The Toronto Theatre Review: Gregory Prest’s Dream in High Park adaptation finds fresh life in Shakespeare’s beloved comedy, embracing its romance, music, queer spirit, and glorious confusion.

By Ross

“Love is…” Those are the first words spoken beneath the slowly emerging stars of High Park, Toronto, and before another line is uttered, I find myself remembering, quite unexpectedly, Moulin Rouge!. That glorious opening declaration of love being like oxygen or a-many splendid things, but this time around the moon, love is being equated to madness, delivered with theatrical abandon by Steven Sutcliffe as Feste, the fool, all before the Twelfth Night story itself begins. Both carry the same sense of wonder and delight; that we are about to be swept into something lovely and larger than life. Here, director Gregory Prest (Tarragon’s Bremen Town) gently casts Shakespeare’s familiar opening overboard with a joyful collage of some of the Bard’s greatest reflections on love, stitched together by our fool into an overture that is funny, romantic, and unabashedly theatrical. It is certainly less subtle than Shakespeare’s own “If music be the food of love.” Still, beneath the summer sky, it works beautifully, inviting the audience into a world where love is not simply an emotion but a force capable of causing madness, confusion, transformation, and yes, “a shipwreck“.

By now I have lost count of how many productions of Twelfth Night I have seen over the years. London’s National Theatre offered a gloriously gender-fluid celebration. Public‘s Central Park gave us a musical feast under the stars. Stratford charmed with its Miró-inspired visual imagination. Even the productions that stumbled revealed something fascinating about one of Shakespeare’s most elastic plays. Canadian Stage‘s Dream in High Park production now happily joins the list of those I have loved. Gregory Prest’s adaptation streamlines the play into a swift ninety minutes, trimming scenes, compressing exposition, and occasionally asking the audience to leap over a few narrative gaps. Surprisingly little is lost. Prest trusts that Twelfth Night has never truly depended on plot mechanics. Its enduring power lies in the exhilarating emotional chaos that erupts whenever people discover that love rarely behaves according to anyone’s carefully prepared plans.

Prest’s production is also wonderfully musical. Olivia Wheeler‘s compositions glide through the evening like ocean currents, carrying us effortlessly from Viola’s terrifying shipwreck to Illyria’s tangled web of longing. That first musical sequence, unfolding within a storm, accomplishes in moments what pages of exposition might otherwise require. Sim Suzer‘s elegant playing space leaves room for imagination, while Logan Raju Cracknell’s lighting performs its own quiet act of magic, gently yielding control from the fading daylight to theatrical illumination as dusk settles over High Park. It becomes difficult to separate Shakespeare’s imagined world from the trees surrounding the amphitheatre, allowing nature itself to become part of the production’s design.

At the centre of everything is Caroline Toal’s radiant Viola. Toal possesses one of those rare stage presences that immediately invites affection without ever pleading for it. After her unforgettable Anne with an ‘e’ at the Stratford Festival, she once again finds remarkable emotional clarity inside a character navigating impossible circumstances. Viola’s disguise as Cesario has always invited audiences to suspend disbelief, yet Toal makes every moment feel emotionally present and truthful. Her growing affection for Duke Orsino unfolds with quiet, tense tenderness, even as she wrestles with the painful knowledge that she cannot reveal who she truly is, a framing that completely registers with anyone who has hid who they are from the one they love.

As her master of all parts of love, Farhang Ghajar (Coal Mine’s People, Places and Things) gives us an Orsino whose emotional awakening feels particularly contemporary. Rather than presenting his attraction toward Cesario as accidental comedy, Ghajar allows genuine affection to develop naturally between master and servant. Watching Orsino slowly recognize that the person he trusts most may also be the person he loves the most becomes one of the production’s richest emotional discoveries. Shakespeare planted those possibilities into the text over four centuries ago, and Prest wisely allows them to pan-sexually bloom rather than rushing to tidy them away. One wonderfully playful staging choice arrives near the play’s resolution, when Viola quietly rotates herself into Sebastian’s place so that Orsino’s affection lands on her rather than her brother. The joke earns a sweetly attuned laugh, but it also acknowledges the emotional journey Orsino has already travelled. Prest never treats the attraction as something to explain away or laugh at. He trusts Shakespeare’s own emotional logic enough to let the moment remain tender, funny, and quietly revealing.

The strong presence of Ghazal Azarbad (Soulpepper/Segal Centre’s English) brings equal modern complexity to Olivia, capturing both her profound grief and her astonishing willingness to surrender to desire almost instantly. Olivia’s infatuation with Cesario often risks becoming little more than comic misunderstanding, but Azarbad allows us to understand why someone trapped inside mourning might seize love so completely upon the first glimpse of joy that enters her world. By the time Sebastian appears, her whirlwind decisions feel entirely consistent with the emotional landscape Shakespeare has created, even as we question its logic.

Ori Black (GCTC’s Forever Young) and Ray Jacildo (COC’s Medea) provide another fascinating and moving emotional thread as Sebastian and Antonio. Their relationship carries an intimacy and devotion that never feels forced or overstated. Antonio’s love emerges with remarkable generosity, giving emotional weight to scenes that productions sometimes hurry through. It becomes another moment where Twelfth Night delivers a remarkably fluid understanding of love, desire, and companionship, without any concern for appropriateness or hiding. Long before modern conversations about identity and sexual orientation entered the cultural vocabulary, Shakespeare was already imagining a world where affection refused to remain neatly categorized.

On the comic front, Justin Otto (PTE’s Space Girl) nearly steals the evening every time Sir Andrew Aguecheek wanders into view. Otto understands that Sir Andrew’s greatest weapon is complete obliviousness. His French is hysterical, his timing is impeccable, particularly during his first entrance, and his relentless attempts to insert himself into romantic situations where absolutely nobody wants him produce some of the evening’s biggest laughs. Mike Shara (Crow’s The Master Plan) tears joyfully into Sir Toby Belch’s debauched appetite for wine and chaos. One inspired moment turns an innocent watermelon into both an outrageously dangerous prank with Sir Andrew and an almost bomb-astic weapon of destruction, perfectly capturing the production’s ability to push Shakespeare’s comedy toward gleeful absurdity without ever losing sight of the characters underneath the joke.

Navtej Sandhu (CanStage’s Mahabharata) gives Maria warmth and sharp intelligence. But perhaps it’s Rick Roberts (Tarragon’s Feast) who walks the evening’s most difficult balancing act as Malvolio. Shakespeare asks audiences to delight in his humiliation while also questioning whether the punishment has gone too far. Roberts successfully holds both truths together. His Malvolio possesses enough vanity and self-importance to justify the prank, yet enough vulnerability that his public unraveling carries genuine sadness and remorse alongside the comedy.

Perhaps what struck me most about this production was how confidently it embraces the play’s queer possibilities without ever feeling as though it is imposing something foreign onto Shakespeare’s text. Viola’s disguise, Olivia’s attraction to Cesario, Orsino’s growing affection for his page, and Antonio’s unwavering devotion to Sebastian all become parts of a world where identity remains fluid, and love refuses to obey rigid expectations. I happened to attend Canadian Stage‘s Queer Night, making these ideas resonate even more deeply with the audience surrounding me, but the production never presents them as modern additions. Instead, Prest simply trusts what has always been waiting inside Shakespeare’s words and runs with it.

One delightful moment also captures the spirit of the entire production. My guest asked, as we made our way back to the subway, why Viola did not simply reveal herself sooner. It is a perfectly reasonable question. Shakespeare, of course, asks audiences to accept a remarkable series of coincidences, disguises, mistaken identities, and improbable reunions. And somehow, we always do. We accept these glorious complications quite happily because Prest, like Shakespeare, trusts us to. Twelfth Night has never asked us to believe in logic. It asks us to believe in poetry and possibility.

As the company gathered beneath the stars for its final moments of love and engagement, I found myself smiling at how effortlessly and compassionately Canadian Stage had welcomed this beloved comedy into the present while preserving everything that has made audiences cherish it since around 1602. This production celebrates love in all its bewildering, joyful, inconvenient forms, where certainty rarely survives first contact with the heart and identity proves wonderfully capable of surprising us. After (at least) seven encounters with Twelfth Night, Gregory Prest’s beautifully crafted staging still found fresh ways to make Shakespeare’s comedy feel alive, generous, and gloriously open to everyone willing to lose themselves in its delightful confusion.