Young People’s Theatre Colonnade

Susan Rubes Entertains Toronto’s Kids

Imagine a stage in the middle of a downtown mixed-use mall and apartment complex. Now imagine the stage thrusts out among the audience, and children erupt in laughter and shout suggestions as a man in a lion costume parades across the stage. 

This is a glimpse of the Colonnade Theatre, which was an early home to Toronto’s longest-standing professional troupe for young audiences: Young People’s Theatre.

Its founder, Susan Rubes, was a child star on Broadway and in television. When she moved from New York to Toronto in 1960, she saw the need for theatre that took Canadian children as serious audience members. 

She was often quoted as saying that “Only the best was good enough for children”, and so created the Young People’s Theatre in 1966 to fill a void for high-quality, professional theatre written specifically for children and their parents.

Theatre for Young Audiences in Toronto

Inspired by the theatre practices of Brian Way, children at the Young People’s Theatre were invited to participate in the action of the plays, which were performed in the round. Nearby companies like Studio Lab Theatre trained actors to improvise with young audience members. These techniques were also used for adult audiences in site-specific theatre, like the hit Toronto production of Dionysus in ‘69.

For three years during the 1970s, Young People’s Theatre mounted plays at the Colonnade like The Looking Glass Review and The Dandy Lion, which follows the musical journey of a boy who runs off to join the circus with his pet lion, Dandy. Toronto Star theatre critic Nathan Cohen loved the show’s imagination and strong actors: “What impresses this adult, aside from the story’s buoyancy and simplicity, is the professionalism of the performance.” 

Susan Rubes also staged musicals like Red Riding Hood and The Popcorn Man, written by broadcasters Pat Patterson and Dodi Robb, who later composed for TVO’s The Polka Dot Door. 

The Colonnade Theatre in Context

The Colonnade has been described as a “pocket theatre”, on a lesser plane than the grand O’Keefe Centre, now Meridian Hall, and the Royal Alexandra. Seating about 300, the Colonnade Theatre was more in line with theatre venues like the Poor Alex at Bloor and Brunswick (now closed), the Central Library Theatre on College and St. George (now the University of Toronto’s Koffler Student Centre), and the Hydro Theatre on University and St. George (destroyed by fire). 

These were the theatres that amateur and professional companies fought over because they were affordable enough to risk a small turnout. Then, as now, theatre real estate was scarce in Toronto. The Colonnade combined its intimate thrust stage and design input from George Luscombe with a prime location in a mall, allowing for lunch-time productions for busy shoppers.

The Young People’s Theatre went on to transform an abandoned stable on Front Street into a state of the art theatre venue in 1977. Although the theatre has since been demolished, the Colonnade Theatre proved a worthy launchpad for this top-tier producer of alternative, documentary, fairy-tale, Canadian theatre for young audiences.