Tracy Dawson calls it “a big adventure” to be acting in her own work, Them & Us, the first show Theatre Passe Muraille is presenting in 2009, though she also admits to having a few anxieties. “We were working a scene,” she explains between rehearsals, “and you have to be present, but my brain pulled out. It sucks, it’s not a good feeling… but then I have to forgive myself and move on. It’s hard. That’s the challenge of doing this. Do I want it any other way? No, it’s fantastic!”

If the thought of facing a dready post-Christmas Toronto makes you want to run off and join the circus, you might just get your wish. The National Circus School is holding an audition tour. With stops in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, the school is accepting applications for auditions until midnight, January 16th. Auditions begin in February.

The myth of The Princess and the Pea gets a re-telling this holiday season, as the award-winning troupe Puppetmongers brings its production of Bed & Breakfast to the Tarragon Theatre, December 20th to January 1st. Performed by brother-sister team Ann and David Powell, Bed and Breakfast is set in an Edwardian-style dollhouse that is peopled with miniscule people. Last performed in winter 2004-5 and directed by Pea Green Theatre’s co-Artistic Director Sue Miner, the piece tells the tale of Prince Cuthbert and the displeased Queen Daphne.

Money, conscience, family, and class figure prominently in Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1919 play The Miracle of Saint Antony. Perhaps best-known for writing Pelleas et Melisande (which composer Claude Debussy later turned into an opera) and his 1908 children’s play The Blue Bird, Maeterlinck was a part of the burgeoning Symbolist movement of the late 19th/early 20th century. Based on his avid readings of the works of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, his ideas about so-called “static drama” were formed; it places the responsibilities of the artist away from expressing human emotion, and toward uncontrollable outside forces. And so it makes sense that The Miracle of Saint Antony has as its premise the actual saint, Antony of Padua, coming to a French household to revive a recently-deceased woman, much to the chagrin of her two grasping nephews. The work is rife with rich allusions to sexism, racism, and most particularly, class warfare. Considering the nature of our economic times, there might be no better time for producing such a work.