The Master Plan at Theatre Aquarius is a bombshell

This political satire about the boondoggle on the Toronto waterfront hums on every level. It’s funny, thought-provoking, memorable and asks important questions.

The Master Plan, now on stage at Theatre Aquarius, is smart, fast-paced, thought-provoking and surprising.

It’s also funny, poignant and even sad – nothing that would be remotely expected in a play about an ambitious waterfront development project that went wildly off the rails. In fact, this play is like nothing you’ve likely seen before, from its subject matter to its staging to its delivery of a story that leaves you pondering whether the outcome was the right one or the wrong one.

A co-production with Crow’s Theatre in Toronto, The Master Plan is a masterful bombshell that truly breaks ground. The real-life story is messy but this show is anything but. It’s slick, entertaining and important at the same time.

The Master Plan is based on Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, a national bestselling book by Globe and Mail journalist Josh O’Kane that examines the 2020 implosion of a plan to build a digitally driven city of the future at Quayside. On this 12 acres of Toronto waterfront driverless cars and robotic delivery would rule, sidewalks shrink or expand depending on need, residents wouldn’t have to take out their trash, electricity is delivered by ethernet, and pedestrians are automatically shielded from rain or snow.

But negotiations between Google’s Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto go to hell in a microchip amid vast cultural differences (brash U.S. vs. reserved Canada and technology disruptor vs. bureaucracy), growing public distrust of the motives of a company built on gathering and selling private data, and enormous, almost farcical, bungling of the project that was born on the Google side out of company founder Larry Page’s sci-fi obsessions with domed cities and flying cars.

Quayside’s many critics said the vision was for Toronto’s waterfront to become surveillance capitalism’s real-world Petri dish. Advocates said the solutions developed for this neighbourhood could transform cities around the world by doing something to tackle the twin crises of housing affordability and climate change.

Who’s right? The Master Plan doesn’t pretend to answer that.

Was this rightly doomed to fail from the very beginning or – if done with any modicum of effectiveness – could it have pushed innovation at a city scale that has never been seen before?

We are reminded several times that this is a work of fiction. There is no doubt timelines have been hugely compressed and backroom dialogue and clashes have been ramped up for dramatic and comedic effect. But it is based on a deeply researched work of non-fiction.

There is a lot to get through here in two hours, so you will have to listen carefully to plenty of rapid-fire information that at times feels a bit too granular and bureaucratic.

But that is exactly what makes this play so unique. This is a real-life story, featuring the major players (including caricatures of Justin Trudeau, Kathleen Wynne, John Tory and Google co-founder Larry Page), at the heart vision for a revolutionary redevelopment of land on Lake Ontario.

RELATED: The Master Plan is crackling and compelling theatre about Toronto scandal

WATCH THE TRAILER HERE

The performances of the cast of seven, who each take on multiple roles, are flawless.

Everyone shines here but standouts are Philippa Domville as Waterfront Toronto executive Meg Davis, who breaks out of her buttoned down persona to deliver an epic meltdown that is both hilarious and compelling, and Mike Shara (Dan Doctoroff), who fully embodies a self-satisfied blowhard and delivers many of the play’s funniest lines.

Shara is an Aquarius veteran, including appearing in A Few Good Men, Spider’s Web, and Boeing and Boeing. Domville appeared in The Gig last year.

The Master Plan made its world premiere in September 2023 at Crow’s Theatre. Some of the original cast is back in the Aquarius production, including Christopher Allen (Cam Malagaam), Ben Carlson (Will Fleisig), Domville and Shara.

Joining them for the Aquarius run under director Chris Abraham are Rose Napoli (Kristina Verner), Tanja Jacobs (Helen Burstyn), and The Master Plan playwright Michael Healey, who won a 2024 Dora Mavor Award for best new play.

A veteran actor, Healey is onstage here as a narrator in the form of a tree. The story of an embattled Norway maple is used as a clever microcosm of a central theme of The Master Plan.

In another stroke of brilliance, Abraham, artistic director at Crow’s, makes an appearance at the show’s opening – in avatar form – that effectively but humorously gets the audience thinking about the privacy dilemmas that govern modern life and underpin this play.   

Fittingly, technology plays a starring storytelling role here. A four-sided scoreboard-style set of suspended connected screens dominates the stage, delivering critical pieces of information and live video streamed from onstage cameras.

Those cameras symbolize the cameras and sensors that would have dotted the landscape in Sidewalk Labs’ vision for a utopia based on data.

Audience members sit on three sides of the stage, recreating the theatre-in-the-round setup of Crow’s. Theatre-goers then serve as the audience at press conferences, board meetings, city council meetings and federal hearings.

But mostly, they are flies on the wall to backroom dealings in which Sidewalk Lab’s CEO Dan Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New York City, tries to run roughshod over initially passive and polite Canadian bureaucrats.

He’s arrogant, prone to crude and loud outbursts, and doesn’t much care for how things are done in Toronto. But it’s hard not to sympathize with his frustration with a system designed to move at a snail’s pace.

“How do you people ever get anything done here?!” screams a man used to making things happen. (I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought about Hamilton’s epic odyssey with LRT at that moment.)

As the Quayside lands sit untouched today, The Master Plan raises a critical question: can companies intent on maximizing profits really work with change-phobic governments to address the most critical problems of today’s world?

The Master Plan is satire at its best. It cuts to the bone of both sides in this debacle while still managing to create interesting characters the audience comes to sympathize with, and even care about.

There are numerous satisfying digs at Toronto that land perfectly with a Hamilton audience. As with all good satire, the laughs prick at truths.

“This is a reminder that Toronto has not, not once, ever been cool about anything,” says Waterfront Toronto CEO Will Fleisig.

“Toronto is really, really good at killing major projects. It’s like our superpower,” says a Toronto fire chief.

When Malagaam, an amalgam of more than 30 young engineers, designers and developers at Sidewalk Labs, delivers a poignant speech after learning the deal is dead, he starts by acknowledging the company is led by “clowns.”

“But NIMBYism is a way of life here. It’s bigger than ice hockey. You could have told us.”

The Master Plan hums on every level. You’ll laugh out loud, you’ll squirm, you’ll ponder the future of our cities and you’ll question just how evil Google and other giant tech companies have become.

It’s important theatre and numerous people mingling after the official opening night performance said they will return to take it in again. There’s no finer compliment.

The Master Plan runs until Nov. 16. Make plans to go see it.