WHAT 'ELBOWS UP' MEANS FOR CANADA'S THEATER MARKET

The view from Toronto, where Trump's saber-rattling adds one more variable to a theater industry still finding its post-lockdown footing

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Toronto: where the second T is silent. Photo: Dave Xu on Unsplash

Canadians are elbows up these days, and who can blame them?

Not long after Trump started threatening America’s northern neighbor with tariffs and annexation, the phrase “elbows up”—an expression drawn from hockey and freshly popularized by Toronto-born actor Mike Meyers when he mouthed the words during a March episode of Saturday Night Live—became a national rallying cry. It’s a mark of resurgent national pride and a declaration of Canada’s new, on-guard stance toward the U.S.: Elbows up and ready to defend—and, if necessary, to push back against an aggressive opponent.

In a time of looming potential tariffs and declining cross-border tourism, I wanted to see what “elbows up” looks like for Canada’s theater industry. So on my way up to Newfoundland to catch the Gander production of Come From Away, I spent a few days in Toronto just as the city’s fringe festival was getting up and running.

What I found was a local theater market that is, not unlike many around the world, poised at a delicate, dynamic moment as the business is still recalibrating after the upheavals of the COVID lockdown. There are both hurdles and reasons for optimism alike, and the sudden antagonism from the United States adds one more element of instability, prompting new difficulties (including a drop in Canadian consumer spending) while at the same time bolstering a local pride in homegrown work that was already present long before Trump began rattling his sabers.

In this week’s SPOTLIGHT STORY, I’ll highlight

• the tourism and spending trends impacting Toronto—and Broadway,

• how Canada’s spike in nationalism manifests in the theater it makes,

• why public funding is so vital to the nation’s arts scene—and why the not-for-profit sector is struggling,

• the four local leadership transitions that stand to have a lasting impact,

• the fight for a tax credit to match the movie industry’s, and

• the developing commercial musicals to look out for.

Let’s dig in, eh?

WHAT TRUMP’S DOING TO TOURISM

One thing the U.S. learned early: Trump’s belligerence has driven Canadians to look elsewhere to spend their tourism dollars. By April there were American headlines about Canadians staying away, reports that this year 32% fewer Canadians had driven across the border compared to the same time frame last year, and even Canadian critics offering West End recommendations to readers who have decided to skip Broadway this year and head to London instead.

Just last week NYC Tourism + Conventions reported that foreign tourism to New York City is now expected to plummet by as much as 14% this year, translating to a loss of up to $4 billion in direct spending. In past years, Canadians have been the second-largest demographic of international visitors to the city (after travellers hailing from the U.K.); of the 13 million foreign tourists that came to New York in 2024, ~1 million of them were Canadian. If there is indeed a significant decline this year, it’ll leave a mark at the Broadway box office: In past years nearly 4% of Broadway ticket sales have been attributed to Canadians.

North of the border, international travel is also down, with American traffic significantly lower than last year while domestic tourism is on the rise as Canadians opt to stay in the country rather than go Stateside. It remains to be seen what those shifts will mean to Toronto’s theaters: Mirvish Productions, the city’s major commercial player, estimates that Americans make up just 4-5% of its audience, according to the company’s sales and marketing director, John Karastamatis.

So far, the international tensions seem to have had a muted effect on attendance at Canada’s two biggest theater festivals. The Stratford Festival in Ontario reports that 18-20% of its audiences this year are American, not quite as high as the 25% pre-COVID high, but not too far off either. In a recent piece in Maclean’s, Tim Jennings, the executive director of the Shaw Festival (right over the U.S. border in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), notes that this year “4% of Shaw’s U.S.-based audience has been reluctant to commit to bookings, even if those who do are staying an average of a day longer.”

The Toronto theatermakers I’ve spoken to this summer tell me that so far, Trump’s talk of tariffs and trade disputes haven’t yet had a significant impact on Canadian production costs—even for the producers who rely on American vendors for some sets, lights, and other assets. But the general atmosphere of economic uncertainty has prompted an overall drop in consumer spending that’s having an identifiable effect on the theater business.

“Canadians are uncertain about the future and worried about the economy,” says Karastamatis, who estimates that such worries have lately prompted a decline in attendance of about 15% at Mirvish shows. “But it’s a really recent thing, and we don’t know how long it will go on.”

Mirvish’s sit-down production of The Lion King, announced to great fanfare for a run that began last November, will close Aug. 30 after less than a year. Though Karastamatis says the production was profitable, outside expectations for the show as a new local longrunner were high—making it hard not to view the closing as a disappointing demise hastened by ambient economic uncertainty.

THE THEATRICAL VERSION OF CANADIAN PRIDE

It would be natural to assume that the recent surge in national pride has prompted a new focus on Canadian theater artists and stories, but that’s not exactly true. For the nation’s theater industry, both commercial and non-profit, that focus on homegrown work has always been there; the new nationalism just strengthens the commitment.

“My sense of the Canadian theater community is that it’s always been focused on Canadian work,” says Stratford’s executive producer, Dave Auster. “But maybe it’s slightly heightened now.”

For Mirvish, the inclusion of imported Broadway work is part of the business model (see: next season’s runs of MJ, Shucked, and The Outsiders, among others), but homegrown shows (such as Tell Tale Harbour this fall) are also part of the lineup. And Canadian theatermakers had already begun to find success with such locally focused work, among them Michael Rubinoff, the Canadian commercial producer behind Come From Away, and Chris Abraham, the artistic director of Toronto’s buzzy Crow’s Theatre.

Among the recent successes at Crow’s have been two new adaptations of Canadian books: the novel 15 Dogs and Sideways, Josh O’Kane’s nonfiction chronicle of Google’s failed attempt to build a smart city in Toronto.

“It’s this kind of wonkish story about bureaucracy and Toronto’s character, but it did really well for us,” Abraham says. “We realized that there was something that was going on there about telling Canadian stories that are hyper-local and produced at a level that reflects back the community, at scale. That works for us.”

Linda Barnett and Natalie Bartello, the principles of commercial production company Yonge Street Theatricals, also noted a surge of audience interest in locally grown fare during the recent spring run of their Canadian-born musical Life After.

“Definitely in terms of our press moment, there was such a hunger to hear form our Canadian playwright and collaborators,” Bartello says. “Our show doesn’t have a scene in a Tim Horton’s or anything, but I think audiences can still hear it’s a Canadian voice. Some of the things younger ticket buyers would say on Instagram and TikTok were so moving and meaningful, in terms of their pride in knowing that the show started here and was written by a Canadian.”

The Crow’s Theatre and Musical Stage Company production of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. Photo: Dahlia Katz

THE CROWDS AT CROW’S

As has been well-documented in news reports like this one and this one, theaters and arts organizations all around Canada are struggling in the face of changing consumer habits, rising costs, disappearing pandemic relief initiatives, and stagnant public funding. That last is of particular concern in a market where the population (40.1 million, or about one-ninth of the U.S.’s 340 million) is spread out over a landmass so large that most performing arts endeavors are near-impossible to sustain commercially with local ticket sales alone.

Companies across the country are still figuring out how to navigate the new normal. Stratford, for instance, posted a $400,000 CAD ($290,000 USD) surplus for 2023, but more recently reported a budget shortfall of $1.1 million CAD ($800,000 USD) for 2024 with year-over-year revenue falling $4.8 million CAD ($3.5 million USD) to $75.3 million CAD ($53.5 million USD). This season, however, the institution’s productions of crowd-pleasing musicals like Annie and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels have proven so successful that runs have been extended into December—a first in the institution’s history.

Meanwhile, the nation’s other major fest, the Shaw Festival Theatre, logged its largest deficit ever in 2023 but in 2024 managed a surplus of $768,000 CAD ($560,000 USD) on revenue of $39 million CAD ($28 million USD).

Amid such ups and downs, Toronto’s not-for-profits seem to have had trouble finding their footing—except for one: The Crow’s Theatre, which is riding a wave of success that no other theater in the city has matched. In the last four years, Crow’s has seen five of its show move to a Mirvish theater for a commercial transfer. The most recent of these, Abraham’s staging of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, began its Mirvish run in early July, just over a year after popular demand extended the show’s initial engagement to a locally unheard-of 17 weeks.

“We’ve had a really good couple of years,” Abraham acknowledges. These are the factors he identifies in the institution’s success:

• The draw of locally relevant fare, such as the aforementioned adaptation of nonfiction tale Sideways (called The Master Plan on stage).

• A 2022 cash infusion from the philanthropic Slaight Family Foundation. One of 22 Canadian theaters to receive pandemic-relief grants from Slaight, Crow’s received $1.5 million CAD ($1.1 million USD)—a lot of money for a theater with an operating budget of $9 million CAD ($6.5 million USD). Abraham explains, “We used that money to do bigger shows with bigger casts and with bigger design budgets, and we spent more on marketing”—all of which in turn helped attract audiences.

• Collaborations and partnerships with theaters across the city, sharing audiences and costs for many of the titles on its slate. (Its recent staging of A Strange Loop, for instance, was produced with three other companies.) Perhaps most notably, Crow’s struck a three-year strategic partnership—it’s not a merger, Abraham stresses—with Toronto’s highly regarded Soulpepper Theatre to share audiences and fundraising efforts.

• A theater complex that has grown with its neighborhood. With multiple performance venues (including a 220-seat theater) and a restaurant, among other amenities, the Streetcar Crowsnest opened in 2017 in Leslieville, an up-and-coming area at the time. As the neighborhood has grown and Crow’s has found its place in it, the company’s subscriber base has gone from 250 before the pandemic to ~3,000 this season.

Next up for the institution: a busy 2025-26 season that includes a musical by Great Comet creator Dave Malloy (Octet), a Brit import (The Welkin), and a homegrown, Succession-style drama about a Canadian telecom giant (Rogers v. Rogers).

THE STAGE SUCCESSIONS EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT

Topline on everyone’s mind while I was in Toronto? The high-stakes leadership transition at Stratford, where artistic director Antoni Cimolino will step down at the end of 2026. But that’s just one of the executive changeups to hit Canadian’s theater scene in recent months. These are the biggies: