The Barrie Theatre Festival returns Thursday, featuring six short-form productions designed to make live theatre more accessible to audiences of all experience levels.
The festival, organized by Theatre by the Bay, runs from Jun. 4 to 13 at Five Points Theatre and marks the second year in its current format.
Organizers say the festival is designed to lower the barrier for audiences who may not regularly attend live theatre, with performances ranging from comedy and music to contemporary dance. Most shows run between 45 minutes and an hour, a format executive producer Glenn Coulson says is intended to make theatre less intimidating for newcomers.
"If you're not maybe sure about this theatre thing and you want to try it out, this is the way to do it," he told Barrie360. "Forty-five minute shows, up to an hour, and you will be blown away by the talent that happens here."
Members of the media were invited to get a sneak peak of the selected productions just hours before the festival opened, which included four comedies, a dance production, and a musical piece.
Two of the comedies, Milk Milk Lemonade and Swordplay: A Play of Swords, are part of the festival's featured series and will be performed every day throughout the 10-day event.
Coulson is most excited about Swordplay, which is written and performed by Sex T-Rex, the same Toronto-based comedy troupe that performed Crime After Crime (After Crime) during the 2025 festival.
"We had great success bringing Sex T-Rex in last year," he said. "Making people laugh is something that we definitely will be doing here... comedy is something that everybody needs right now."
Swordplay is a parodic mashup of The Princess Bride, The Three Musketeers, and Zorro, featuring swashbucklers and retro video game references.
"Video games were actually, not a super late addition, but we were halfway through the process of writing the show and then we're like, 'let's make it a video game,' said actor Conor Bradbury, who co-stars with Julian Frid, Lowen Morrow, Seann Murray, and Sharjil Rasool.
Among numerous awards, the production won the Best Comedy Award at the 2015 Just For Laughs comedy festival and has seen lots of success over its 100-plus appearances.
Meanwhile, Milk Milk Lemonade is described as a "fast-paced whirlwind comedy" starring Emma Nelles and Jonas Trottier. Collectively, the two actors play nine kids, five teachers, and a wide range of parents in a story that follows the class clowns of Mallowmarsh Elementary.
The acclaimed production won the Second City Award for Best Comedy at the Toronto Fringe Festival.
In the spotlight series, the festival opens with Village Idiots, a political satire set written by Ben Anderson and set in Newton Village.
Taking its time slot later in the festival is There Are Enemies, a comedy based on a real rumour that enemy spies were operating in Parry Sound during the Second World War.
"There was a genuine concern that there was going to be supplies in Canada trying to do espionage in key areas of supply and food, munitions, transportation," playwright Michael Whyte. "The thing about Parry Sound, not only is the explosive factory there (in Nobel, just north of Parry Sound), but there's a major east-west transportation route with the train trestle (running over downtown)."
The story revolves around a woman seeking a job as head of the new Citizens’ Defence Committee goes on a comical adventure to find spies in Parry Sound. In real life, the committee was created to encourage citizens of Ontario to work with police and report suspected enemy activity in their communities.
It features members of the Kempenfelt Players in the show, while the final show How Do You Live? is a choreographic production mixed with spoken word performed by the Simcoe Contemporary Dancers.
"All of the (five) choreographies deal with our own stories," Chrissy Baxter, the group's executive director said. "And all of those letters that we're reading to each other are pieces that have come from our own journals that we wrote as part of the creation of the choreography. So you're really getting a deep dive into our world from a choreographic perspective, but also from those very vulnerable words that we picked out to share."
Also featured in the lineup is a musical by Danny Cannis called You, Me, and the Big Screen, which features performances of iconic and nostalgic movie soundtrack songs, including those from Rocky IV, Top Gun, and more
Coulson said the local artists and performers were a focus for this year's, and hopes it can grow even further, especially with the city's new performing arts centre to be built at the waterfront.
"This year it's a little more collaborative with the local community," he explained. "That's the point of the festival, to bring people together. Theatre by the Bay wants to be a collective and help as many arts groups as possible in our area to elevate everybody."
