The Toronto Theatre Review: b current, Crow’s Theatre, and Studio 180’s The Christmas Market

By Ross

Caribbean music slides into the space, playing up against all the frivolities of the holiday spirit packed onto those cold metal shelves. There’s a quiet, subtle courage to all that in The Christmas Market, the new play by Kanka Ambrose (Moonlight Schooner) at the Streetcar Crowsnest Studio Theatre. It’s a narrative that refuses to sentimentalize the reality it depicts, instead offering something sharper, more detailed, and ultimately more human. This is a portrait, strongly defined and broadening in scope, of three Caribbean migrant workers navigating an Ontario winter, a foreign land, and the ache of dislocation. What emerges is a story about unlikely kinship, in a found family formed not out of convenience, but necessity, humour, and a hope for shared endurance and communion. All to the sounds of music, Caribbean or otherwise.

Directed with care and intent by Philip Akin (Shaw’s The House That Will Not Stand), the production sings and challenges our earliest memories of the holidays. Its greatest strength lies in its performers, each carving out an authentic, compelling character to hang their talented wreaths on. Matthew G. Brown (CS’s Romeo and Juliet), Danté Prince (H+B’s Measure For Measure), and Savion Roach (CS’s Choir Boy) all bring distinct rhythms and frameworks to their roles, unpacking humour and heartache without ever leaning too hard on cliché. Their scenes together carry an energy that feels lived-in, specific, and quietly revelatory. And in a contrasting connection, Brenda Robins (Soulpepper/Necessary Angel’s Escaped Alone) brings a sharply etched presence that provokes and elevates every interaction she steps into. Each actor magnetically finds a personal truth inside the play’s larger conversation, and those truthful moments are where the work feels most alive.

These performances within The Christmas Market are a ‘few of my favourite things‘, to a Caribbean beat, but if there is a misplacement under that tree, it’s the play’s quick tendency to not dig deep enough into the inner lives of these men. I wanted to know more, about their present connections, their pasts, their reasons for being here, and the emotional cost of this migration. The script tends to move too briskly through the early beats, and after a richly compelling middle section that teases some kind of outcome, the play drops the story off too abruptly without a solid enough resolution. The ending simply arrives, standing in the cold by itself without giving us the chance to absorb the weight of what these characters have endured, or what they’ll carry forward once the holiday lights turn off. Perhaps that abruptness is intentional, but within the theatre, it feels under-explored.

The narrative’s most potent themes, ideas around labour inequity, cultural isolation, and the invisible architecture of exploitation, hover at the edges, shelved but not completely unpacked, leaving us not fully grounded in the story’s closing moments. And it’s here that the shadow of reality presses in. There are thousands of Caribbean workers brought to Canada each year through the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, many of them labouring in the vineyards of Niagara and beyond, living in converted bunkhouses and working 100-hour weeks that would destroy most Canadians. Their lives form the unspoken subtext of this play; a truth both harder and harsher than we might care to acknowledge, especially at this time of year.

Yet even in these gaps, there is something undeniably compelling in the play’s depiction of found family. Ambrose seems to understand that community doesn’t blossom from sameness but from a shared vulnerability, shared survival skills, and the humour required to get through a winter you were never built for. That thematic thread shines brightly through the cracks, offering a deeper emotional resonance than the plot always manages to hold.

The physical production doesn’t always rise to meet that emotional clarity. The set, ambitious in intention by designer Ken Mackenzie (CS/Obsidian/Necessary Angel’s Is God Is), feels overextended, trying to be too many spaces at once without allowing any one of them to breathe or feel fully lived in. But the rest of the design team works hard to compensate. The lighting by Shawn Henry (Nightwood’s Shedding a Skin) adds shape and focus, the sound design by Jacob Lin 林鴻恩 (Crow’s The Wrong Bashir) creates the necessary televised quality, and Des’ree Gray‘s costumes hint at a world of attempted practicality and historic scarcity that the set can’t quite deliver.

Despite its structural stumbles, The Christmas Market is far from a bleak midwinter tale. There is warmth here, real, earned warmth, held carefully between characters who try to discover that family can be something forged in the cold rather than found in a market stall. The production may leave us wishing for a fuller examination of its complex themes, but what it does offer is genuine: a story of resilience, humour, and the fragile bonds that keep some people going when the world around them is inhospitable and downright hostile in its DNA sweep.

In a season that often trades in sentiment, The Christmas Market stands out for insisting that meaning comes not from lavish displays, but from the simple, stubborn acts of holding one another up. Yet even as gratitude flickers between the characters, a quiet dread creeps in—for the one who will be left outside that circle of warmth once the lights fade, the one whose real-life counterparts may still be standing in the cold long after the curtain falls. And in that uneasy space between comfort and truth, the play leaves its unshoveled mark.