Now in her fourth season at the Stratford Festival, Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane is spending this summer inhabiting two women who seem worlds apart.
The first is a starched-collar mission worker in 1948 New York. In Guys and Dolls, directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, Sinclair-Brisbane plays Sarah Brown, the missionary who becomes the unlikely object of a wager placed by gambler Sky Masterson, opposite Jennifer Rider-Shaw’s Miss Adelaide and Mark Uhre’s Nathan Detroit.
The second is a poetry-mad Renaissance ingenue discovering a new world shaped by a new technology: the printing press. In Something Rotten!, the Festival’s revival of its acclaimed 2024 production, also directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, she plays Portia—lover of verse and unwitting muse to a pair of struggling Renaissance playwrights (Henry Firmston and Mark Uhre) who are trying to out-write William Shakespeare (Jeff Lillico).
That she moves between both roles with equal energy and conviction speaks to her range and her process, which she explored in a recent conversation with Sesaya Arts.
Playing Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls
“I adore the role of Sarah Brown,” gushes Sinclair-Brisbane, before granting that it was “such a lesson for me… It’s a role that I really wanted to play, but at first it was quite intimidating”. The first challenge was musical: “She’s a legit soprano, usually, and traditionally I’m more of a mezzo belter.” The second part was emotional: “the biggest challenge was looking at what she wants, and what she’s telling people that she wants.” She continues, reflectively: “I think no matter what piece of art you’re trying to bring forward to an audience, that is the audience’s way in. That is how to make it immediate, and to make it contemporary—because from time immemorial, we’ve all been feeling the same emotions. We just communicate them differently now.”
Her way into the role was immediate and personal: “I’m a woman in my early 30s who is trying to build a career and work as hard as I possibly can to prove myself. And that’s exactly what Sarah Brown is doing. I think her fight is the same fight as everybody: trying to survive.”
She credits Feore with sharpening that reading further, recalling her director’s insistence on “realistically looking at the facts of the show in the script”—and how, in the show’s postwar setting, “the women are holding the power. It’s simply that through the lens of 1948, it appears that the men are holding the power. To elaborate the point, she notes how in Guys and Dolls, “the people who have actual jobs—who are actually making money or have actual careers—are women. Skye Masterson, Nathan Detroit, Nicely-Nicely Johnson… None of them have actual jobs. They’re all mobsters: they’re all gambling.”
Playing Portia in Something Rotten
Portia taps a different well. “Portia is so near and dear to my heart,” Sinclair-Brisbane smiles, “because I’m also a great lover of poetry. And I’m also a big nerd!” As such, she simply revels in the idea of a world “just cracked open” by the arrival of the printing press. “it’s like getting Instagram for the first time, or getting Google for the first time,” she explains. And in this production, she gets the added benefit of familiarity with her scene partner Henry Firmston, who is also from London, Ontario, and is a former high-school castmate. “We really trust each other on stage,” she explains. This means “you have more freedom to play, because you know you’re both going to be there for each other.”
How did she come to find herself on these stages? Sinclair-Brisbane grows reflective at the question. “Mom used to say that I practically sang before I could talk,” she recalls, before describing an all-consuming early pull toward performance. “It just encompassed my whole being: the energy that you feel when you’re performing is like this return: like giving and receiving.” She began formal lessons around age six, was rejected in her first audition for a specialized arts elementary school, and vowed never to audition again … holding out only until a year later, when her mother gently pushed her to try again.
“I am a little bit Type A,” she concedes. “So I’ve always longed to do everything well…. It’s just that the more that I learned, the more I realized how much more there was to learn.” And knowing her family “weren’t well off”, she says plainly and practically, “I knew that to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, I had to be the best. Because I wanted to be seen, and I wanted more opportunities to do what I loved!”
Looking back and ahead
While Sinclair-Brisbane loves where she’s at and what brought her here, she is candid about the pull of heavier, more interior work. “I would love to play Margaret of Anjou in Henry VI. I’d love to play Medea,” she offers—before revealing a long-held, thoughtful wish to play Ophelia in Hamlet. She reads the character not as passive, but as a study in release: “I think of water flowing through hands, and I think of a door learning to open…. I don’t think she’s powerless. I think her only power is in letting go.”
She’s equally direct about what she considers her proudest professional through-line: “I’m very blessed to be a woman of colour who’s been playing lead roles where the trauma in the show is not about my skin,” she declares. From friends auditioning south of the border, she has learned that this “doesn’t happen in the States as much as it should.” Her bottom line is simple: “We are all people, and we all go through [and] we all share a human experience….” Being able to conjure such universal experience is “one of the proudest things that I have in my career.”
Guys and Dolls runs at the Festival Theatre until November 1. Something Rotten! runs at the Festival Theatre until October 31. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca or by calling 1.800.567.1600.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
