Red Barn Theatre Mandate and Mission Statement

The Red Barn Theatre is a professional theatre in the region of Georgina dedicated to the presentation of compelling and entertaining contemporary plays and musicals with an emphasis on Canadian work.

The Red Barn Theatre is committed to attracting, nurturing and developing, established and emerging Canadian playwrights, composers, actors, directors and designers.

The Red Barn Theatre is committed to developing a larger and more active theatre going public in the Georgina Region and includes in its programming theatre for all ages including theatre for children and young adults.

The Red Barn Theatre is committed to the development of new plays and musicals through its play development program, including the commissioning of new works by established and emerging playwrights and composers.  Our goal is to present world premieres that will contribute to the landscape of Canadian theatre.

The Red Barn Theatre is the longest running professional summer theatre in Canada and celebrates its rich past by creating a working space that is supportive for the artist and inviting and welcoming for its audience.

History of the Red Barn Theatre (1949 to present) ~ 60 Years and still going strong

Why did the young Toronto-born actor, Alfred Mulock, create a theatre in Jackson’s Point in the late spring of 1949? There were only a handful of fledgling professional companies in Canada in the immediate years following World War II. No theatre schools, no Stratford Festival. Summer theatres have always attracted young people anxious to launch a stage career and the 23 year old Mulock and his mother were well acquainted with Jackson’s Point and the Sibbald family.

J.D. (Jack) Sibbald, (then also the Reeve of Georgina), agreed to lease the barn to Mulock for several years, for the token amount, and gave his permission that it could be converted into a theatre. The Mulocks set about to finance the necessary $18,000 to $20,000 required for the renovations. It was a sizeable sum: in 1949 you could buy a house in Toronto for the same amount.

Al’s friend Harry Belafonte visited the Barn on a planning trip with the architect. It is said that young Belafonte delivered an impromptu, a capella solo concert from the rafters….

Seating for the first season came from two sources…120 seats from a closing movie house in Guelph for $2 a piece, and the father of CBC actor Lloyd Bochner is reported to have contributed the rest, to create the Barn’s approximate 290 seat capacity….Rehearsals began for the opening play, Lillian Hellman’s meaty drama The Little Foxes….Opening night [was] July 1, 1949….An American reviewer from New England described the Red Barn as “the nicest, best laid out summer theatre he had ever attended.” Other shows scheduled for that first season were Room Service, Voice of the Turtle, Glass Menagerie and Night Must Fall.

At the end of that first season the Mulocks had amassed a number of liens on the property, which had to be covered by Jack Sibbald. They abandoned their dream and word went out that The Red Barn Theatre was available for the coming season.

Brian Doherty, who would go on to found the Shaw Festival, produced the Barn’s 1950 season and he did five musical-comedy revues in the Spring Thaw tradition. The next season was produced by actress-director Amelia Hall, founder of the Civic Repertory Theatre in Ottawa. In 1955, Stan Jacobson, who would later go on to produce the Wayne and Shuster revues, and Mervyn Rosenzveig started their theatre careers by taking over the Barn and offered his first professional directing job to Leon Major, later the Artistic Director of Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre.

The Barn’s 1956 season included Seven Year Itch and As I See It. One of the young actors to grace her stage that year was Hal Jackman, who would become Ontario’s 39th Lieutenant Governor.

In 1958, actor-director Vern Chapman, later president of Canadian Actor’s Equity, became the theatre’s resident director. From 1959 to 1962, Marigold Charlesworth and Jean Roberts ran the Barn, a warm-up for their years running the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Among the wonderful actors who played there at this time, were Martha Henry, James B. Douglas, Timothy Findlay, Joseph Shaw and Janet Amos.

Patricia Carroll Brown, Raymond Wickens, later the General Manager of Theatre Toronto, and Roger Dauphin moved their Harlequin Players from Quebec to the Barn in 1963 to 1965. They brought to the Barn such now well-known artists as Eric Donkin, Ben and Sylvia Lennick (the Jewish Lunts), William Davis (later the Artistic Director of Festival Lennox-ville), John Wood, Eric Steiner and Andis Celms (he would later run the National Arts Centre).

In 1968 and 1969, actors Joyce Gordon, Jennifer Phipps and Peter Boretski and they staged, among other shows, The Fantasticks. A year later, the young Bill Glassco took over the running of the Red Barn prior to beginning his well-known Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. Glassco directed five of the theatre’s eight plays that summer in a season. Among his actors were Jackie Burroughs and Mia Anderson.

Ernest J. Schwarz, director of the Studio Lab, and Brian Sewell brought in stars like Barbara Hamilton, Frances Hyland and Tom Kneebone in 1980 and 1981. Karen Hassard produced the next 10 seasons, 1973 to 1982 season and in 1985 the Second City troupe first appeared on the Barn stage. Doug and Rod Beattie, of the Wingfield series, produced the 1989 and 1990. Sunday afternoon readings and barbeques brought in luminaries such as Pierre Berton, Timothy Findley, Stuart McLean, Peter Gzowski and Alice Munro.

Lloyd Whiteway ran the theatre from 1994 to 2000. In 2001 the Barn hired Jordan Merkur, artistic director of Toronto’s Eclectic Theatre, to run the theatre. Jordan, whose family had a summer cottage on Lake Simcoe, was quick to tell everyone that he saw his first professional shows at the Barn as a child.

Today, under the leadership of Artistic Director Jordan Merkur, the Barn attracts the “cream of the crop” of Canadian talent and the Red Barn’s reputation as a respected professional theatre continues to grow. It’s estimated the theatre brings in excess of $750,000 annually to the local community.

The Red Barn Theatre is operated under the auspices of The Lake Simcoe Arts Foundation (L.S.A.F.), a not-for-profit fundraising entity founded in 1973 by John Sibbald, Jack’s son.