Christian Barry
2b Theatre is turning 25 years old and to celebrate they are throwing a big party entitled 25 Years: The Music and the Muses on June 25th, 2025 at Kenneth C. Rowe Hall in the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. The show includes performances from Aquakultre, Ben Caplan, and Hawksley Workman and is hosted by CBC’s Jeff Douglas.
I sat down with Artistic Director Christian Barry via Zoom to chat with him about 2b’s big birthday party. There are still tickets available, and you can pick up yours right now here.
Barry says that it made sense to celebrate this milestone for 2b with a concert because so many of the shows that they have been touring internationally, especially since 2013, have been music-centred shows. “We’re going to bring back some of those artists for a little look back- a little trundle down Memory Lane,” he says. Aquakultre is 2b’s most recent ‘music-theatre hybrid collaborator,’ Ben Caplan will be performing songs from Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, which Caplan and Barry co-created with Hannah Moscovitch. That show premiered at The Waiting Room in Halifax in May of 2017. Hawksley Workman will be performing songs from The God That Comes, which premiered at Alberta Theatre Projects in March of 2013, before coming here to the Marquee Ballroom that April. “Interpersed between these mini [music] sets are going to be some interview segments where we’re going to speak to the artists about their artistic process and how it was impacted by our theatrical intervention, and that hosting is going to be done by Jeff Douglas,” says Barry.
Christian Barry met fellow 2b co-founder Anthony Black when they were both working at Neptune Theatre School in the summer before they were both graduating from University. They were both also teaching a precocious thirteen year old girl that summer who would grow up to be a theatre critic. “There was a teachers’ party to get to know each other,” Barry says, “and [Anthony] and I met there and quickly got into a deep discussion, which became an argument, about lighting design. We kind of lovingly say our relationship kicked off with an argument and we’ve been arguing lovingly ever since.”
In the 1999 Atlantic Fringe Festival Black and Barry worked together on Our Boy Ben (Or Breathing Problems), a new play written and directed by Black. In the same festival Black also directed a clown show called Etiquette which featured Zach Fraser, Andrea Dymond, and Angela Gasparetto. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” says Barry. “We just kind of made a show, and said we were starting a theatre company.” Fairly quickly they realized that they should brand these two shows together and get a Board of Directors. “We knew we were coming into a very conservative theatre context. The regionals were still doing British plays, and American plays and musicals, and they weren’t going to do original works, and they certainly weren’t gonna hand over the keys of the car to a precocious nineteen year old director. So Anthony and I, both as budding directors, knew we better build something if we wanted to find a way to direct things. So, thank heavens we did that when we were young enough to live on rice and potatoes and didn’t have children and mortgages and all the trappings of being a grownup… and thank heavens we did because here we are 25 years later and I’m still doing what I love.”
Barry and Black were co-Artistic Directors for the company until 2020 when Black left to pursue other projects, but, Barry stresses that they are still great friends, and Black continues to “pop in and out”- in February when a show he directed for Imago Theatre and Keep Good (Theatre) Company, Adventures by Gillian Clark, opened in Montréal and Barry couldn’t be there, Anthony was able to go instead. Jacob Sampson is now the company’s Associate Artistic Director.
Barry says that he first got involved with theatre through his first love: music. “I think music is the most direct way to the heart,” he says, “it’s one thing to do intellectual, rigorous work, but it’s going to fall down if you can’t access people’s hearts, and music does that so effectively and so directly. [In a] show like Old Stock you’re tapping your foot, and you’re having a good time and moving your body before you realize just how serious the subject matter is. It drops you into it. It’s a time-honoured tradition of the theatre to use songs as a way to access the body.”
Barry was a fan of Hawksley Workman first, and would go to see him in concert while he was living in Montréal and attending the National Theatre School of Canada. When he was starting to think about his graduation show he went to see Workman in concert and says, “I used to watch his shows and I had never seen anybody with greater stage presence, with greater ability to command the attention of an audience in a space with the smallest flick of a wrist or the intake of breath. Just everybody, it felt like, was so directly connected to his every impulse. So, that raw material was so exciting. I also just love this music. There’s always this feeling when I go to concerts, for better or for worse, I can’t just sit back and enjoy the concert- I’m always sitting there thinking, ‘if this lighting cue was a little different, and you reverse those two songs in the set list, the structure would be more satisfying, and then maybe just think about weaving a little story through here, and just imagine the impact.’ So I think my brain was always doing that when I would see his shows. So, I reached out and said that, and I don’t know why he trusted me, but he thought enough of my introductory email that we got on a phone call and then started having a few coffee dates, and bit by bit started talking about what we were going to make together.” He didn’t end up using this idea for his graduating project, in fact, he says, they “didn’t rush into it. I reached out when I was still in school in Montréal and it wasn’t until… five years later at least that we kind of got serious and got into a recording studio and started jamming on some ideas. We kind of waited for the story to find us. In that case, it was the story of the Bacchae. And once we knew we had the right story, it was just kind of like cooking with gas.”
The God That Comes played at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and the Stratford Festival, it went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and also to festivals in the Netherlands, Denmark, New Zealand and Tasmania between 2013 and 2017. It really opened new doors for 2b and introduced their work to new international audiences. Barry credits the music in the show with making it more accessible for audiences.
Old Stock, he says, “managed to take very serious subject matter, but also treat it with humour and with some degree of joy… The theme of the show resonated all around the world. We thought we were making a show about the Syrian refugee crisis, the global refugee crisis in 2015, from a Canadian perspective, but it turned out… we didn’t have to change a thing- it resonated everywhere- whether we were in Australia or whether we were in the UK, or whether we were in the United States, all these English-speaking markets that we took the show to, the themes resonated very clearly. Everybody has that story of other generations that have come before and were othered and had to fight through discrimination in some form.” Barry says that the themes in Old Stock continue to resonate to this day. It has already been performed over 400 times all over the world, and they are taking the show to Shanghai, China later this summer.
Hannah Moscovitch’s play Red Like Fruit, also under the 2b banner, just closed at Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto, but is headed to the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe where it will open July 31st, 2025 and run until August 24th.
Here at home 2b recently moved into their new Creation Laboratory at the old Video Difference space on Quinpool Road. “The dream is for it also to be a gathering place for artists because there are so few of them in our city.” Now Barry says it is primarily an office space, citing that the building is shared by a variety of different arts organizations and creators throughout the year, but he also hopes that there will be more and more demand for the building’s rehearsal space as well.
Barry says that he is “really moved and thankful” to have Workman, Caplan, and Aquakultre coming together for 2b’s 25th Birthday concert. “It was very meaningful for us to work with these great artists on these show, but if they’re to be believed, and I think they are, it was also meaningful for them. I’m excited about the conversations that are going to unfold on stage. Jeff is a great host and a great interviewer, and I’ve heard Ben and Hawksley in particular, Lance (Aquakultre) is still in the middle of the process, but I’ve heard them speak about what that experience was like, in terms of the rigour, the hours we put in, the number of times we revised things, the ways in which the dramaturgical process of just examining the meaning of every word and examining the meaning of every gesture, what that brought to their artistic practice. I’m humbled and thankful that they care as much as they do about the times that we all spent together, and that they’re here to celebrate… It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to see these great artists on one stage and I think it’s going to be a great night.”
25 years: The Music and the Muses is a One Night Only Event- June 25th, 2025 at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21-Kenneth C. Rowe Hall. Tickets range in price from $50.00 (plus fees) to VIP $125.00 (plus fees). VIP Seats include exclusive access to 2b’s catered pre-show VIP reception: Mix and mingle with the artists, plus get priority seating for the show. Tickets are available here.
Canada’s Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 is a fully accessible space for those using wheelchairs and mobility aids. It has fully accessible washrooms on both floors and a non-gendered washroom on the second floor. The museum is working with community to make the space and the programming there more accessible for folks. For more information visit this website.
