The Capitol Theatre Port Hope is presenting the world premiere production of Rez Gas by Cale Crowe and Genevieve Adam. Cale Crowe is an indie singer-songwriter, and the production is his first foray into theatre.
The score is infused with hip-hop, and orchestrated by Jeff Newberry, whose credits include the Mirvish production of The Lion King.
The Story is simple. Destin left his home reservation years ago to follow his musical muse, and start a career singing on stage. But one day, he finds himself back in his home town via unexpected car troubles. He ends up at a diner called Wide Wigwam, where he reconnects with many of the people he left behind.
Those people remind him of his past, and of a place in his community that still waits for him.
Ojibwe singer-songwriter, and now playwright, Cale Crowe grew up in the Alderville First Nation, a small community of less than 1,000 people.
We caught up with Crowe to talk about the musical.
Cale Crowe: The Interview
“I’ve been a singer-songwriter professionally […] since 2013,” Crowe says. “That’s when I officially dropped out of school to play music,” he adds.
“My own mother will give me grief if I don’t mention that I went back to school at some point.”
As a point of fact, he’s a graduate of the Music Business Management program at Oshawa’s Durham College.
“In September it will be 12 years.”
That has typically included a busy schedule of playing in festivals, bars, and other music venues in the region. Musical theatre wasn’t in his sight lines.
“I say all the time that it was out of my wheelhouse,” he acknowledges. Still, he was no stranger to musical theatre. “I did musical theatre when I was in high school as an actor,” he says. That extended to taking roles in community theatre productions after high school.
It was a chance meeting that led him down the road to a musical.
“It wasn’t honestly until I met Rob that I even considered doing something theatrical again,” Cale says. “I definitely had choice words for what I thought of his idea.”
Rob Kempson is Artistic Director of the Capitol Theatre. Kempson is a seasoned director, writer, and educator who’s worked with multiple theatre companies over his career, including Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille.
“He saw something in me that was in one of my blind spots,” Crowe says.
Creating A Musical
Cale had written music of his own to sing, of course, but creating songs and music for a theatrical production enlarges the role.
“That was one of the bigger challenges, because I have only ever written from a first person perspective,” Crowe says.
That includes writing from the perspective of fictional characters who weren’t at all similar to him. The songs, like the dialogue, has to maintain a conversation, the narrative of the story, and create the perspectives and plot points that are right for the story.
He likens it to “designing your own game of table tennis”.
“My co-writer Genevieve was writing maybe four or five lines of dialogue that would kick off a song,” he explains.
Genevieve Adams is a graduate of the George Brown Theatre School in Toronto and holds an MFA from the East15 Acting School. As an actress, she recently appeared on Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia, and has been on other popular TV shows such as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and The Handmaid’s Tale.
As a playwright, she’s created several productions, including the New France trilogy of Dark Heart, Heartless, and Deceitful Above All Things. She won a 2025 ACTRA for Outstanding Performance for her work in the role of Anne in her own play Deceitful Above All Things (Favour The Brave Collective and Thought For Food Productions), currently available online via Stratford At Home.
He describes a process where he’d read through the dialogue several times, getting ideas for the music, where the rise and fall in tension should be, and then restructuring her lines into a rhyming scheme.
“In a very literal meat and potatoes sense, that was the process.”
There are also the in-between bits to consider, where one song or scene ends and before another begins. Blocking the play was another element to add to the complexities he had to take into account.
“One of the things that I didn’t consider when we started writing the songs [was], these characters are going to have to be visually dynamic — moving around on the stage.”
Putting It On Stage
When the play was reading for a read through, Kempson sent out feelers through his theatre network.
“When we did a reading of this show back in 2023, he already had a list of people,” Crowe says. A couple of those interested parties are still involved in 2025. “They didn’t miss a beat, they embodied the characters so well.”
The reading fine tuned the play, including characterization.
The story itself, while not autobiographical, is based on Crowe’s experiences.
“Very, very loosely,” he says. The story and concept were the result of collaborating with Genevieve. “I’m currently on the opposite end of a transitional period in my own life.”
Crowe moved back to the Alderville First Nation in 2022 when his son was born. “It was kind of a moment of taking a step back,” he says.
That process continues with the show. “It has been this really great opportunity to self reflect and self examine.”
It’s been transformational, and while the show hasn’t hit the stage yet, he’s thinking of continuing his career with a dual focus on music and theatre.
“When we did our workshop in Toronto back in the winter, I would sit with the actors and Rob and Jeff Newberry, our music director — I’d sit with them at lunch, and the actors would ask me, you’ve definitely caught the bug — and I think I have,” he says.
He’s got a few ideas for future stories to pursue, with and without music. “Creating something for stage, I’ve had quite a few ideas floating around,” he says. “I think it’s entirely possible.”
Like his work as a singer-songwriter, theatre is a way of trying to get your message across.
“In the process of creating this show, whatever messages you’re trying to convey, or questions you want to ask your audience, theatre is this intersection of show and tell,” he says.
The Capitol Theatre as a venue, with a capacity of just over 350 people, creates an intimate theatrical experience. “I don’t know that I would ask for a bigger room for that ever,” Crowe says. He wants to be able to see people connecting directly with the actors on stage. “You feel it in the room.”
There are intense moments on stage, along with the lighter ones.
“There are some pretty heavy arguments that happen in this story,” Cale says. “I’m going to feel it in my chest.”
It’s the skill of the actors to bring those to life.
“There’s something visceral to me with being in the same room as the actors. It’s the difference between going to see Phantom of the Opera and going to your local Cineplex and seeing the latest superhero movie,” he says. “You can get something of substance that is going to nourish you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or you can go to the theatre and get your junk food fix.”
The Audience
Cale isn’t looking to give his audience any pat answers to those larger questions about reconciling with the past.
“With this show, I think, my goal when we started writing it was that I didn’t want to give my audience the impression that I had any particular answer to any of the questions asked in the [show],” he explains. “What I think I want this show to represent is for the audience to ask transitional questions to themselves.”
Rez Gas leaves some questions open ended, and up for interpretation.
“What I would love is for audiences to walk away with is an internal sense of how it pertains to them, and to see parallels in their own lives — whether they’re Indigenous or not,” he adds. “I want my characters and my story to be seen in their own lives.”
As he points out, we’ve all tried to leave some of the past behind at some point in our lives.
“No matter what life you’ve lived, there is always going to be something unresolved that you’ve left, over your shoulder,” he says.
“We all have work to do with ourselves and our communities.”
Performances & Details
Rez Gas features Vinnie Alberto, Dillan Meighan-Chiblow and John Wamsley as a trio of old friends The ensemble also features Michelle Bardach, Jonathan Fisher, Nicole Joy-Fraser, and Emma Rudy. The piece is directed by Herbie Barnes. Orchestrations and Music Supervision by Jeff Newberry, with a band led by Music Director Sarah Richardson, and featuring Kia Rose, Emry Tupper, and David Schotzko.
The Rez Gas creative team also includes set designer Jung-Hye Kim, costume designer Yolonda Skelton, lighting designer Jareth Li, sound designer Emily C Porter, stage manager Kat Chin and assistant stage manager Ada Aguilar, choreographer Monica Dotter, and copyist Haneul Yi.
Along with regular dates, there are several special performances throughout the run:
- Pay-What-You-Can Preview: August 22
- Talk Back Thursday: August 28, September 4
- Indigenous Community Night: August 29
- Relaxed Performance: August 31
The Capitol Theatre also offers general assistance, accessible parking, wheelchair and low mobility access and seating, washroom accessibility, and hearing assistance devices. Learn more about accessibility here.
- Find tickets and other show details [HERE]
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