"From 2010 to the pandemic, [Aluna Theatre's] energy was totally devoted to creating a community of Latinx artists," says this year's Silver Ticket Award recipient. "Now they’ve grown up, and a lot of them are being produced by other companies. Creating that space has been a huge responsibility and I never take it lightly."
By Nathaniel Hanula-James /Jul 1, 2025
iPhoto caption: 'The Hound of the Baskervilles 'rehearsal photo courtesy of Lighthouse Festival.
“[I’ll] be taking off a full tweed suit and putting on a Victorian dress,” says actor Andrew Scanlon. “There will be a lot of coordination that needs to go on.”
“You can’t perform if you’re self-conscious. It’s absolute death. And that extends to every other artist in the theatre: every designer, every director, every composer,” says the former artistic director of Young People’s Theatre. “If you’re concerned about how the audience will judge what you’ve done, something’s held back.”
By Nathaniel Hanula-James /May 27, 2025
iPhoto caption: Top to bottom, L to R: Naguib Keval, Aruna Bhalla, Colin MacLellan, Payge Mildebrath.
I suspect that most people who work in theatre professionally, and many who don’t, have a story about a high school drama teacher who changed their life. This edition of Speaking in Draft is a celebration of those figures.