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Holden Players

Stock company, founded as the Good Companions in the summer resort town of Bala in the Muskoka region of Ontario by John Porter Holden in 1934. After 1937, it was called the John Holden Players. The 1934 season was mounted at the Bala Town Hall, using paper scenery and tin cans for footlights, with four performances at the nearby Gravenhurst Opera House. The repertoire included a satirical review, So This is Canada by W.S. Atkinson, and City Limits by Holden. In the winter, the company relocated to the Margaret Eaton Hall in Toronto. Company members in the 1930s included Robert Christie.

By 1937, the Players routinely played in Bala in the summer, and at the Dominion Theatre in Winnipeg in the winter, with a season of 27 plays. They rehearsed in the ballroom in the Fort Garry Court Hotel, since the theatre was only partially heated until time for an audience.

John Holden began a thirty-week season at the Dominion Theatre in 1939 with a production of Our Town which had opened at the Henry Miller theatre in New York earlier in 1939. Holden played the Stage Manager and directed the cast from NYC and from Canada, including Isobel Price, Ev Staples, Gordon Tanner, Betty Kelly, Leonard Patrick and William Needles.

Business at the beginning of World War II was uncertain. Holden tried every type of play – tragedy, comedy, farce : “Up in Mabel’s Room,” “Getting Gertie’s Garter,” “Captain Applejack”. On New Year’s Day of 1939, he announced that the company would close in Winnipeg and return to Toronto. It produced its final season in 1941.

Sources: William Needles; Judith Rudakoff. “Holden, John Porter,” Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, Eds. Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989.

Last updated 2011-03-09