A place for weird dreams
The Staircase Theatre and Café has been both a critical indie arts venue and a home for artists across Hamilton for 28 years. It’s a place where creatives of all kinds can take risks.
“There’s a weirdness here.”
I’m nestled inside the brownstone interior of Hamilton’s Staircase Theatre and Café, sitting with director of event management Matthew Surina. Confronted by a dizzying assortment of show posters in the lobby, it’s hard not to agree.
Yet, sitting on an unassuming corner of one of the city’s most bustling thoroughfares, you’d be forgiven if you had no idea it was there. Such is the strange secret identity of what has become one of this city’s most treasured if oft-overlooked performance spaces. It’s all part of the charm that is the Staircase, a hidden gem which has been attracting audiences to local artists and their eclectic work for nearly three decades.
Long before I moved to Hamilton, I knew of the Staircase. A darling of the indie arts scene, the venue has played host to a literal feast of cultural events, the kind that have been instrumental to keeping the arts alive and thriving in Steeltown. Indeed, almost every artist working in Hamilton today – including yours truly – can point to being part of some event or other hosted by or taking place at the Staircase. It’s baked into the collective grassroots identity of the city.
“It’s very off the beaten path,” says Surina. “We’re not quite downtown, and not quite Westdale. But you come in here, and you’re going to see a show that you might not know much about. A lot of the acts we book, we try to keep things affordable enough so audiences can take chances.” For Surina, who runs daily operations and programming for the Staircase, this is the essence of keeping the venue alive. “That’s the biggest thing I want to keep doing here: allow people to just have a weird dream.”
You walk in the door, after climbing a small set of chiseled granite steps, and the wrought iron spiral staircase winds itself towards an almost cavernous roof. The spacious interior belies the hustle and bustle that has come to characterize the space on a performance night. Be it a comedy set, a cult film screening, a book launch, a wedding or the annual Fringe Festival, the Staircase has become Hamilton’s go-to grassroots arts venue of choice.
A passionate advocate for the role that the Staircase plays in the city’s arts scene, Surina first connected with the venue as part of the many improv workshops and events that have run out of its spaces for years. “I ran a show here called Hammer Night Live in 2012. It was a hybrid comedy / talk show for seven years.” Now that he’s running the place, Surina feels a bit of an obligation to keep the venue’s unique profile alive within the community. “It’s always been a building that’s been very important to me. But now, as we’re losing venues left and right in the city, it’s even more vital.”
A multi-faceted building, with a wide variety of performance and event spaces, the Staircase can house multiple events at the same time. “We have a building that can pretty much house anywhere between 50 to 75 people per show,” says Surina. In addition to the first floor’s black box space, used for both live theatre and film screenings, the Staircase boasts the third floor Bright Room and a smaller studio in the basement. Next door, there’s the Elaine May space, which was added in the mid-2010s and now serves as a companion space for improv and theatre workshops.
Though the versatility is certainly a selling point, Surina contends that it’s only part of the building’s charm. “It just has this characteristic vibe to it,” he says. “We’d have much more of an uphill battle if it was just a black box theatre attached to a bar. You don’t have to see a show to appreciate this place, and I think that’s kind of what we’re trying to accomplish is getting this place populated. If you’re not here to see a show, you grab a drink with a friend.”
Sitting across from Surina, with the sun streaming in through the windows, there’s a sense that the Staircase is coming alive again. This is all the more miraculous when you consider that the building has changed hands, and was threatened with permanent closure, twice in the last four years. Given the loss of several other prominent local indie arts venues in the last decade – Artword Artbar, This Ain’t Hollywood, and the Pearl Company – the continued survival of the Staircase would seem to be a continuing struggle.
Surina admits that shrinking audiences and funding cuts across the arts sector have impacted the venue (like many others). But he’s quick to say how he tries his best to accommodate such challenges for those artists looking for space. “Has it bit me in the butt a couple times? Sure. But if it means people are taking more chances and following their passions, I’m all for it. You have to have that in the arts with the way the economy is. You have to take a chance. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s the beauty of it.”
Surina is the latest in a long line of stewards who have overseen the running of the Staircase, starting with its foundation by longtime Hamilton improviser Hugh MacLeod and his partner Kathy Garneau. “We’d moved from Vancouver to Hamilton in 1994,” says MacLeod, “after having done improv comedy at Vancouver Theatresports League for years. There was no improv comedy in Hamilton around that time. Even though Hamilton had a rich improv comedy history in the past. From a Vancouver perspective, Hamilton building prices were very low, but rents were very high. Kathy and I decided that buying and renovating a space for community-driven comedy arts was really the only way to get improv happening in Hamilton in the mid-’90s.”
MacLeod also received a boost from family to get the project off the ground. “Our mom, Elaine May MacLeod, gave us the seed money for the renovations. She was very ill at the time but she still managed to do a bit of work on the building before passing away. She knew the benefits of improv comedy and wanted to see her impending inheritance concretely make the world a better place. It’s ironic that it was the generosity of a woman from Vancouver that seeded the Staircase and all that came from it.”
MacLeod is upfront about the challenges he faced in starting up the Staircase. “Running an event space is nothing but hurdles,” he asserts. “The City was overtly hostile to the project and did everything it could to not let it start. This is a crucial point that informed a lot of the Staircase’s point of view.” MacLeod recalls a tangle of zoning issues rooted in the venue’s location that contributed to the challenges. To win over City council, MacLeod “enlisted improv comedy contacts from coast to coast to email the councillors in support of the project.” In the meantime, he and Garneau used the venue to teach comedy workshops, which helped to put it on the map.
One local performer who recalls those early years is Crystal Jonasson. “When I first started attending the improv workshops, it wasn’t yet a completed venue and there was still active construction. At times, there was no central heating or other amenities. Sometimes before the workshop we would show up and also drywall or do whatever current renovations we’re going on. Although I have a lot of memories of the theatre as a polished space, I think some of my dearest memories are of when it was really just becoming.”
For Jonasson, much of the magic of the Staircase seems rooted in its power to draw together disparate elements of the arts scene at community events. “There was an ongoing karaoke night every Friday,” she recalls, “which brought members of the arts community together even when they weren’t doing a show. I know it was a great way to strengthen the social network of theatre and, on top of that, it was just a really good time.”
Community and family connections are an important part of the weirdness factor of the venue. Peter and Kimberley Jonasson, Crystal’s father and stepmother, met as active members of the Staircase improv team in the 2000s. For them, the Staircase represents something much more than simply another theatre venue. “I’ve attended birthday celebrations, baby showers, and weddings at the Staircase. In fact,” recalls Kimberley Jonasson, “my own wedding was at the Staircase, as was my mother’s celebration of life in the café area.”
She points out that the sheer diversity of the productions at the Staircase are essential to its unique character. “Actors got to perform their first one-person shows; singers and musicians made their start at open mic nights; poets and spoken word artists honed their crafts; artists hung their paintings; yoga gurus, karate teachers, and dance instructors were all able to earn their livings there. I think when a venue has been so instrumental in giving a start to so many creative and talented people, it’s a hard place to forget.”
Indeed, since the mid-2000s, the Staircase as a community hub has often overshadowed its profile as an arts centre. Private parties and weddings bumped up against role-playing games and trivia nights alongside karaoke and the weekly improv workshops. And, of course, the annual Halloween galas and New Years Eve parties were epic. During this influential period, daily oversight and management of the Staircase was handed to Colette Kendell, herself a local veteran of the Canadian theatre and comedy scene.
Kendall would come to preside over the Staircase during this time, when rapid artistic growth and an influx of new talent was emerging in Hamilton, marking a renaissance for the venue that mirrored the rest of the city’s cultural revival. As more and more artists from Toronto and Vancouver settled in Hamilton, a myriad of companies and a long list of new and local creatives came to use the space, adding to its allure as a credible and affordable alternative performance space.
Aaron Joel Craig, of Same Boat Theatre, is one of the many drawn to the Staircase during this period. He says the venue “made me curious about what making new work in Hamilton could look like – it gave us a place to experiment.”
For Craig, the ability to take risks is the key to the Staircase’s legacy. “It’s a landing place,” he says, “for folks to try new things, and a home for artists to do work in a place that feels comfortable and knowable, without feeling low rent.” He adds that the venue has “been able to evolve with the changing city, while maintaining its working class accessible identity,” something that leads to “an intersection of a lot of creative worlds in Hamilton, a city where there aren’t a lot of opportunities to overlap with other creatives.”
In that vein, Nathan Fleet, the executive director of the Hamilton Film Festival, calls the Staircase a true arts incubator, responsible for keeping his and many other arts festivals alive. “The festival started there and now it’s going into its 19th year and is a Top 100 festival out of over 10,000 such events and is recognized worldwide.” As an early filmmaker, Fleet often had to make the trek to Toronto but when he learned of the Staircase, and the venue’s large projector and screen, “I planted myself there and started volunteering at their film festival events.”
Fleet and Craig’s experiences echo that of so many other artists as well as numerous arts organizations. Some of these, like the Black Box Fire Theatre Company and the HamilTEN Theatre Festival have gone or are on hiatus. But others, like the LitLive Reading Series, the Hamilton Fringe Festival, and Hamilton Theatre Project have continued producing events at the Staircase. And this may be an essential part of the Staircase’s role within the city: giving a piece of real estate to smaller arts organizations when they need it without breaking the bank.
Franny McCabe-Bennett, managing director of the Hamilton Fringe, says when she joined the Fringe team in 2019, the Staircase was already an essential element of the festival. The result of this long-held partnership has been an expectation – borne out by ticket sales year after year – that the venue often sells out. “Hamiltonians know that when it’s Fringe season, you head over to the Staircase and there will be something to see, something to eat, and someone to chat with. We’ve been lucky to continue to build that relationship and prove those Hamiltonians right year after year.”
Playwright and performer Ryan Sero also cites the importance of the Staircase working in concert with professional organizations like the Fringe as key to raising the venue’s profile. “When it became #TeamStaircase at the Fringe; things seemed to explode all around the community. Multiple spaces were in-use and it was tough to book it with less than five months’ notice. This increase meant a slightly easier time to attract audiences all year round.” That, in addition to the “bright and welcoming look” of the venue “compared to other venues in operation at that time,” meant the appeal of the Staircase was clear.
Despite pandemic hiccups, the venue seems more popular than ever. Just ask Amber Mills, artistic producer at Hamilton Theatre Project. In 2020, her company produced a show in the Bright Room upstairs. After a four-year break, her company returned this past spring with Nick Payne’s award-winning play Constellations. In many ways, her company’s mission of “intimate storytelling for the big city that feels like a small town” feels like an apt description for the venue.
“There are so few affordable spaces in Hamilton,” says Mills. “Knowing I could access the Staircase on my meagre budget was one of the things that allowed me to move forward with producing work here.”
Mills sees the Staircase as one of the city’s best hubs for the arts, but she also thinks the venue has to change if it’s to prosper in the future. “I hope it can adapt and grow alongside the city,” she says, “while continuing to be an affordable space for indie companies like mine. It would be wonderful if the café/bar developed into a space that people chose to come to, even without a show attached, so the energy of the space can continue.”
Staying an affordable space for artists, while holding on to the gritty urban weirdness factor that started it all, is exactly what Surina plans to keep doing at the Staircase. “We’re finding ways to update the place without losing its charm and character. It’s a tough tightrope to walk because you have to be realistic. But if we can take a chance on something, we will. Some things will stick and some things won’t. But that’s the arts.”
