Shawn Wright as Badger in The Wind in the Willows. Photo credit: Michael Cooper.
This is Shawn Wright’s tenth season at the Shaw Festival, and as the season winds down there for him on October 3rd, 2026, he will then be headed to Atlantic Repertory Theatre to perform in John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt, which will be directed by Samantha Wilson. Doubt runs at the theatre’s BMO Studio Theatre from October 28th to 31st. I chatted with Wright via Zoom [much] earlier this summer about what he’s been up to at the Shaw Festival this year, and why he loves working in repertory theatre so much.
Wright came to Toronto from New Brunswick for two weeks when he was in his twenties thinking that he would audition for everything that he could. He didn’t realize, initially, that the theatres had specifically scheduled audition times, so he went about knocking on doors, and found out that there were auditions happening for the Shaw Festival. “I went in, and I didn’t even know how to audition,” he says. “I was not trained. I had done some work, but I wasn’t trained.” Christopher Newton, Shaw’s Artistic Director between 1980 and 2002, told him that he needed some more experience, but to come back once he’d gotten that experience. A few years later, after having worked at Neptune Theatre in Halifax, he decided to move to Toronto and make a start there. “I just got an agent, and the agent said, ‘there’s auditions for the Shaw Festival. Someone just dropped out, and they need someone to start in two days. They’ve already done all their generals, and they don’t want to see any of those people…’ so they only called in three people. And I was basically just off the fucking boat from New Brunswick. I wore dress shoes to a dance audition… and I ended up getting it.” He was a replacement for a small part. He was asked to come back the following year, and, again, was cast in a small role, but then when one of the lead actors left the show to do Phantom of the Opera Wright got bumped up. “So, in my second year I was playing the leading part in the musical, which was amazing.”
“All I wanted to do was stay there forever,” he says. But again, he was told that he needed to go off into the broader theatre world to get more experience in different theatres. “I was just devastated,” he says. He was told at that time, “I hope that the next time you’re right for something and you audition, you’re going to be too busy to come because you’re going to have career out of here.” “That’s exactly what happened,” says Wright.
Twenty years later he came back to the Shaw to play Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. “It was just a wonderful, wonderful time,” he says. By that time there were a number of fellow East Coasters in the company like Marla McLean, who is from Dartmouth, and Julie Martell, who is from Sydney. He says of McLean that he first met her when she was a kid at Neptune, and that by the time he was in Guys and Dolls she was a leading lady there. “There’s some great Atlantic Canadians working there who’ve been sort of like the backbone of that place, as they are everywhere.”
Wright says that some of the benefits as an actor working at the Shaw Festival are the ability to play all different styles of theatre, to work on shows from different time periods, and that over time the acting company has reduced in size, and that has meant that the theatre went from having a separate musical theatre acting company to hiring actors to do both musicals and straight plays in the same season of ten shows. This means that some actors who had previously looked down on musical theatre were now taking classes from those who had been in the musical theatre company to learn how to sing and dance. From then on actors could be doing Kander and Ebb at the matinee and then George Bernard Shaw at night. “And seemingly looking like you were born to play each of them. That’s really fun,” he says.
He says that usually he ends up being in one American play and one British play, and that is the case this year too. He’s in Funny Girl (Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill, book by Isobel Lennart), and The Wind in the Willows (based on the play Toad of Toad Hall by A.A. Milne, but from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, and now adapted by Fiona Sauder). He praises the dialect coaches that they have at the theatre who help him find the right accent for each character.
“There’s this amazing woman named Fiona Sauder who works in Toronto a lot. She has a company called Bad Hats Theatre, and she re-invisions children’s classics for modern audiences- for adults, and also kids, in a very stylish, hilarious, immersive sort of way. I’ve seen a few of her shows, that Narnia she did at Christmas at Soulpepper, which was amazing. Last year I did The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and this year we’re doing The Wind in the Willows in the studio space, which is sort of in the round- it’s just beautifully designed, and the score is beautiful. They’ve written a sort of soundscape for it- beautiful orchestrations- it’s really delightful.”
He is playing Mr. Badger in the show. He describes him as “the cranky old curmudgeon that ends up sort of befriending the heroes, the four of them that are on the journey together, and they end up being friends, and it’s all about how people with different skills or different walks of life, or people who would not normally meet each other come together for the common good. The metaphor is for different countries, different races, different ethnicities, different socioeconomic [backgrounds], it’s beautifully designed, really funny, and very touching too.”
He says the characters are written as English people with the characteristics of animals, so he has “this amazing wig that was built for me, a badger wig” that is white and black.
Wright says he loves doing repertory theatre, rehearsing two shows at the same time, and doing two different shows in one day. When he was at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton Maxim Mazumdar, the founder of the Stephenville Festival in Newfoundland and Labrador used to come through and adjudicate the drama festivals and look for young people to hire for his company. Wright says that his show swept the acting awards, but that there were five actors, and four awards, and he was the odd one out who didn’t win anything. He thought he must have been really bad in the show, but Mazumdar came up to him and asked him if he sang, and he said yes, so he asked him to mail him a cassette tape of him singing “something musical theatreish.” “I ended up at Stephenville playing Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.” He stayed there for three years. He also did repertory theatre in Jim Petrie’s Festival On the Bay in Glace Bay for a few years. “I think one of the reasons that I got into Shaw, which was right after that, was that they knew that I understood how to be in two shows at once.”
He also has been in seven seasons at the Stratford Festival where he also was able to oscillate between working on musical theatre, Greek tragedies, and Shakespeare comedies. “That was all kind of training too, which I just loved. I really love it.” He says that doing two shows simultaneously can actually improve the work. “It’s probably like having two aging parents that live in different places. Even though you’re working just as hard in both places, it does allow the other half to rest and marinate things- a scene that you can’t get, an accent that you’re just not getting- you think ‘I don’t have time to work on this,’ but you know you’ve been given all the information about it from the dialect coach, and while you’re away doing something else, it starts to marinate. You know how when you sleep on something, then it sort of becomes clear.” He says it’s also fun to perform within the different spaces of a theatre festival like the Shaw or Stratford. “One [venue]’s huge, one’s little, one’s experimental, one’s sort of a jewel box place. It’s nice because you’re in a different theatre, you’re with, usually, different actors in your dressing room, in a different style, so if someday’s driving you nuts, and I know I drive other people nuts, depending on the day, you can take a rest from [the whole thing]. There’s great joy in it too because there’s a common language that you all [in the company] have because you’re sort of being trained in the same way.” They’re also all understudying for each other, especially, he points out, since Covid. He says understudies go on much more frequently now, as even the smallest symptoms are cause for actors to stay home now lest they “decimate the whole company” with something contagious like Covid-19 or the flu. “Your ability to learn lines, out of necessity, becomes sort of paramount.”
Along with Mr. Badger in Wind in the Willows Wright is also playing Mr. Keeney in Funny Girl this year. He is the manager of the vaudeville company where Fanny Brice works. “He’s a real crusty sort of been there done that type. He basically begs her to get out of the business because the audiences don’t like her. It’s basically almost a strip joint, right? And then you’ve got a star with actual talent. And then Nick Arnstein, who she basically ends up with, he spots her, is a friend of Keeney’s, and he comes and sees her and introduces her to Mr. Ziegfeld, and then she’s a star of the Ziegfeld Follies. So, that’s really fun.” This isn’t Wright’s first time performing in the show. “Believe it or not we did Funny Girl at St. Malachy’s High School, a Catholic School [in Saint John], and [the show] is about divorce, gambling, and it’s set in a Jewish community in New York, all the things that we would not know about in New Brunswick- except for the gambling. I thought that was pretty forward thinking on their part.” He played Nicky Arnstein in that production. He’s since found a cassette tape of himself saying his lines. “Oh my god, he’s this sophisticated man of the world, and I had like the whitest trailer park little accent from New Brunswick- it’s actually sort of sweet.” He had the opportunity to reprise this role much later in a concert version of Funny Girl at Harold Green Jewish Theatre starring Gabi Epstein as Fanny Brice. “She was phenomenal, of course,” he says.
Sara Farb plays the role at the Shaw Festival, a part that Wright says that she also was “born to play.”
He says that it’s fun for folks to see both Funny Girl and The Wind in the Willows because twelve of them are in both shows. That’s also what’s interesting about doing repertory theatre, he notes that Farb mostly carries Funny Girl, but then she has a much smaller role in The Wind in the Willows. “It’s neat that you give the spotlight to someone else, and then they’ll give it to you.” It’s also great to get to see the actors play completely different roles- like Farb is playing a kid who is a rabbit and also playing Fanny Brice.
One of the newest aspects of working at the Shaw Festival is that with the newly built residences in the Artist Village students from Ontarian schools can now come to Niagara on the Lake and stay overnight so they can see more than one show, and take workshops in dance, acting, and singing, with various artists from the company. “They learn numbers [from the musicals]. They’ll teach them a number, and then they see that musical that night with the choreography they have learned [in it]. It’s pretty great.” Wright says that even though Niagara on the Lake is close to Toronto it feels like an oasis- similar to the East Coast, as it is right on Lake Ontario- it even has a Cows store. The Shaw Festival has been bringing their “beautiful production” of A Christmas Carol to the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto for the last couple of years. “And Sanjay Talwar, who is a Haligonian, is playing Scrooge.” There are also a few other familiar faces for Haligonians in the show- Janelle Cooper who played Sofia in The Colour Purple at Neptune, Gryphyn Karimloo who was just here in Come From Away at Neptune. and Graeme Somerville, who is Marla McLean’s husband.
Shawn Wright is keeping busy. After Doubt Closes he will be in Toronto this Christmas in Canadian Stage’s Ross Petty pantomime Cinderella written by Matt Murray and directed by Mary Francis Moore. He is playing the Evil Stepmother. “James Daly’s the Prince, [he’s] an East Coaster; he’s from St. John’s, and Andrew McAllister is in it too; he’s from New Brunswick. So, we’re taking over. Always have.”
The Wind in the Willows plays at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre (85 Queen Street, Niagara on the Lake, Ontario) until September 27th, 2026. Tickets range in price from $28.25 to 96.12 (based on seating) and are available here. You can also phone the Box Office at 905-468-2172/ 1-800-511-7429 or visit in person at 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara on the Lake.
Funny Girl plays at the Festival Theatre (10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara on the Lake, Ontario) until October 3rd. Tickets range in price from $28.25 to $207.65 (based on seating) and are available here.
Doubt plays at the Atlantic Repertory Theatre’s BMO Studio Theatre (112 Princess Street, Saint John, New Brunswick) from October 28th to October 31st, 2026. Doubt plays October 28th to October 31st at 7:30pm with a 2:00pm matinee on October 31st. Tickets are $55.00 or $45.00 for students. They are available online here.
Cinderella plays between December 5th, 2026 and January 3rd, 2027 at the Winter Garden Theatre (189 Yonge Street, Toronto). Tickets range in price between $30.00 and $99.00 and are available here.
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