Frontmezzjunkies reports: HOUSE + BODY’s Measure for Measure Returns to Crow’s Theatre
By Ross
When HOUSE + BODY’s Measure For Measure returns to Crow’s Theatre this month, it brings back a production that already made quite an impression on me when I saw it in March, 2025. Christopher Manousos’s inventive adaptation takes Shakespeare’s complicated drama of justice, morality, mercy, and hypocrisy and places it inside a contemporary sound studio, where five actors step behind four microphones and take on all twenty characters during a live radio broadcast. With the originating cast returning, including Jamie Cavanagh, Katherine Gauthier, Sébastien Heins, Beck Lloyd, and Danté Prince, this darkly funny and wonderfully energetic production gets another chance to play with the tangled relationship between what happens on air and what happens between the actors themselves. When I first saw it, I was struck by the way this deceptively simple radio-play framing opened up Shakespeare’s already complicated questions about power, virtue, and who gets to decide when mercy should enter the room, and I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to tune in once again at Crow’s.
My Abridged Review from March, 2026:
They gather together around a long split white table, filled to overflowing with black sound props and four microphones, wired up to the ceiling for amplification and effect. The crew of five arrives, ushered in by the Sound Tech and Radio host leader, Matthew Graham, played solidly by Danté Prince (Stratford’s Much Ado About Nothing), who will lead them through their radio paces. He gives us the “snap, snap, snap” at the four microphones as the crew of radio actors, played well and clear by a band of fabulously talented stage actors, size each other up and settle in. We see the tension between the actors, played by actors, and we wonder where this electricity is going to lead us. And parallel the Shakespearian tale as Matthew, our radio host, starts it all off with a “here we go…4…3…2…1″.
With that strong set-up, we are off to the races. He meta-introduces us all to the play and the interesting and adept formula that HOUSE + BODY has crafted for their stage production, produced in association with Crow’s Theatre, of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a new adaptation by its director Christopher Manousos (Crow’s The Surrogate) designed and reformated “after William Shakespeare“. It’s an energizing and enlightening beginning, framed inside a modern sound studio, where five expert actors playing actors take on all the wild and wicked characters that live inside Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure for a live radio streamed presentation. It’s a formidable and fantastic formula that radio-focuses us in on the actors’ voices and the poetic words and phrases embedded most dutifully in one of Shakespeare’s most ambiguously toned “problem plays.”
That backstage element becomes particularly intriguing when a young actress arrives rushed and frazzled to step into the role of Isabella without having had a rehearsal. There is something deliciously chaotic about watching the production attempt to continue while the personal tensions around her begin to heat up. The reading itself remains determined and well-paced, shifting between comedy and darker psychological territory. The occasional radio advertisements, including spots for Purity vodka and shampoo, do not always land , but the larger device of turning Measure For Measure into a live broadcast gives the production plenty of room to play. It also allows the actors to move rapidly through an astonishing collection of characters.
The five performers make that juggling act one of the production’s great gifts. Prince moves between Matthew and several other roles, while Sébastien Heins (CanStage’s Slave Play) takes on Dalton Eddy, Angelo, and others, finding something stern and increasingly unhinged in Angelo as his repressed desires begin to surface. Katherine Gauthier (Crow’s Bad Roads) brings both humour and a strong sense of mercy to her various roles, including Escalus and Mistress Overdone, while Jamie Cavanagh (Knifefight’s Invasion Christmas Carol) handles Cope Adams, the Duke, and others. Beck Lloyd (Coal Mine’s Dance Nation) gives Isabella wit and grace, while also finding some terrific comedy in Elbow. Chris Malkowski’s lighting and Riel Reddick-Stevens’s sound design help maintain the sense that we are inside a functioning studio, even as Shakespeare’s world keeps expanding around the microphones.
At the centre of it all is the question of power. The Duke transfers authority to Angelo and Escalus, and I found myself increasingly suspicious of the Duke’s logistical and moral reasoning, seeing something of a misguided practical joker and paranoid protector in his attempts to manipulate the people around him. Angelo’s demand that Isabella sacrifice her virtue in exchange for her brother Claudio’s life exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of the play, while Gauthier’s Escalus embodies the possibility of mercy and forgiveness. Lloyd’s Isabella carries the argument with intelligence and determination, and Prince’s Claudio becomes the human cost of a system in which morality can be invoked whenever those in power find it useful.
This play, first performed in 1604, explores the complex balance between justice, mercy, and virtue, yet something about this play always makes me lean back from it, especially in the beginning, as it takes some conscious patience to engage and stay engaged. The language, many say (not just me), seems to be of a few different minds. Many suggest that some of the scripted parts of Measure that survive to this day are not actually Shakespeare’s but rather the product of a reformulated, edited revision by English Jacobean playwright and poet, Thomas Middleton, sometime after Shakespeare’s death. Herein lies some of the challenges with the complex language of Shakespeare and his problem play. Within the text, especially in the first few scenes of Act One, many passages, as perceived by scholars, basically sound like gibberish to our modern ear and sensibility, causing a ‘disconnect’ between the written text and the hoops an actor must jump through to present these words to a modern audience. One can feel the muddle we find ourselves in during the first Act, but luckily for us, this cast drives us through the fog and out into the sun before we know it, saving us from the murky muddle and allowing us to join them in this inventive journey.
What stayed with me most after seeing this production in March, 2025, was the production’s ability to keep all of those layers operating at once. We are watching Shakespeare, a radio production of Shakespeare, and the actors creating that production while their own relationships begin to collide with the story they are telling. The final moments, particularly the request made to the newcomer after the microphones have been switched off, bring those layers together in a way that gives the production its emotional weight. HOUSE + BODY’s Measure For Measure is inventive, energetic, funny, and sharply attuned to the uneasy relationship between justice, morality, power, and mercy, all while having a very good time playing with the machinery of live radio.
