Tono: Five City Tour Across Canada

The Tono cast and crew have now all returned home after a five-city tour across Canada. Over the past few weeks, Red Sky has travelled from Ontario to Québec to the Yukon to Alberta and back! We saw and enjoyed so many corners of this wonderful country and experienced a number of different Canadian cultures and customs along the way.

The tour started with a bang at the showcase in the country’s capital for Canada’s national network of performing arts, CAPACOA. At this Ottawa showcase, Red Sky performed an excerpt of Tono to a very appreciative crowd of presenters, who greeted us with a standing ovation for our 15-minute excerpt.

After a few more days of rehearsal back in Toronto and a hometown show at the Betty Oliphant Theatre in Toronto, we headed off to Québec for a brief stay in Montréal, to perform at Place des Arts. We even managed to practice a bit of French and enjoy some Montréal nightlife, as we were staying very near St. Catherine in the heart of the city. The Montreal Gazette gave us a very favourable review, “Fascinating Tono is a polished work by eloquent artists.”

Then it was off to enjoy some proper Canadian winter in Whitehorse. The temperatures may have been chilly, but the audiences were warm and welcoming at the beautiful Yukon Arts Centre. Standing ovations are always a pleasure to receive and a testament to our work. We really enjoyed the atmosphere of Whitehorse, with it’s small-town Klondike charm and mountain views; a good warm-up to the spectacular vistas that greeted us next in Banff.

And, we couldn’t have asked for a better way to end the tour. As Tono was developed in Banff, it was like a homecoming for many of the artists; a familiar place with an intimate theatre, wonderful crew and warm audiences for our final two shows. Not to mention the Chinook that greeted us with clear, crisp skies, bright sun and temperatures much warmer than the -30 degrees of the week before!

Now it is time to have a week rest and enjoy the holidays before starting up again with our new production of The Great Mountain in January!