Kanika Ambrose’s world premiere The Christmas Market is promoted in Crow’s Theatre’s materials as a heartwarming seasonal story. It is, in fact, so much more. The holidays sentimentalize belonging. The show, which was commissioned by Crow’s Theatre and is produced with b current Performing Arts and Studio 180 Theatre, puts belonging under the microscope and asks us to consider who gets to belong — and at what cost.
Drawing on the realities surrounding Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (never named in the script, but discussed at length in Ambrose’s playwright’s note and baked bone-deep into the play’s backdrop), Ambrose builds a taut and surprisingly funny 90-minute chamber piece set in the lodgings of three Caribbean migrant farm workers. The trio share a cramped bunkhouse-trailer, and navigate their first Canadian winter, while the Christmas market that their labour enables hums elsewhere. Inside, they prepare food, swap stories, and wrestle with financial, cultural and legal realities that don’t let up for the holiday season. Outside, the snow-globe fantasy rolls on.
Ambrose’s conceit—holiday feast preparations away from home, juxtaposed with incendiary cultural friction—sharpens under Philip Akin’s precise direction. In the Studio Theatre’s elongated playing space, he composes movement and spacing that isolate each worker’s unique situation and rhythm, until moments where their trajectories collide. The result is kinetic, lucid … and sometimes explosive.
The ensemble cast is exceptional. Matthew G. Brown’s Joe is a smiling, solid pragmatist—eight years into seasonal work and turning the grind into tangible success back home. Dressed in the grit and holiday greens and reds of Des’ree Gray’s costumes, he grins and bears it, determined to stage a Caribbean Christmas feast right here in the trailer. Savion Roach electrifies as Roy, the most educated and observant of the trio, branded a troublemaker for asking too many of the wrong (right) questions and expecting too much (basic decency). Clad consistently in his dirty coat — in every sense, he simply can’t come in from the cold — he seethes and stalks, nearly leaping out of his body at injustices large and small. His performance is a tour de force cocktail of righteous anger, cultural misfires, DIY advocacy, and incredulous despair.
Danté Prince’s marvellously understated Lionel seems like the chill counterweight to Joe and Roy, but his calm masks complex legal jeopardy and personal shortcomings that have all but trapped him. And Brenda Robins, the sole white cast member, is wonderfully pragmatic as rough-hewn Ryan, the on-site manager who works with the men and for an unenlightened offstage boss, trying to help within the limits of her own limited power and perspective.
Ken Mackenzie’s naturalistic trailer set—a tiny kitchen with shelves of food staples, a TV and couch, battered bunk beds, more shelving—begins bare-bones and grows increasingly kitschy under Joe’s inveterate optimism. Strings of red-and-green cheer creep in like a garish challenge: can décor outpace despair? For Toronto theatregoers, the play’s title conjures the Distillery District’s snowy bustle and soundtrack. But practically speaking, the on-stage experience feels more like the Christmas market supply chain’s back room. In this setting, holiday staple The Sound of Music, beloved by Joe, becomes a brutally ironic backdrop: a musical widescreen celebration of place and story of escape refracted through this atonal, small screen pressure cooker.
The Christmas Market is an unexpected, engrossing, multi-layered gift to thinking theatregoers. It is not the heartwarmer that the title—or the promotional copy—might suggest, and that’s a feature, not a bug. There are no villains here, only likeable but spiky humans with blind spots, doing their best in a crucible engineered by systems, policies and permissions that invisibly power our commerce. And the ending rejects the comforting fiction of different cultures uncomplicatedly breaking bread: where you look on that elongated stage literally determines the story you take home.
And that, perhaps, is Ambrose and Akin’s quiet holiday challenge: in a season that relentlessly directs your gaze, choose to widen the aperture, and include the people who make the season possible.
The Christmas Market runs at Crow’s Theatre’s Studio Theatre until December 7, 2025. Tickets are available at crowstheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
