"All the world’s a stage, 

And all the men and women merely players; 

They have their exits and their entrances; 

And one man in his time plays many parts."

Many parts, you say. There’s the rub: what we don’t see,  we don’t understand. Our awareness is incomplete.  What remains behind the scenes, remains invisible.  

The theatre is a perfect metaphor for life: the stage and its players obscure the production, the many parts that create the world that both the players and the stage can’t exist without.  

Enter The Young Company: a collaboration between the Thousand Islands Playhouse and Gananoque Secondary School.  

Scene: a hidden gem on the St. Lawrence Seaway, Gananoque, Ontario.   

Young people congregate at a production facility to stage a play: throughout the 4 month process students design and make costumes, props, design and build the stage, bring the stage to life with scenic painting, design and light the production, design and execute sound, and, of course, coordinate the stage full of actors in a production of Miss Electricity the likes of which the world has never truly seen.  

When the play opens, it opens to a full-house at the Firehall Theatre, a short jaunt from the seaway , opening the 2023 summer season.  

The parts we play, one might say, brought to life, into the light: the back of house to the spotlight, to share in the applause and magic of theatre. To see the theatre as if for the first time.  

A special thanks to Kieran Velcov for sharing his original composition which you heard at the beginning of the episode; this piece of music became the musical thread for Young Company’s production of Miss Electricity which ran at Thousand Island Playhouse during the month of May, 2023.