As she tells it, Laurie Steven was sitting in Nate’s Deli 25 years ago this year when she decided to start a theatre company. Fresh from Toronto, the trained director was living through a round of “fairly massive budget cuts across the country.” With everything around her being slashed and burnt, Steven realized, “If I wanted to work in theatre, I’d have to found a company.”

After a two-year hiatus from summer performance in the verdant Strathcona Park, Odyssey Theatre returns to its bread and butter: theatre under the stars. This year the company presents They All Do It, a commissioned work from local playwright Jan Irwin. Loosely based on the opera Cosi fan tutte, the company aims to straddle the divide between the old-fashioned classical opera and contemporary theatre with a genre-mixing, intellectually interesting show. READ MORE