Equal parts sexy and strange, Measure for Measure at Crow’s Theatre gets a well-deserved victory lap

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• Title: Measure for Measure
• Adapted and directed by: Christopher Manousos
• Actors: Jamie Cavanagh, Katherine Gauthier, Sébastien Heins, Beck Lloyd, Danté Prince
• Company: House + Body, presented by Crow’s Theatre
• Venue: Studio Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs until Oct. 11

Critic’s Pick

Plays-within-plays get a bad rap. Occasionally, that’s justified: Thematic resonances between nested stories, particularly within the canon of William Shakespeare, can feel gratingly obvious. And in the hands of an ineffective director – or the eyes of an overly cynical critic – a metadrama can feel as if it does little more than pad the runtime.

I raised an eyebrow, then, when independent theatre company House + Body chose to superimpose a frame narrative around Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare’s genre-bending problem plays – and one without an existing play-within-a-play, or mise en abyme.

Set in puritanical Vienna, Shakespeare’s kinda-sorta comedy follows nun Isabella as she fights to free her brother Claudio from inevitable execution. His crime? Impregnating a woman out of wedlock.

When Isabella confronts judge Angelo, acting as the Duke of Vienna’s deputy in the leader’s absence, he offers Isabella an impossible choice: He’ll spare Claudio if she surrenders her virginity to him.

Shakespeare’s play as written is psychologically thorny and emotionally dense, a tangle of commentaries on moralism and familial duty. You’d think the addition of highly contemporary narrative scaffolding would either confuse or overexplain the nuances of a text teeming with nuance.

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But when House + Body premiered their Measure for Measure at Crow’s Theatre last year, I was gobsmacked. Director and adaptor Christopher Manousos found a way into the text that not only felt dramaturgically rigorous, but emotionally complicated in a way that enhanced rather than muddied Shakespeare’s work.

After a fabulous, too-short short premiere in 2025, Manousos’s production is back this year, its remount officially part of Crow’s subscription season. And thank goodness for that.

As staged by Manousos, we’re not in Vienna, but in a brightly lit recording studio where Soundwave Shakespeare, a fictional audio-drama troupe, is taping Measure for Measure. The director (Sébastien Heins) is domineering and mercurial; his pregnant wife (Katherine Gauthier), an actor, is edgy and suave. His best friend (Jamie Cavanagh) and sound guy (Danté Prince), meanwhile, are champing at the bit to get started – it’s evident we’re in a room of passionate theatre devotees, their nerdiness central to their charm.

When we meet the actor playing Isabella (Beck Lloyd), the energy in the room begins to crackle: She’s a last-minute replacement for another actor, but there’s evident history between her, the director and his wife. Lingering stares thread through the studio; warm handshakes last just a moment too long.

When no one’s looking – except for us, of course – the director allows himself to divert his gaze from his wife’s pregnant belly to the emergency ingenue’s legs, leering as if he might lift the hem of her short black dress through sheer willpower alone. (Andrew Broderick’s costumes are subtle and spot-on, from Lloyd’s elegant leather boots to Cavanagh’s ball cap, so cleverly embroidered with the word “duke.”)

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So goes Measure for Measure. For the most part, Manousos’s adaptation centres Shakespeare’s play: His cuts are minor and yet speed up the plot such that the whole thing clocks in at just over two hours, including an intermission. But that metanarrative’s always there, informing how Isabella capitalizes on her own sexuality under the watchful rule of straitlaced Vienna.

That might all sound fussy and complicated – and in the best ways, it is. But the not-quite-comedy at Measure for Measure’s middle is overwhelmingly well-articulated, with recitations of Shakespeare’s text that arguably rival the sort of work you might find at the Stratford Festival.

Heins and Lloyd, in particular, are electric in their layered relationships with one another – you’re never quite sure where the actor-director and his last-minute hire stand with each other, nor can you tell if Isabella might be the tiniest bit allured by Angelo’s wrenching demands.

Chris Malkowski’s lighting design, too, adds a certain will-they-won’t-they punchiness to the play and its packaging. Malkowski washes the small space in a rainbow of hues: One moment, we’re drowned in sultry red, the contours of the actors’ bodies highly defined against the all-white studio. Seconds later, we’re underwater in a chasm of deep blue, the sexual tension of Manousos’s framing device briefly cast aside.

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Measure for Measure is a roller coaster whose loops you can’t see coming until you’re already upside down, and Malkowski’s thoughtful lighting plot plays a key role in communicating the piece’s unstoppable momentum.

I’d argue Manousos’s Measure for Measure couldn’t play anywhere larger than Crow’s intimate studio. At its most crucial moments, the production reads more like a film than a play, its emotional beats telegraphed by tiny eye movements rather than sweeping gestures. Manousos has a good eye for vectors – his actors navigate the space with confidence and verve – but the piece’s power comes from its sense of voyeurism. Measure for Measure doesn’t feel like watching a story on a stage, but through a peephole; I’m unsure that effect could be replicated quite so forcefully in another space.

Toronto has quite a bit of non-traditional Shakespeare in its near future, from solo productions of Macbeth at Crow’s and Hamlet at Theatre Passe Muraille to Romeo and Juliet at the National Ballet of Canada. Even so, it’s well worth the visit to the city’s east end for Measure for Measure’s well-deserved victory lap: You’ll likely never see a more original take on Shakespeare’s knottiest problem play.