Burgandy Code as Julius Caesar Photo by James Arthur MacLean Photography
Shakespeare By The Sea has lots of news to share today about their upcoming 33rd Season. They are bringing a brand-new family musical to the park: Beauty and the Beast: The Fairytale-Gameshow Musical, written by Garry Williams and Dan Bray, as well as William Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar, starring Burgandy Code, in her Shakespeare By The Sea debut. Their one-night only Unrehearsed Shakespeare show this year will be the highly ambitious Hamlet, and there’s some structural changes coming to the company as well, Jesse MacLean is moving from his role as Artistic Director to a new role for the company, Executive Director, and Drew Douris-O’Hara is becoming the company’s new Artistic Director.
From the Press Release: “Together, Drew Douris-O’Hara and Jesse MacLean represent a powerful blend of institutional knowledge and forward-thinking artistic leadership. Their long-standing connection to SBTS ensures continuity, while their shared ambition promises an exciting future filled with unforgettable theatrical experiences.”
I was very fortunate to get to chat with Drew Douris-O’Hara via Zoom during his rehearsals for The Tempest at the Stratford Festival where he is Assistant Directing as part of the Langham Directors’ Workshop.
He says that he has been in discussions with Garry Williams, who has both acted in the SBTS company and composed scores for both the family musicals and the Shakespeare productions in the past, and Dan Bray, who has acted in several of SBTS’ productions, for years trying to find the right project for them to do together. “Beauty and the Beast came up as something that they were really interested in as a title. We’ve never, in all of the years we have been doing adaptation and big family musicals, Beauty and the Beast has never been done. … Dan and Garry pitched this quite out-there idea that both honours the original story and its major themes, but goes in a completely new direction, which is very much full of twists and turns that you will not see coming.”
He says that the play is set in the “beautifully vague fairytale land that is very useful to us here,” and that within this world there is a television show, “very inspired by various gameshows and reality TV… most notably The Bachelor,” and that Beauty and the Beast takes place within the set of this gameshow. Within this context, the Prince inhabits this world, and instead of the workers in his castle turning into furniture objects, like a clock and a candlestick, they turn into objects you would find in a television studio like a camera, a boom, or a clacker. “They are all part of the making of this TV show where the Prince is going to find true love,” he says. The score is a pop-musical theatre flavour with “some elements of retro Eurovision.”
Belle doesn’t enter this world right away. The three contestants on the show are other iconic fairytale heroines: Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Snow White. “The framing of the whole thing is really synthesizing the traditional fairytale aesthetic with a very modern lens. I think people are going to be really excited by it. What [Bray and Williams] have created is hilarious, adventurous, and surprising. We’re really proud of it.” Seb Reade, who played Celia last year in As You Like It, returns to the park to play Belle. Patrick Jeffrey, Matt Lacas, Chris George, and Jade Douris-O’Hara are also returning. Liliona Quarmyne, who choreographed Come From Away, which is still playing at Neptune Theatre, joins the cast this year, along with Rosie Callaghan, who was in the 2023 season up at Two Planks and a Passion.
Regarding Burgandy Code making her debut in the company this year Douris-O’Hara says, “Burgandy would make every list of Atlantic Canada’s most prominent artists in any genre. She’s a legend and an icon, and a source of inspiration to young directors like me, so it’s really a brilliant opportunity for us to have an artist of that pedigree and caliber with us in the park.” He says that he had a meeting with Code last fall, and she was asking him what he was thinking for the upcoming season, and Douris-O’Hara responded with, “‘What do you mean what am I thinking? Do you want to come play?’… I put my big Julius Caesar book on the table and said, ‘I have this for you. I have this if you come.’ So we really have a collaboration that grew quite organically.”
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, believed to have been written in 1599, centres on the political conspiracy that led to Julius Caesar’s assassination on the 15th of March, 44 BCE. Caesar, for all intents and purposes, ruled the Roman Republic as a dictator for five years before he was killed. The play also explores how Caesar’s death left a power vacuum that led to civil war. “Julius Caesar has been on my list for a number of years,” says Douris-O’Hara. “It’s tragically prescient in our society today- a play about power struggles and political violence- unfortunately it continues to be quite relevant, now more so than ever. We have talked around the production of Julius Caesar for some time, and when I was sitting across the table from Burgandy it was like, ‘well, this is the piece that makes the most sense.’”
Along with playing the title role in the play Code will also play Octavius Caesar, who is introduced in the second half, and is the nephew of the slain Julius. “That will be very challenging and very interesting to see the same actor embody both of those sides of the Caesar family. I’m really thrilled about it. It’s all coming together very well.”
Code, who audiences here know from her countless seasons at Two Planks and a Passion Theatre up at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, is no stranger to performing outside. “Poetry in the air is one of the gifts that Burgandy brings,” says Douris-O’Hara, “She has such command over language and space, and so watching her bring that to Julius Caesar, a very complicated and complex political figure, is going to be quite the ride. [And she’s] not afraid of getting her boots wet, that’s for sure.”
“Julius Caesar is a story about a choice that people, who were real people in history, made and that choice has essentially defined Western culture ever since,” he says. “It’s a play about choices and consequences, and I think it’s easy to look at the play and want to decide it’s a play about ‘good people’ and ‘bad people,’ but it’s not as simple as that. Everybody in the play gets their chance to speak, and gets to make their arguments, so at the end of the day it poses more questions than it does answers, and it really invites us to be a part of that conversation, which I think is such a uniquely brilliant thing that Shakespeare is able to do in that play. I’m excited to get in there with the cast and start asking those tough questions. It also has a lot of exciting violence and big elements to play. It’s a ghost play. There is music in it. It’s full of very tense, dramatic moments, and we’ve got the team to do it, so it’s going to be a big undertaking.”
Douris-O’Hara says that it’s interesting to remember that William Shakespeare was writing so much closer to our own time than he was to Julius Caesar’s. “[Ancient Rome] has pervaded Western culture. It’s where democracy was born; it’s where our political structure was invented…. What strikes me most about the play is how modern and how true it is.” He says that the play explores the way that our own culture today continues to remember that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March. “There’s a line in the play where Cassius, one of the conspirators, says, ‘how often will our act be reenacted?’ And this is this meta-theatrical moment where an actor on Shakespeare’s stage looked out and said, ‘they’re gonna keep telling this story forever and ever and ever.’ And now we are over 2,000 years removed from the murder of Julius Caesar and over 400 years removed from the time that Shakespeare wrote it, and here we are still telling this story… What a profound observation about the legacy of this event and this choice.”
Currently Douris-O’Hara is in Stratford, Ontario at the famed Canadian Shakespeare Festival there serving as the last Assistant Director to Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino on a Shakespeare Production before he retires at the end of this season after nearly 40 seasons with the festival. “He’s directed just about every play in the canon, and if not directed, certainly programmed, and he’s one of the most prominent Shakespeare directors in the world, and most accomplished, and we have him here in Canada, and I get to spend a little bit of time with him before he walks out of the door, which is pretty remarkable. He’s been an incredibly generous mentor to me throughout this process.” He notes that the Stratford Festival is North America’s leading classical theatre, and so just being there “comes with a lot of history… The Festival invested in its legacy, so you feel very welcomed as a part of that,” he says. “We talk about Christopher Plummer’s King Lear, and we talk about Maggie Smith coming and playing Rosalind in the 80s. These things come up in rehearsal, and there are people in the room who were there. It’s really Shakespeare on the world stage. … A lot of the times I just pinch myself, and try to remember to take it all in… I’ve been telling people I’m at Theatre Disney World. That’s what it’s been like… They’re in the business of making magic, as are we all in theatre, it’s the level that they are doing it at at the festival, and the size of the teams here is unbelievable. There are 80 people who work full time in the wardrobe department. It’s huge. They have their own milliner and their own cobbler. In-House. They make your shoes. The artists who work here, both on stage and behind the scenes, they are world class…. It’s been really special for me to be here in the time where I’m becoming an Artistic Director of a Classical Theatre Festival in this country.”
Shakespeare By the Sea has a direct connection to the Stratford Festival as two of its co-founders, Patrick Christopher-Carter and Elizabeth Murphy, worked at the Festival before moving to Halifax. “I hope that me being here is the start of a greater connection between, certainly Shakespeare By the Sea, but Halifax Theatre in general, and a place like the Stratford Festival,” he says, “where, although it is “Canada’s Theatre” East Coast artists have rarely been invited into spaces like this. The thing I’m really passionate about is putting our stories and our artists on larger stages. I’m very aware of that while I’m here, and making the most of it…. Halifax is such an incredible theatre city. Nova Scotia, and the Maritimes in general, are such a well developed and unique theatre voice in the country.” He mentions that Neptune Theatre’s Artistic Director Jeremy Webb has done some inter-provincial collaborations recently and says, “we need more than Neptune to be part of that exchange. We have a lot to offer the rest of the country. Trying to make those connections and build those bridges is, I think, really paramount to the growth of the sector and to the growth of the artists.”
While Drew Douris-O’Hara is at Stratford Jade Douris-O’Hara is covering four different parts as a swing for Come From Away at Neptune. “She’s having the best time and working with this cast that has been such an inspiration. They’re all so brilliant in that show, and it’s such a special show to happen on the East Coast… You know you’re at something important when you’re there. It’s light and it’s fun, but it’s also so deep and meaningful. And that’s definitely what she says about working with the people in the cast. I’m so proud of her. It’s an incredible thing to see what standbys and swings and understudies do.”
Douris-O’Hara cautions fans of The Unrehearsed Show to buy their Sweet Season Passes ASAP for a reserved seat for Hamlet because there are very few of those Sweet Season Passes left. General Admission seats are also on sale now for that show, and do not worry- they have a huge seating capacity for General Admission. “Last year there were 908 people there,” says Douris-O’Hara, “… we’re hoping to beat that record this year.”
Beauty and the Beast: The Fairytale-Gameshow Musical! By: Dan Bray. Music & Lyrics by: Garry Williams. Directed by: Jesse MacLean. Musical Director: Shanoa Phillips. Choreographer: Jade Douris-O’Hara. July 4th to August 29th, 2026.
William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Adapted and Directed by Drew Douris-O’Hara. With Original Music by Shanoa Phillips. July 17th-August 28th, 2026
Both Beauty and the Beast and Julius Caesar will be performed for free at the Halifax Central Library in August, supported by the Spring Garden Business Association.
Season Closer: The UNREHEARSED HAMLET By William Shakespeare ONE NIGHT ONLY: August 30th, 2026.
For more information and to buy your tickets please visit this website.
