‘The job kept me sane’: How some Stratford Festival actors filled their days and their pocketbooks when the show couldn’t go on

After two long pandemic years, the Stratford Festival is back in full swing. Among the approximately 1,000 artists, artisans and other workers employed by the festival this season is an acting company of 139 performing in the Festival’s 10 shows.

The 2020 festival was cancelled, and last summer the company ran a limited, reduced-capacity outdoor season.

This year’s opening is a welcome return for a workforce that was particularly hard-hit during the pandemic. Stage performance, given its live audience and face-to-face interactions, ground to a halt and many of Stratford’s performers tried on new professional hats. Some put on familiar ones. Here are stories of four of those pandemic side hustles.

André Sills: Stage actor turned web series private investigator

Ten years ago, André Sills cocreated two short comedic films about a pair of private investigators, one white and one Black, on a stakeout. The humour was geared around “treading the line,” said Sills, of what’s acceptable to say about race, gender and other sensitive topics.

In the summer of 2020, Sills and his collaborators picked up the project again, aware that the global racial reckoning was making their series more topical than ever. And so was born “Private Idiots,” a co-written web series directed by Dennis Nicholson featuring Sills and Oliver Ward as investigators Steve and Boise.

Each nine, five-minute episode revolves around a triggering topic. “The Karen Contagion,” for example, responds to the May 2020 incident in New York’s Central Park in which a woman called 911 to complain that a Black male birdwatcher was menacing her. “I have a theory that there’s another COVID symptom that’s taking white people to racist extremes,” says Sills’ character in that episode. He and his co-creators are looking for funding to keep the series going.

Back at Stratford this season and performing in “Richard III” and “All’s Well that Ends Well,” Sills has been involved in conversations around equity and diversity in the productions, some of them challenging: “There is no blueprint on how to proceed,” he said. “But I think everybody’s hearts are in the right place. And we understand how special it is to be back at work.”

Bonnie Jordan: A dancer in a factory

Like “Flashdance,” but in reverse: During the pandemic, Stratford musical theatre performer Bonnie Jordan worked in a factory, as does the leading character in the 1983 movie, who is then accepted into a prestigious dancing academy.

In the early days of the pandemic, “we didn’t know what was going to happen with CERB,” said Jordan, referring to the government relief benefit. “I thought, maybe it’s not going to continue. Maybe I need to get a job.”

She was hired at an auto parts factory where she was “running these really big robot machines,” she said. “You load the machine with a bunch of parts. You step back and press a button, and the robot arm welds everything together,” she said. “And then you do it again.”

Maintaining her mental health during an unpredictable time was “definitely the main reason why I got the job,” said Jordan. “I’m a very personable person, so I needed something. And it helped to have a routine.”

She’s retained friends from the factory work, some of whom were surprised to find a Stratford performer in their midst: “They were like, ‘you do what?’” she recalled. “Lots of people watch the shows, but there are a lot of local people who have never been.” She’s looking forward to some of them coming to see her in “Chicago” this season, in which she’s playing the character of Hunyak and understudying the lead role of Velma Kelly.

Colm Feore: Theatre star back on screen

“I thought the theatre was dead,” said theatre, film, and TV star Colm Feore. As the first months of the pandemic wore on, Feore realized that live performance was not coming back anytime soon. He took film offers as they came, including the thriller “Trigger Point” and the postapocalyptic Western “Six Days to Die.” On “Trigger Point,” he reconnected with the actor-turned-director/writer Laura Vandervoort and agreed to appear in her short film “My Soul to Take” for “the princely sum of $165,” he said.

“I tend to always say yes” when approached for such indie projects, said Feore. “I’m not able to wear other hats … I know what my skill set is. I know my limitations enough to say I can put my skills in service of someone who’s got a good idea.”

That said, it was “terrific news from an employment standpoint” when he booked the third season of the Netflix series “Umbrella Academy,” and a number of projects that his wife, director/choreographer Donna Feore, was working on, also moved forward. “We were just thanking our lucky stars that we found some work and tried to refill the coffers,” said Feore.

Feore has returned for his 18th Stratford season, performing leading roles in “Richard III” and “The Miser.” It’s “been magnificent,” he said, “to look into another actor’s eyes and be able to see their excitement and interest.”

Michael Spencer-Davis: Actor turned garage door-maker

Stratford Festival veteran actor Michael Spencer-Davis considers himself a “handy guy,” but he’d never considered a manufacturing job before. A few months into the pandemic and “on the old mental health roller-coaster like everybody else,” he said, he successfully applied to work at a garage door company in Stratford.

He was mentored for three months by a senior employee who was retiring, and then became a one-person department, building doors alone on a shop floor. “I played my CBC in the morning and my Spotify in the afternoon. I was very happy because I had lots of tools,” he said.

It was difficult to stand on a cement floor for hours and days on end, but otherwise, he liked the work: “I was able to streamline some of the manufacturing processes and I was working with my hands,” he said. “It was the first time in years that almost all (Stratford) actors had summers,” because they usually work long hours during festival seasons. “There’s no doubt the job kept me sane.”

This season, his 11th at the festival, Spencer-Davis is performing in “Hamlet” and “The Miser,” and said he hopes that some of his colleagues from the garage door company will come see the shows. “It was really nice to hang out with people who rarely go to the theatre … it was a very refreshing change.”

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