THEATRE REVIEW

FEBRUARY 2026 | Volume 260

 

Faly Mevamanana’s new play, in which she herself stars, satirizes—as the title suggests—the competitive baking shows so popular on TV.

Jasmine Chen’s Ruby Slippers Theatre production is delightful for the most part, clever and amusing with a serious undertone that creeps up on us nicely, as laughs slowly turn to cringes. Its couple of key flaws are classic new play issues that can be ironed out in subsequent stagings.

Mevamanana plays Grace, a young woman eager, no, desperate to qualify for The Baking Show, Canada, and then to win the competition. Two other actors, Sharon Crandall and Andy Marie, play all the other characters: Crandall the show’s producer and host, and an older woman contestant named Trisha; Marie plays Grace’s two primary competitors,a young woman (Betty )and a German guy.

Over the course of eight days the contestants are required to bake specific items, then are judged and ranked, and the losers gradually eliminated. The play’s repetitious structure—bake, get judged, react, repeat—becomes wearisome even though the recipes are different, as are the reactions. Grace’s desperation zigs and zags towards the ending rather than builds, so certain episodes feel anticlimactic.

Nevertheless, Mevamanana’s Grace is mostly a charmer. Even when she’s a cheating charmer she worries about the ethics of her behaviour until she doesn’t anymore. And her competitors’ ethics are equally ambiguous. Crandall and Marie have many witty turns playing their different characters, sometimes even drawing applause. Director Chen lets them also go over the top into cartoonland caricature a little too often.

Along with the comic portrayals and competitions, some clever real-time video work by Apprentice Stage Manager Anna Brew draws big laughs as her close-ups of Grace’s expressive face are projected above the stage. Also on that screen an uncredited male actor judges the contestants’ baking.

Some of the funniest moments take place in Grace’s recollections, expressed through voiceover conversations between her as a kid, aspiring to bake and to please her father, and the father who politely discourages and disparages her time after time. These are shockingly funny until we realize how unfunny they really are,given the damage they’ve done to Grace. We understand the source of her desperation to succeed.

This play grew out of Ruby Slippers’ annual Advance Theatre Festival in which new plays by artists of colour are developed and workshopped. One of those plays each year gets a fully staged production. The Baking Show Show proves itself a winning recipe.

 

 

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