Before we announce the winners of the 2023 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series.
One of the most exciting new voices in Toronto’s young musical theatre scene is Colette Richardson and her ambitious company Shifting Ground Collective. They’re shepherding new works and producing existing ones, including 2023’s hit Ordinary Days for which Colette is nominated for Outstanding Performance (Musical).
Do you remember your first experience with theatre?
You know, I’m not sure I have any memory of theatre not being in my life. My mom is a theatre person, so I was growing up on a media diet of Disney Renaissance movies and The Sound of Music. It was just such a huge part of my life growing up, that I don’t really have that “a-ha” moment like everyone else does.
That being said, I have a very clear memory of the moment I decided I was going to do theatre professionally. I was thirteen, and my Dad had to go on a business trip to New York – so my parents decided that we would all go as a family for my birthday. The second show we saw on the trip was Wicked, and I was the kind of pre-teen theatre kid with a HUGE Wicked phase (I think I actually went to elementary school dressed all in white and asked people to call me Galinda for a week once).
When we got to the end of “Defying Gravity”, there was something inside me that just clicked – according to my Mom I stood up in my chair and just stood there with my jaw on the floor and as soon as the lights came up for intermission, I looked over at here and said “I. Want. To. Do. That.”
We walked out of the theatre that night and I was already making plans for what dance classes I was going to sign up for in September, and I haven’t really ever thought about doing anything else ever since.
When did you first start singing? Tell us about finding and developing your voice.
Similarly, music was always a huge thing in my house, especially with me and my Mom. She likes to tell stories about how she would lose me in a Costco when I was maybe three or four, and she could always find me because I would get up on top of the flat pack boxes and sing “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid and a crowd would form.
I think there’s always been something about singing, and singing musical theatre in specific that has been an emotional outlet for me. I am someone with Really Big Feelings, and, like the old adage goes, sometimes there’s no other way to get those feelings out than to do it through song (as cheesy as that might be).
It was absolutely a journey figuring out how to find control as a vocalist though. I spent much of my adolescence screaming out to the Heathers soundtrack as I tried to find my mix. I’ve had a lot of really fantastic vocal teachers in my life, and working with them, cross training my classical voice, and honestly – time, have been huge factors in getting me to where I am today. I think a lot of people forget that the voice is a muscle, and just like any other muscle in your body, it’s about exercising it and strengthening it and giving it the time to grow along with you. Once I stopped thinking of my voice as this metaphorical concept, and approached my training in a more technical way, it opened a lot of doors in terms of things I didn’t know I could do.
I still sing just to get my feelings out though. I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing that.
You’re the Managing Producer of Shifting Ground Collective. Tell us about the company and its goals.
We (myself, and my co-producers Joshua Kilimnik and Shannon Murtagh) started Shifting Ground in the spring of 2022 in response to what we saw as a gap in the Toronto scene for emerging musical theatre artists. We were all early on in our professional careers (Joshua and I were just finishing up our undergrads, and Shannon had graduated during the pandemic), and we were surrounded by all of these phenomenally talented artists – performers, writers, designers, technicians – and no one had a place to find their footing in the industry. We wanted to build a space that could be the springboard from finishing your training to those larger mid-career contracts.
We’ve been doing a lot of cool stuff since then – developing new Canadian musicals, producing cabarets, running community pub nights, and producing full scale productions.
What we didn’t anticipate at the time was just how much of a community would form around the collective and the work we were doing. I’m so grateful every day to the incredible group of artists, audience members, donors and friends of the organization for the ways that they have supported and continue to support us, the work that we do, and each other. Community is very important to us, and it’s been an absolute gift being able to carve out this space in the industry for the early-career artists who are just starting to get their voices heard.
We have lots of dreams for the organization, some big and some smaller. I personally would love to see a world where Statistics (the show we’re developing with Shreya Jha) is being licenced in high schools across North America. But I think for now, we’re just focused on growing this community, and getting the incredibly talented emerging artists into the spotlight so that the rest of the city can experience just how phenomenal their work is and will become.
How did the concept for Ordinary Days with a shifting cast first come about?
You’re not going to believe me, but it actually started as a joke.
Since we all have day jobs, Shifting Ground meetings can sometimes occur at odd hours – particularly very late odd hours. We were having a meeting at my apartment, and we were trying to set preliminary casting for Ordinary Days for a proof of concept we needed to record for a grant application. Shannon and I were absolutely convinced that we knew who would play whom. We’d told Joshua this, so when he came in, he said “You’re right. There’s only one right answer”, and then proceeded to say the opposite casting.
I think he and I spent a solid 45 minutes debating which casting made more sense, and by this time it was one o’clock in the morning and we still had three quarters of our agenda to get through, and Shannon, just wanting us to move on, says “Why don’t we just flip a coin”. Entirely as a joke.
And we looked at each other, and it just kind of spiralled from there. It’s wild to me now how serendipitous that was. It’s one of those things that starts as a throwaway and then grows into something so much bigger than anyone was ever imagining it could be.
But if there’s anything the three of us know how to do it’s to commit to a bit. And that might have been one of the best bits we’ve ever done.
What were some of the rewards and challenges of putting the concept into practice?
I’d say the things that were the most challenging were also the things that ended up being the most rewarding. From the very first rehearsal, we were switching tracks. We would block a scene, or set of scenes in one role, and then, right before we broke for the evening, Steven (our director), would say “OK! Switch tracks!”
The first couple of times were terrifying – it really gave me a lot of appreciation for just how hard it is to be a swing. Performing blocking and choreography that you’ve only ever watched someone else do without having walked it through beforehand is incredibly stressful, and it took a couple of go-arounds before I stopped feeling like I was entirely lost.
The cool thing though, was that after a couple of weeks, it became second nature, and switching back and forth wasn’t so daunting anymore. By the time we got to the end of the process, I was finding a lot of creative freedom in switching back and forth between tracks so rapidly. It forces you to be in the moment the entire time – you can’t get too locked into an interpretation because you’re doing a different show against a different scene partner every time. That degree of novelty was so liberating, because it really forced us to play, and discover entirely new colours with every run through and performance.
You were in the rare position of having another company member playing the same roles as you. How were your versions of Deb & Claire different from Shannon’s?
One of the really beautiful things about Ordinary Days is how the characters are so flexible, they’re sort of these “every people” which lets them really be coloured by the personalities of the actors playing them.
I think the ways that mine and Shannon, and Emma (Coulson, our alternate)’s performances differed echo the ways that we’re different as people. I have always been a very loud, expressive, emotional, and heart-on-the-sleeve kind of person, and I think that was reflected in both of my tracks. My Deb is neurotic, and high strung, and very quick to emotional volatility. My Claire is emotional and raw and vulnerable, and very much having her emotions coming up to the surface. Shannon is (thankfully) far more grounded and controlled in her energy than I am (that’s one of the things that make us such good friends and collaborators), and I think that’s reflected in her Deb and Claire as well.
There was this one moment in the museum where Deb is finally getting her notebook back, and for my Deb, the release of stress in that moment ended with her collapsing onto the floor in a heap. When we were running that scene for the first time, Shan came up to me after the run and said “That’s hilarious, and so perfect for your Deb, but absolutely wrong for mine”. And I think that’s one of the things that was so beautiful about this process, is it allowed for us to really infuse ourselves into the process. Em’s Deb had a bit where she pulled out an asthma inhaler – we all found ways of really bringing ourselves to the roles, which was really fun.
Tell us about working with the rest of the cast, especially with different scene partners each time.
I can not sing the praises of my teammates on this project enough. It was such an incredible gift getting to play and build this story together. It really felt like a team sport in the room – because we were all sharing roles, we could really support one another in an entirely different way because we knew what the others were going through. We would swap notes on ways of navigating difficult vocal passages, or how we made certain entrances or exits work, or how to avoid getting twisted up in props – every challenge you were experiencing with your track you had this think tank of people who could help you find your way through it, which felt like such a gift in this wacky and challenging process we’d built for ourselves.
The best part though was how much your show changes depending on who you’re playing opposite. We started referring to the characters as “Randy Warren”, “Taylor Jason” or “Kevin Warren” because you were getting an entirely different energy depending on who was on. It almost made it feel like there were twelve possible shows you would get to do depending on who you were paired with and in what tracks.
The level of trust we developed as a company was something really special. We still hang out quite often and keep in touch, and I think that team mentality really helped me feel safe doing the show. On the outside it was this incredibly risky thing, but from the inside, it almost didn’t matter which way the coin fell because you knew that everyone else on the stage knew everything going on and had your back – so we really just got to ride the roller coaster together.
What were some of the most interesting conversations you remember having with your director in developing your interpretation of each role?
Steven is such a gift of a director to work with because he really doesn’t dictate anything about how you’re seeing or interpreting the characters. He’ll come into the room and just invite you to make big choices and play. He’s such a physical director, and so much of the storytelling is derived from the blocking and choreography. I think I learned the most about both Deb and Claire from the ways that Steven had everyone moving – he would show us a section of staging and suddenly all of these ideas would come out of that – what do those physical movements tell us about a character’s internal life? What does the change in tempo of those movements tell you about someone’s thought process?
And then we just had the space to play from there, and listen to the music and the lyrics and let the physicality of the piece really shape the emotional experiences. I found my Deb getting more and more neurotic the more we worked on the piece, and I found her rhythm in pacing back and forth across the stage. Claire moved more slowly and spent a lot more time in stillness – and that felt very representative to me of the way that she’s feeling stuck – and that was all coming from Steven and the way his staging gives you the space to make those discoveries.
Did you have a favourite moment in the production?
I had several. Shannon and I used to joke that it didn’t matter what way the coin landed because you got to do some of the best parts of the show in each track.
For Deb – I always really loved doing “Big Picture” and finding a barista in the audience (I surprised quite a few people over the course of the run), and I really love Deb’s verse in “Rooftop Duet/Falling”. It was the first piece of music in the show that I really latched onto, and her section always makes me cry – especially on closing night. It’s also always a good time to get to button the show by singing the title of the musical.
As Claire – the end of “I’m Trying” where she’s looking out over the New York skyline and noticing what isn’t there was always a really special moment for me. And being wheeled around on the ladder during “Gotta Get Out” feels like such main character energy.
But if I had to pick one, it would be the moment where we’re all standing on the boxes and throw the papers up into the air. That moment just felt so magical every single night.
You’re currently working on Merrily We Roll Along with Shifting Ground. How’s that coming together?
It’s going really well!
This production of Merrily is actually several years in the making (very long story for another day, but if you see me at the Fringe patio this summer, ask me about it), so it’s incredibly fulfilling finally getting to bring the production to Toronto audiences.
The way that Joshua, who’s directing and Shannon who’s choreographing have envisioned this piece is so incredibly exciting and makes me really honoured to consider myself their friend and collaborator. Our music director Ethan, and the twelve-piece orchestra (pinch me), are making everything sound PHENOMENAL. We’ve got an INCREDIBLE team of designers and production staff who are so smart and thoughtful and thorough, and the CAST – God I could listen to them sing for the rest of my life.
I’m also really excited to finally get to crack into this character. I’m playing Mary Flynn, and this role is the most challenging and adult character I think I’ve ever tackled in my career. She’s giving me permission to find enough confidence in myself to be onstage without feeling like I need to be pretty – to be loud and messy and ugly in places, and that feels so liberating and exciting.
I’m incredibly proud of the work that we’re doing, and I really feel like Toronto is going to see something really special from some people who are going to become incredibly big names in February. I can’t wait to share it with you.
Do you have anything else you’d like to plug?
Find Shifting Ground on socials! We’re everywhere @shiftinggroundcollective – or you can join our email list on our website. We’ve got all sorts of fun programming outside of our shows (our next Community Musical Theatre Pub Night and Piano Bar is on Feb 10th!), and we’d absolutely love to connect with everyone who loves musical theatre in this city. Please reach out!
Do you have anything you’d like to add?
I just want to say to anyone reading this who has something they want to say as an artist, as an administrator, as a creative – don’t wait for someone else to open the magic gates for you. Your voice deserves to be heard, and you never know what could happen if you take the chance and put yourself out there. If you’re sitting there waiting for permission to take the leap and start the passion project – write the book, make the podcast, sing at the karaoke night, whatever it is – consider this your permission. Go out there and make things and make friends and build things and take up space. You can do anything that you set your mind to.