.
[Fiona Sauder]
Yeah, I think you’ve hit on the essence of a lot of our style, which is based around the way that children play at home. They pick up a stick and they go, this is my wand and it has these powers. And because they say it, so they begin to believe it is so.
And they have really strict rule sets. They go, no, no, it doesn’t have that power. Actually, it only works when you’re wearing blue.
So this doesn’t apply. It’s this idea of of endowing often everyday items with a grand sense of magic and possibility and then showing our hand. You know, it’s it’s more interesting.
And I will say budget friendly to rather than have an entire pirate ship in Peter Pan say that we’re on the pirate ship, create a rule set, a physicality that is really unified amongst the ensemble and let the people who are in the audience fill in the ship. And it means that there’s a complicity between the witness and the performer that creates the magic of the show. And it adds to that thing that is the greatest about theatre, which is that it’s unrepeatable and it’s live.
And so to me, it feels like we get to dig into the essence of my favorite part about theatre, which is which is ensembles working really well together to make something that didn’t exist before be there, even if it’s invisible in some cases.
[Phil Rickaby]
I love the way that audiences in in the theatre are more willing to suspend their disbelief than if they’re watching TV or if they’re watching a movie, people want it to be it. Oh, that doesn’t look real or whatever. But in the theatre, they will go, well, they say it’s pirate ship.
That’s a pirate ship. And everybody just sort of goes along with this. And I think that is, like you said, one of the magical things about theatre that makes it so unique.
[Fiona Sauder]
Mm hmm. And I also think performance to performance or sorry, production to production, really, you you have to train the audience in whatever your rule set is. The style is created by what rules you make up with the audience.
What you show them is going to happen. For example, if I walk onto the stage and I pretend there’s an ice cream cone and I start to pretend to eat this ice cream cone and I go, gosh, that’s great ice cream. We know we’re in a production where mime will happen or invisible objects exist.
And it’s amazing. You’re right. How quickly we accept that because we understand, oh, that’s the rule.
OK, so if someone comes on and, you know, trips on an invisible cord, we go, oh, they tripped. We see the cord because we’ve established these rules. So it’s that’s the most fun thing is figuring out what order do we give the information of this style to the audience and so that they’ll come along with us.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. You were mentioning about the child, like, you know, the rules of childhood and things like that, you know, around, you know, here’s a stick. It’s a magic wand.
Here are the rules around it. And that is a very particular space that the children have in their heads. How do you bring your actors into that space at the beginning of rehearsals so that they are prepared to play in that space?
[Fiona Sauder]
I mean, that’s a great question. Honestly, well, in all theatrical endeavors, there is never enough time. But if I had it my way, we would do a week long Bad Hats boot camp in advance, which would involve essentially a lot of playing like children just on a really high skill level, because what we do involves like dance.
It involves musicianship. The actors are the band in our shows. It involves incredible vocal precision and it involves a lot of, you know, physical object and puppetry work in a way.
So that would be really convenient if we could do that. There just simply isn’t the time. But also, I think a lot of the people that we hire don’t need a lot of that training in a way.
They are already multidisciplinary artists who have been likely, in most cases, asked to bring all of those skills to the table on many occasions. But the complicity that has to exist between the ensemble is really built through trust in the room and play. And I think it’s a matter of, as we start to stage the piece, discovering those rules together.
We’re bringing a lot of the ideas in, but we really like to encourage all of our actors to follow their impulses and say, oh, well, what if this stump here was actually the throne in Narnia, for example? And maybe we don’t need that. And obviously, you don’t want too many voices in the room.
But what we discover together, sometimes by accident, often through joking around about the show, you figure out what is funny or can work in the show. We have thrones in Narnia, though, just to be clear. There are some thrones.
Fret not. Yeah, I think they’re all pretty ready to do it because the feeling in an ensemble, I know this experiencing it from the outside and from the inside many times, the feeling of doing something clearly at the same time that gives a piece of information and usually a piece of magic to the audience. And it can be something as simple as a unison gesture.
You feel amongst your fellow actors how well that works. And it basically just feels very good to do. So everyone’s really ready to play in the Bad Hat Sandbox, you know, strange, magical-making rule sets.
[Phil Rickaby]
You originated the role of Peter Pan and played that for a while. You were in Alice in Wonderland. You no longer perform those roles.
Do you ever feel you could put on Peter again?
[Fiona Sauder]
I think I definitely could. And I think I would find a lot of joy in doing it again. I think that my knees may not be up to the task, but I’m sure we could accommodate that.
Yes, I would love to return to those roles, but I also think it’s such a gift to pass them off to others. You know, as I was saying this summer, getting to see one of my dear, dear friends play a role that I originated alongside one of my best friends. We were Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Landon Doakes, who wrote the music for Narnia and co-wrote the music for Alice and wrote the music for Peter Pan.
We got to play Tweedledum and Tweedledee together, and they’re like my best friend. And so it was just this amazing, joyful thing. But to get to hand that off to a new duo and watch them become such great friends, you know, and help them to learn their own version of that language of the duo was so joyful.
You know, I don’t think I would trade that for having played the role this spring. I did understudy both of them, so that was a bit of a head trip because if you’ve trained forever to play the salt shaker, and then someone tells you, but today you’re pepper, it’s like a whole identity crisis. And also because, I mean, specifically if you’ve seen that show, those two characters share a brain.
And so they’re, anyway, understudying a half of a duo that are basically the same person split in half is very, very challenging. And they play different instruments. One of them’s on percussion.
One of them’s on bass. So it was a fun spring.
[Phil Rickaby]
Have any actors who’ve taken over a role ever felt weird about having the originator of that role in the room as they’re starting to learn it?
[Fiona Sauder]
Well, we haven’t done it yet with Peter. We have, well, we’ve had other, have we had other Peters? We’ve had, that’s a good question.
I haven’t had to be in the room with another Peter Pan learning the role. I suspect in my life I will. And I’m sure they’ll maybe have feelings about that.
We did it this spring with Alice, someone in my role, and I’m sure they had a bit of nerves around getting it right, I think is a thing that actors feel, even if they don’t have an originating actor in the room, they go constantly into a crisis of, am I doing a good job? But I found it as far as that goes, this is a pretty light on the anxiety front because these are fantastic people who we have just years and years of trust together. So, I mean, that’s a question for them.
[Phil Rickaby]
It’s true. That’s true. It’s not a fair question for you.
You’ve often talked about play curiosity and transparency, like showing the gears in your work. What does it mean to you to treat play as an act of resistance in theatre?
[Fiona Sauder]
I think our shows at their core are trying to move people, are trying to say something. But I think underneath all that and the thing that propels it is joy. It’s the joy of making it and the joy of sharing it.
And the joy of watching all the elements come together to create a narrative that makes us care, live for one night only, because every experience is different. And I think that, I just think also in an age when we spend so much time isolated and glued to our devices and overworking ourselves in a vacuum, that to be together, breezing live on stage, telling live people a story feels rare. And it’s not rare to me because it’s my job all year round, but there’s always a sense of rarity to it.
And I always talk to our actors about making sure that as hard as it is and as challenging as these shows are, because they are a big, big undertaking, to not miss it. Because we’re only going to make it together first once. And there’s memories here and connections and the muck and the building of it and the play, the sort of fervent play to find out what the best version of every moment in the show could look like and what makes it the most fun to do is only going to happen once.
Because we’re solving this puzzle for the first time. I know we’ve done the show in Winnipeg. There have been many changes.
We have a whole new cast. We have rearrangements. We have different instrumentation.
We’ve got all these different things at play. So in a way, it feels like we’ve done a lot of work on the puzzle in advance, but there’s a lot of solving for the first time. And the feeling of grinding it out together and figuring out what the answer is and watching it appear in front of your eyes and everyone goes, that’s it.
That’s how we’ll do it. This way. And you watch everybody get excited.
It feels like life coming back into my body, which otherwise can leave me when I’m alone, doom scrolling in my house or insert any other unhealthy activity. So it feels like we’re in a way, the more we attack the puzzle of making this really difficult show, the more boisterously joyful it will be when we share it with people. And that feels like something we can give.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. You mentioned the doom scrolling and things like that. And that’s something that audiences are doing.
I’ve recently found out that TV shows are getting dumber because they’re trying to create shows that can be understood while somebody is also scrolling on their phone. Whereas in the theatre, it’s one of those few times now where the phone isn’t out, where the phone goes away and your full attention is on the stage, which presents us with an opportunity to not only tell more complex stories, but also just to have someone’s full attention for a period of time, which is so rare. It’s a fascinating thing to approach with so much joy.
[Fiona Sauder]
Yeah. I feel like in a way, a lot of the job is how do we make something that’s exciting enough to be better than Netflix? And that’s a really challenging thing.
I think the rarity of being, having your attention held captive for whether it’s an hour or 90 minutes or longer, I feel that it’s, I don’t know a lot of other places were getting that experience. And I so wish there was more of a culture in Canada and even in Toronto, which is a massive city for live performance. I wish there was more of a culture that sought out those experiences in the theatre because we’ll do something that is much less engaging for longer swaths of time at home or out in the world.
And I think it’s incredibly psychologically healthy for us to sit and focus together with other breathing individuals. I think we go to the theatre to understand something about ourselves. There’s characters that remind us of ourselves.
There’s characters that are making choices that we either would or wouldn’t make. And we get to watch things reflected back to us that wake up our minds and make us look inward or to our community or what have you. And I think that there’s so much in the world now that is begging us to be in as shallow consideration as we can be day to day.
And everything that we can do that helps ourselves, helps the world, helps others, begins when we ask questions about how we’re moving through the world and what we’re doing and what we’re contributing and how we’re feeling. And so I think we need theatre to stop the clock on our other sort of unhelpful wanderings in our minds and just dedicate an hour, if you can, to thinking about what this story might have to teach you about yourself.
[Phil Rickaby]
There’s something about the way that we as people who make theatre or go to theatre, we know what it’s like, what sets it apart from other entertainments. We know what it’s like to be in a room with the actors and how that moment where everybody is breathing together and that moment that’s like nothing else. But of course, there are audiences out there or potential audiences that don’t know that.
They haven’t experienced that. In order to bring them in, we have to find a way to… People are seeking experiences now.
They’ll pay like, I don’t know, 50, $60 to watch projections on a wall in a room because they want that experience. And if we could communicate to them the experience of being in a theatre, then they wouldn’t go to that anymore. They would only want theatre.
It’s that nut that we have to crack to bring those audiences to us. I guess we haven’t figured out how to tell them.
[Fiona Sauder]
Yes, yes. I mean, I think there’s a reason that there are marketing departments at all these theatres and they’re working hard. But one of the cool things about Narnia this year is that Soulpepper at the Young Center in the Distillery, they’ve really started to expand.
At Soulpepper in the Young Center, they have started to expand this notion of their lobby installation in the Christmas market because every year there’s the Winter Village down there. I’ve experienced this for a decade now because I went to school in the same building as Soulpepper, just across the hall at George Brown. And so every year you go, oh, what are all these huts doing in the Distillery?
And then suddenly there’s a bunch of elves and everyone’s singing Christmas carols and a million tourists are there. So I think Soulpepper is really starting to connect their lobby to the rest of that. And this year it’s all going to be Narnia-themed, which is really exciting.
So that’s sort of, I think a big, uniquely this time at this production, there’s this great pitch of these experience, you know, for these experienced seekers, because you’ll walk into the lobby and you’ll be in the wardrobe. And, you know, that energy will continue into the show and as they leave. So I think it’s actually quite a great package.
Also, the ticket to our show gets you into the Winter Market for free. So you can do a whole, make a whole day of it. So I’m really feeling lucky that we have that experience to support, you know, the show and hopefully draw more people to it.
[Phil Rickaby]
100%, yeah, that’s very exciting. And it is like the right time for these shows at Soulpepper in that market, in that environment. You mentioned going to George Brown.
So that’s in the same building as the Young Center. Now you spent like three years as a student at George Brown College in the Young Center and then came back as a performer and a creator. What was the difference between being in this space as a student and being in this space as a creator, performer?
[Fiona Sauder]
Oh man, I mean, I can’t tell you how much of a sort of, it’s sort of shocking to look back on how much of a dream come true scenario it was. You know, when I was in high school, our drama teacher took us to Toronto to see a bunch of shows and to tour some theatre schools. And one of the ones we went to was George Brown and I got a little tour of the facility and I stood in the lobby and I looked to my right and there was George Brown where I hoped to maybe go to school and it looked really great and turned to my left and we’re in a theatre.
This is real life theatre that happens right here. This is a big professional company. So I get into school and I spend three years sitting in that lobby watching these astonishing actors, the greats across the hall coming out of their rehearsals and going, one day I’ll turn left when I go in the building and not turn to the right and I’ll be over there.
And that’s the dream, you know, you never think that that’ll happen. So I truly, when we did Peter Pan around all those breweries and as I said, the right people saw that show and I got an email from one of the producers at Soulpepper and I thought truly that it was a prank. Like I read the signature and it had the logo and I was like, this is spam, it’s not meant for me.
And then I, you know, called my friends and said, Soulpepper wants to talk to us about our show. And it was just, I felt that I was sort of walking through a dream and then immediately what happened was we had to get the hell to work because we had to figure out how to be a more established company than we were in order to meet the challenge of being there. But anyway, your question is, you know, it felt, I mean, obviously it felt amazing.
It felt like finally my key card opened the door on the left and I was, I felt sort of in a way at home because I’d been in that building for so long but I felt sort of like all the hero characters and all these adapted stories where they go through some portal into some other magical land where, you know, we were really lucky at the time to not have to change anything about our show but just get a bunch more resource thrown at it. And we weren’t highly supervised. It felt like someone just gave us a bigger clubhouse and we learned how to be a company through trying to meet that grand opportunity with the best of our abilities.
And it was really special. Yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. In the time that we have left, I want to talk about your theatre origin story. You mentioned going to George Brown.
When I went to George Brown, the building that you’re in now did not exist. I was, it was the warehouse on King Street, which is now a condo. So it’s a very different experience being in that space.
But before that, how were you first exposed to theatre? What made you want to do this?
[Fiona Sauder]
I think it started with watching old VHS recordings of musicals. When I was a kid, I always was very boisterous, very attention seeking, just a capital B brat. And my parents often compared me to characters like, the Tasmanian Devil and the Animaniacs.
And so I was a lot. And so I think naturally they thought maybe this kid might want to perform. And it’s also a great way to get me to sort of run in circles and blow off steam.
So they, very kind of them, sent me to a bunch of classes. I went to an excellent afterschool drama program at this place called the Ottawa School of Speech and Drama and really got to learn a ton of skills. And I was obsessed with musical theatre.
And I remember my mother had a subscription to the National Arts Centre and would go to all the shows every year. And she would say always, I mean, you love theatre film, come with me. And I would go, is it a musical?
And she would say, well, no. And I go, I’m not interested. And one day she convinced me to go to a play because she said, well, it’s not a musical but it’s a play with music.
There’s musical numbers in it. And I thought, oh, okay. And I went and I was blown away and realized that I think maybe I also like plays and that maybe plays aren’t so bad.
And then I just absolutely flipped the script and became really fascinated by classical theatre. And this is why I ultimately wanted to go to George Brown because they were training some of the greatest classical actors of the day. And I thought, well, this is great.
I’ll go and I’ll be a seasoned member of the Stratford Festival. And that’s where my journey will take me. And then as I was there, the most fun I had at school, I mean, I loved doing the work that they asked of us there, but we had one project where we got to create our own thing.
And I had more fun in that than I’d had in any of our other units, I guess. And that was the first show that Bad Hats did when I graduated from school. It was an expanded version of a solo piece that I created in school.
I guess I skipped a step where I went, a very formative step, where I went to an arts high school in Ottawa that a lot of people around Toronto and working in the industry will have gone to this high school there from Ottawa where there’s just an incredible arts program. I had a key to my high school and I was there from 8 a.m to 11 at night working on writing, directing, acting in original shows, classic shows. We’d be doing Judith Thompson one day and then we’d be creating a collective piece about the essence of fire and all this great stuff I would not have gotten.
It’s all thanks to this wonderful man. His name’s Paul Griffin. He’s a teacher now out at Mount Allison.
He ran that program for many, many years and I think changed the lives of a lot, a lot of. Students and now professional, working artists across Canada, which brings me back to what Narnia is about, is a thank you to these mentors, these guides, these friends, these people who aren’t necessarily related to us by blood but become intrinsic and world-changing parts of our story through our lives. And I really just wanted to write a love letter to all of those people.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, there are a lot of mentors in Narnia. Some of them are talking animals, some of them are lions, and some of them are people. And it’s a fascinating mix of potential mentors that you have in that show.
[Fiona Sauder]
Yeah, it’s a lot about the relationship between, as I said, found family among the kids but found family of the kids to, specifically, our story centers this professor who is a big character, obviously, in the books and is a little bit different in our show. But there’s a lot of parental relationships and questions about care and seeking where is home for these characters and who is a safe and bringer of good magic person to trust and who’s a danger. And ultimately, it’s about the people that we find who make all of the dangerous, challenging, special and terrifying times in our life palatable and more magic for having happened.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, the thing is that the professor in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is kind of an absentee figure. They don’t see him much and they’ve come from a traumatic place. They’ve come to the country in the middle of the blitz of World War II with their home being bombed.
So they’re already traumatized, seeking some kind of guidance and some kind of something that they don’t get there, at least in the book, they don’t get that until they come back from Narnia.
[Fiona Sauder]
Yeah, well, we talk a lot about it’s about the upstairs, downstairs, as it were, because so many of the worlds we end up working in, these adaptations exist in, there’s reality first to begin with, something crucial happens, you meet somebody or you go through the, down the rabbit hole, you fly out the window with Peter Pan, you go through the wardrobe in Narnia and you’re in an upside down version of effectively the world you came from.
And so there’s all these great mirrorings of what the upstairs is and the downstairs. I think of it as upstairs, downstairs, because Alice is upstairs and the Wonderland is downstairs. But in ours, we too are trying to mirror those parallels are alive in ours as well, because as you say, in the original novel, they come from the blitz and then they go to and end up fighting in a war of their own at the end of that book.
And so that’s the idea that you’re coming from a place of instability and precarity and trauma. And then you out there in the magical world, in the downstairs Wonderland of it, you have to process or contend with what’s really going on in your actual life. And again, art mirrors life.
It’s like these plays are about the things that we’re processing and contending with. And we process them through writing about them and hopefully sharing them with other people who feel the same way.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Now, just as we come to a close, you’re just at the beginning of rehearsals for this. So as we record this, but this is a question that I like to ask people in rehearsal, which is, what are you most looking forward to discovering in this rehearsal process?
[Fiona Sauder]
Ooh, that’s a great question. I’m most looking forward to discovering more about who these people are, these characters. So much about the original source material that is so rich, but also very archetypical.
So much of the novel that has sort of shallow portraits of these people. Edmund is just a twat from the beginning. And so it’s like, what I’m excited to find out, and again, we’ve been digging at this for years, but it’s already revealing itself to be a new layer of understanding of who these four kids are, who everyone else in the world of the piece is.
I’m really excited about discovering how that works. And also, I would say sort of on a mechanical level, I’m really excited about discovering how it works in proscenium, because last time we did it, we were in the round. And so there’s a whole new mechanism at foot.
I would say maybe a slightly easier one in some realm, slightly easier one in some cases, and also challenging in others, because I really like to be quite, quite close to the audience. Yeah, there’s so much to discover. It’s almost like I can’t answer that question, I’ll tell you after.
This is what was the most fun to discover, because you can’t predict what you’re going to find out you didn’t know about your own play until you try to put it on.
[Phil Rickaby]
No, that’s true. But we have the things that we think at the beginning, and I would be thrilled to know at the end of the process, what you did most enjoy.
[Fiona Sauder]
Here’s my question right now. How long is the play? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
As a writer, you got to overwrite and then distill it down. I very famously have what I call the writing dump. So I’ll have the script open, and then I’ll have my writing dump next to it.
And my writing dump for Narnia is about 350 pages of writing that isn’t in the musical right now. I’m not trying to put it in. I’m mostly now trying to pull stuff out to make it a palatable length.
But anyway, I’m sure if there’s any writers listening to us, they will feel seen by this experience.
[Phil Rickaby]
It is 100% the most difficult thing is time. How much time do you have? How much is too long?
What’s working? And you can’t know, like you’re saying, until you get through that rehearsal process and figure out the length. Because things that take a certain amount of time in the writer’s brain can take a different amount of time on stage.
[Fiona Sauder]
Exactly. Yeah, I’m just so excited to watch it all unfold. And I can’t wait to share it with people and see how they respond to this version.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Well, Fiona, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you giving me some time.
And I, for one, I’m looking forward to Narnia with Bad Hats this year. Can’t wait for you to see it.
[Fiona Sauder]
Yeah, thank you so much for chatting with me.
[Phil Rickaby]
Thank you for listening to this episode of Stageworthy. I will get to who my guest is next week in just one moment. But first, I want to do a little bit of housekeeping.
Thank you, by the way, for sticking around in the episode. If you are watching on YouTube, make sure that you like and comment on this. I’d love to hear from you about what you enjoyed about this episode.
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So if you want to be part of that, if you want to help me to make this show, go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a backer. Next week, my guest is Kanika Ambrose, who has been having just the most amazing year, just in fact, the most amazing fall, late fall to winter, because she is the playwright behind Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop’s production of Power Place. She’s the playwright of The Christmas Market at Crow’s and Moonlight Schooner at Canadian Stage.
So tune in for that. We’re going to talk about those plays and Kanika’s big year next week on Stageworthy.
