VideoCabaret is one of Canada's most inventive, prolific and celebrated theatre ensembles. The company's founding playwrights Michael Hollingsworth and Deanne Taylor have created many enduring plays, and with renowned designers and actors have devised spectacularly original styles of performance -- black-box epics, multi-media cabarets, musicals, opera, and masquerades.


Michael Hollingsworth in 1973.


1984

Michael Hollingsworth's adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 at Toronto Workshop Productions (1981).


Cold War

Campaign poster for the Hummer Sisters' municipal bid (1983).

 


Billy Merasty in The British, at the Cameron House (2001).

 

1976 - 1980
In Toronto 1976, VideoCabaret began to make the first plays integrating video-cameras, piles of hot-wired TV’s, and live rock'n'roll; and staged these spectacles in famous and notorious venues in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, New York and London.

After the world tour, VideoCab moved into the Cameron House, an art and music club on pre-hip Queen Street West in Toronto. The company wired the building for video, joining their upstairs studio and the Cameron stage ina half-real half-virtual theatre space. In this environment Michael staged adaptations of Brave New World and 1984, while Deanne and the Hummer Sisters ran for Mayor of Toronto and helped define the local zeitgeist with political cabarets involving hundreds of actors, designers, musicians, painters.

 

1980-1999
In the 80's and 90's VideoCab performed mainly on the stages of Toronto's heroic new-play producers -- Theatre Passe Muraille, Factory Theatre and the Theatre Centre. Deanne and long-term collaborators honed the 'video-cabaret' staging-style to realize her plays about mass-media politics and societies. In the same period, the company's core artists invented the 'black-box' style for Michael's epic play cycle: The History Of The Village Of The Small Huts which satirizes and dramatizes Canada’s history from Chief Donnacona and Jacques Cartier to recent times.

 

 

2000 - 2011
In 2000, at the invitation of the legendary Cameron House, VideoCab refurbished a theatre space where the company is creating new work, re-inventing their classic History Plays, supporting play workshops for Guest Artists, and sustaining a Carnival Arts Exchange that connnects Trinidadian and Toronto artists in the practice of Carnival design.

 

VideoCabaret's work has been honoured by scores of Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations and a total of twenty-three awards.

 


Deanne Taylor's VIDEOCAB NEWS, at Factory Theatre (1998).


THE GREAT WAR at the Cameron House (2010.)


Hummer Sisters Jennifer Dean, Janet Burke and Deanne Taylor in WHERE'S FLUFFY? (1980)

Our Cameron House Headquarters at Queen & Spadina, in Toronto.

Gary Farmer in the first produced History Play, NEW FRANCE at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1985.

 

The BritishDeanne Taylor's CITY FOR SALE (2004)

Programme covershot for THE BRITISH, at The Stratford Shakespeare Festival (2012).

THE EARLY DAYS .... Photo by Thaddeus Holownia taken in 1976 during VideoCabaret's three-year Residency at A-Space.

Pictured: Andrew Paterson, Janet Burke, Ron Terrill, Alan Rosenthal, Bobbe Besold, Marien Lewis, Michael Hollingsworth, Bob Nasmith, Deanne Taylor, Brian Condie