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If living life passionately is a sign of success, then Lindsay Robinson is a successful person.  Robinson is currently in Perth to play the role of an archeologist in the “comedy-thriller” I’ll Be Back before Midnight, the annual nail-biter that opens at the Classic Theatre Festival’s mainstage August 18 at 54 Beckwith Street East. I’ll Be Back before Midnight, the most produced play in Canadian history, is an Alfred Hitchcock-styled psychological thriller about a young Toronto couple who leave the big city to get away from it all, only to encounter weird happenings in the spooky old country farmhouse they decide to rent. Penned by prolific Canadian writer Peter Colley, who also recently opened a new musical about the life of Terry Fox, Marathon of Hope, it combines the spine-tingling building of tension and quirky humour of a Hitchcock film. For Robinson, it represents another in a long series of roles that have won him award nominations from the likes of Broadway World, Spirit of the Industry Awards, and the Calgary Theatre Alliance. His star turn in the comedy Arms and the Man last year at the Classic Theatre Festival helped snag that show a Best Production nomination from the Capital Critics Circle. Robinson is a multi-talented individual who, in addition to being a skilled performer, personal trainer, singer-songwriter, and video producer, is also studying to become a medical physician. In a twist on the line “is there a doctor in the house?” Robinson recently provided medical assistance to a distressed theatre patron at BC’s Blue Ridge Repertory Theatre. “I have a passion for helping people, and I think a combined career as an actor and emergency room doctor allows me that chance,” says Robinson, who has also appeared in Perth as the philandering central character in Neil Simon’s debut Broadway comedy Come Blow Your Horn. Since 2007, the Vancouver Island born-and-raised Robinson has been working non-stop in professional theatre, television, and film, from recent spots on the Food Network’s Giving You the Business and a pilot for the E1 Network called Mergers and Acquisitions to commercials for Samsung and Sears and a new web series called Sweet Jayne. Robinson eagerly grabs every moment as an opportunity to express himself artistically, as the recent web series “Mini Series” attests: a road trip from Vancouver to Toronto inspired a daily episode of a web series that was written, edited, and posted each night along their journey. Robinson is not shy about taking on new and heavy-duty challenges. His professional training is extensive, from the New York-based American Academy of Dramatic Arts to the intensive program at the Canadian College of Performing Arts, which entailed six days a week of choreography, directing, singing, acting, and dancing for two years. During the third year, he joined a cooperative theatre company of 12 who spend three months working on and offstage for three productions. He also recently just completed the Banff Professional Theatre training program in conjunction with the Citadel Theatre. He is also busy… Continue reading

For Toronto performer Jeffrey Aarles, who returns to the Classic Theatre Festival stage in Perth this summer to take on the role of the conflicted minister Rev. James Morell in Shaw’s warm and witty classic, Candida, playing the role a second time around has been a very different experience from the first. Candida, which plays until August 13 at 54 Beckwith Street East, has won warm reviews from theatre reviewers and audiences alike for its take on Victorian notions of love and marriage, and also the unique characterization with which Shaw infuses each role he creates. Aarles first played the role at Toronto’s Shaw in the City series, directed by Laurel Smith. Teaming up with Smith again in Perth has been a great experience, though, as he explains, also a new one. “A play is all about human interactions: change the humans, and you change the interactions,” he says. “Add to that the different venue, different stage management, different designers, different everything. A play is a communal effort. It isn’t like a painting that is completed and framed and remains more or less static for the course of its existence; every production is blessed with many minds, and will emphasize different elements of what the playwright consciously or unconsciously included.” Aarles is especially fond of Shaw’s language, full of wit and wisdom. “What’s most amazing about Shaw is that he finds ways to make the political the personal for his characters,” he says. “He wraps his words around ways that people see the world, and he lets those perspectives be presented honestly, and without it feeling at all pedantic, and he somehow manages to do this while retaining great respect for each of them. Shaw creates a framework that doesn’t allow for ‘bad guys’.” Indeed, Aarles continues, in a Shaw play like Candida, “Everyone is honest to his or her own standards, whatever the other characters (or the audience) might think of them. Everyone is granted their dignity and a kind of honesty, even if we consider the character a total hypocrite. This is what makes  Shaw so wonderfully contemporary; the audience will know the characters they meet in his plays. They may speak in unfamiliar ways, but they aren’t strangers. They live next door, or run the corner store, or are in the news on a regular basis.” Aarles came to performing because, as he recalls it, one of his acting teachers used to say that “people choose acting because they like to feel. That now feels like kind of a generalization, but there’s truth in it for me anyway. A character presents opportunities to explore not only one’s own feelings, but to attempt to step into a stranger’s skin and understand the world from his perspective, which is often going to be quite different from one’s own. To feel and react to events not as oneself, but as someone else – doing that makes one look at the whole world a little differently.” Candida has certainly provoked a good deal… Continue reading