The first thing you notice on walking into the Shaw Festival’s The Wind in the Willows is the awe on the faces of children in the audience. Some point and gaze at a meadow carpeted in moss and rock; others take pictures standing beneath the gauzy, oversized flowers hanging overhead, like something a tiny creature glimpses from the ground.
Fiona Sauder’s adaptation, playing in the intimate Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, captures the giddy pleasure of being small in a fantasy world built by busy anthropomorphic animals. At the same time, it transports grown-ups familiar with the source material back to their childhood. With hummable music, maximum use of the performance space, eye-catching design and over-the-top performances, The Wind in the Willows offers a feast for the senses, plus a little food for thought.
This is territory Sauder knows well. Sesaya Arts has followed her work for years, and the throughline is consistently the same: theatre for young audiences that is genuinely engaging — without talking down to anyone of any age. Audiences who come to The Wind in the Willows expecting this care and quality will be richly rewarded.
Sauder’s script follows the familiar arc of Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 classic book, but with a crucial detour: it is adapted not from the novel, but from A.A. Milne’s 1929 stage version of it, Toad of Toad Hall. Where Grahame’s better-known book traverses a wide range of pastoral episodes and philosophical riverbank musings, Milne’s play—and Sauder’s reworking of it—is laser-focused on the capers of the irrepressible Mr Toad.
The story begins when earnest, homebound Mole (Gabriella Sundar Singh) abandons his burrow to explore the river, where he meets the genial Rat (Sharry Flett) and the stern and idiosyncratic Badger (Shawn Wright). After this gentle, friendly opening, the energy level clkimbs to 11 with the arrival of pompous, motorcar-obsessed Toad (Lawrence Libor), whose reckless driving Badger tries unsuccessfully to curb. Toad’s joyride ends in his arrest, with extended consequences that include a trial, a prison stint, an escape, and an Odysseus-like return to his beloved Toad Hall, which has been overrun by the Chief Weasel (Matt Alfano) and Chief Stoat (Sara Farb) and their gang of ferrets and weasels.
Sauder pursues this Toad-centric spine within an elegant framing device reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, which opens with a human child named Marigold (Jaden Kim) who plays in a garden before the world shrinks, and the animals take over. This effect invites young audiences into the fantasy and declares that this is a story about seeing the world anew. But not too anew… because, in keeping with Toad’s manic energy, the adaptation will then lean hard into schoolyard comedy. Insults like “doo-doo head” fly. Props balloon to a cartoonish scale. And the ensemble swirls with the buoyant energy of a playground game. Given the joyousness of this near-anarchy, the script’s moralizing about recklessness and responsibility begins to feel heavy-handed by the second act, though the production’s overall charm compensates for this.
The quartet of leads are the prime source of that charm. Sundar Singh’s Mole is wide-eyed and tender, capturing the character’s mix of curiosity and vulnerability, without tipping into cloying innocence. Flett’s Rat is resourceful and warm: the steady friend who keeps the beloved riverbank running, while Toad’s chaos threatens to swamp it. Wright brings a dry, no-nonsense wit to Badger, making the character’s gruff sternness feel more protective than scolding. And then there is Libor’s Toad: an unstoppable, over-the-top whirlwind of vanity, panic, and delirious self-regard. Toad is permanently three steps ahead of his own consequences, sprinting, preening, and collapsing in equal measure. Libor’s performance is frenetic in the best sense: broad but precise in its physical comedy, and generous in interactions with the rest of the cast. He is utterly convincing as a creature who believes every room, every car and every riverbank was made just for him. And Qasim Khan clearly enjoys his turn as the exasperated and opinionated judge trying to preside over his whirling trial.
The design team provides the whimsy that grounds and enables the evolving story. Judith Bowden’s set and props transform the in-the-round Studio Theatre into a storybook countryside, with its moss-and-rock riverbank and oversized flowers that give way, piece by piece, to prison cells and the rooms of Toad Hall, as the cast builds and rebuilds the world before us. This visible construction—the sense that the story is being assembled with the audience inside it—does as much as any line of dialogue to pull young viewers into the fantasy. Laura Delchiaro’s animal costumes are playful and just specific enough to help each character’s personality pop. Kevin Lamotte’s lighting shifts from sun-dappled afternoon to moonlit evenings with a painterly grace, while Jeffrey Newberry’s original music and sound design and Jack Davidson’s fight and movement direction add texture, dimension and snap to the action.
If I have a quibble, it is the run time. The late placement of a lengthy intermission makes the two-hour runtime feel longer than it needs to, especially for younger viewers. Might I propose a tighter 90-minute, no-intermission revival that would sustain the buoyant production’s momentum from start to finish, without interruption?
This said, The Wind in the Willows is exactly the kind of raucous, riotous romp that my children would delight in when they were little, and the giggling children throughout the theatre were clearly smitten. The show runs at the Shaw Festival’s Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre until September 27, 2026. Tickets are available at shawfest.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
