After the Canadian Stage was highjacked by the Board of Directors, with the cowardly connivance of Bill Glassco, Bob Baker was installed as the Artistic Director. Bob is a decent director, in fact I had hired him to direct in my 1989-90 season. But as a human being he is creep. Easily capable of knifing a fellow director in the back. The new administration cobbled together a financially disastrous 1990-91 season after I was ousted. In the summer of 1996, Bob Baker and his General Manager, Marty Bragg gave a puff-piece year -end interview to the Toronto Life magazine. (September 1996 issue.) In the interview they played fast and loose with the facts behind the highjacking and blamed me for the financial deficit of the Canadian Stage that had been largely the result of Bill Glassco’s seasons, exacerbated by the disastrous, totally stupid, decision to highjack the theatre and cancel my planned season. I sued Toronto Life Magazine for libel and won enough to live on for 6 months. Which was lucky, as times were hard and I was never sure where I was going to be able find the money to pay my kids’ their support payments. In addition to the cash, the magazine was forced to print a full apology to me and publish my rebuttal. As you can see if you read the Toronto Life columns and letters, putting our own personal investment into the project, we produced one of the plays from that cancelled season, Douglas Rodger’s, How Could You Mrs Dick? at the Tivoli in Hamilton and then brought it to the Wintergarden Theatre in Toronto. It sold over 25,000 single tickets. More single tickets than the entire cobbled together season at Canadian Stage! Without a single $$ in government subsidy we more than broke even on the production. Doug says now he was able to pay off the mortgage on his house thanks to the Tivoli revenue.

But the real disaster that resulted from the highjacking was that the Canadian Stage Theatre lost its raison d’être. Without a sustaining vision it and was doomed to slowly shrink into irrelevancy. Soulpepper Theatre, to its credit, ended up as the major theatre company in Toronto. Now Crow’s Theatre has taken up that mantle. If Canadian Stage had not had the outdoor amphitheatre I created, it would long ago have disappeared. The board had tried, with the start-up of the new company running a deficit, to kill the High Park Shakespeare as a cost-saving measure. How ironic, because it was my successful battle to keep the outdoor summer Shakespeare in High Park alive that was one of the main issues that alienated me from the Board. Below you can read my rebuttal Toronto Life was forced to print as part of their settlement with me. Makes for fun reading.