The Ontario Theatre Review: A bold, design-driven Earnest that celebrates Wilde while stretching its emotional grounding
By Ross
After an insightfully hilarious lesson in the “Language of Fans,” the first notes of A Most Unnecessary Song hit the air. Suddenly, we are no longer in London, Ontario, but in some glorious, gender-bending drawing room where the rules of society have been delightfully upended in a smart balancing act between populism and subversion. Billy Lake, as the gifted and magnetic Lady Stella Clinton, stands center stage in a shimmering gown, delivering Gilbert and Sullivan’s ode to vegetable love with a wink so broad it could span the Thames. The audience laps it up like good champagne, all before the curtain even rises on the main action, and just like that, we know we are in for something distinct and divine. This is not your grandmother’s Importance of Being Earnest, thanks to director Alistair Newton (Shaw’s Witness for the Prosecution). This is a production that understands Wilde’s comedy and core. It is not a museum piece but a living, breathing, gloriously queer celebration of artifice, wit, and the sheer joy of being utterly, delightfully unnecessary.
Newton’s vision for the Grand Theatre’s production is joyously revelatory and striking. From the moment the house lights dim, the design team, led brilliantly by set designer Michelle Tracey (Buddies’ Roberto Zucco), lighting designer Siobhan Sleath (Neptune’s Shrek), and costume designer Judith Bowden (Stratford’s Ransacking Troy), transports us into the much-pleated and polished world where every colour, every fabric, every carefully placed prop feels like a love letter to Wilde’s subversive genius. The production is stunningly colour-blocked, with each act unfolding in a vivid monochromatic palette that reflects the hidden codes and secret languages of Wilde’s era.
Act One’s emerald green, inspired by the dyed carnations Wilde and his circle wore to identify one another, sets the tone for a play that is as much about giddy performance as it is about truth. Act Two’s decadent yellow, evoking the covers of the Yellow Book and the Aesthetic Movement, bathes the stage in a glow that feels both opulent and quietly dangerous. And Act Three’s bold red, taken from Wilde’s own vermillion office, is a defiant splash of coloured subversion that leaves no doubt about the production’s intentions. This is the “age of ideals“, we are told, a world where surface is substance, and where every detail, from the opulent gowns to the precise choreography of a fan’s flick, serves to amplify the play’s razor-sharp wit and draw us into the play’s delight.
At the heart of this production is a cast that understands Wilde’s language as if it were their mother tongue. James Daly (Off-Broadway’s Dracula – A Comedy of Terrors) is delightfully crafty as Algernon Moncrieff. He trots around the stage deliciously, giving us all a masterclass in comedic timing and effortless charm. He unpacks Wilde’s epigrams with ease, tossing off clever quips about muffins and propriety. Yet, there is a sly depth to his performance that keeps the character from slipping into caricature. Julien Galipeau (Bard on the Beach’s Much Ado About Nothing) as John Worthing is his perfect foil, grounding the play’s absurdities in a sincerity that makes his eventual unraveling all the more delicious to digest. Together, they create a dynamic feast that crackles with chemistry, their verbal sparring a dance of wit and one-upmanship that feels fresh and exhilarating.
Mirabella Sundar Singh‘s Cecily Cardew is a revelation, all wide-eyed innocence and razor-sharp cunning, while Kaylee Harwood’s Gwendolen Fairfax matches her beat for beat with a steely determination that disguises her questionable romantic exterior. And then there is Claire Jullien’s Lady Bracknell gifting the room with a perfectly calibrated performance that is extra sharp and pointed, as though Wilde himself might have penned the role with her in mind. Jullien finds every nuance in the character, from the imperious disdain of her famously funny handbag lines to the barely concealed delight she takes in her own absurdity. She may not be the traditional male actor in drag (like Stephen Fry in the National Theatre’s production of Earnest I saw in the West End a few months ago), but her portrayal is so rich, so layered, that it feels like a revelation rather than a departure.
The addition of Lady Stella Clinton is one of the production’s most inspired choices. The Lady, also known as Ernest Boulton, was a real-life 19th-century queer trailblazer who famously fainted when she was found innocent in the trial of the century, after being arrested for wearing women’s clothes. Lake’s performance is a triumph, a seamless blend of drag artistry and historical homage that serves as both a balcony-bridge between scenes and a reminder of the queer subtext that has always lurked beneath Wilde’s text. The musical numbers, far from feeling like unnecessary additions, enhance the play’s themes of performance and identity, giving the audience a moment to catch their breath while never letting them forget the witty world they are in. It speaks to Newton’s direction and the music direction by Stephen Ingram (Shaw’s Gypsy) that these moments feel organic, as though they have always been part of the play rather than clever interpolations.
For all its visual confidence and theatrical playfulness, there are moments when the production leans so fully into its stylized language that the emotional clarity softens. The heightened gestures and carefully constructed images occasionally feel guided rather than instinctive, as though the production is leading us toward its ideas rather than allowing them to surface naturally from the characters themselves. The wit remains sharp, incredibly so, and the performances remain committed, but the connection between impulse and action does not always land with the same precision as the design and concept. This is felt most clearly in the quieter relationship between Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble. On opening night, the sound design by Olivia Wheeler (Coal Mine’s Infinite Life) seemed to place a subtle distance between them and us, lessening the emotional impact of Deena Aziz’s finely observed Miss Prism and Ben Sanders’s Canon. Their gentle, awkward courtship becomes slightly muted, and by the time their proposal arrives, it lands with more surprise than it should, rather than the soft inevitability the text suggests.
Yet the cast continues to ground the production with remarkable clarity and commitment. What makes this production so thrilling is its fearless embrace of Wilde’s queerness. This is not an Earnest that shies away from the play’s homoerotic undertones or its celebration of artifice over authenticity. Instead, it leans into them, playing with the language, using design, performance, and even the addition of Lady Stella to highlight the ways in which Wilde’s comedy is a defiant act of self-expression. The production’s bold use of colour, its dynamic costuming, and its unapologetic camp all serve to remind us that Wilde’s world was one where identity was fluid, where performance was power, and where the only sin was being boring. In a time when the boundaries of gender and identity are being fiercely debated, this production feels not just relevant but essential. It keeps Wilde’s questions alive, about truth, performance, and the masks we wear, and lets them land in the present with surprising clarity.
The final moments find the characters gathered in a tableau that is as visually stunning as it is thematically resonant. The red of Act Three lingers like a challenge, a dare to the audience to embrace the absurdity of it all as that opening image lingers. The language of the fan, the playfulness of the music, the open, fluid invitation into a world where identity is something worn, performed, and reshaped at will. It points toward a production that revels in its theatricality and trusts in the power of delight. This is a production that does not just honour Wilde’s wanton wit and legacy; it revels in it, inviting us to do the same, following that impulse, often with beauty, sometimes with strain, always with intention. The world outside may be full of earnestness, but inside the Grand Theatre and its production of The Importance of Being Earnest, pleasure is the only rule worth following.
