The Princess Show
The Princess Show is genre-bending theatrical work in a form that is equal parts stage play, drag show, and anime cartoon. Two live actors tell the story of Princess Edward and her beloved Abel in their quest to surmount depression and shame in a dystopian fantasy world. Princess Edward’s battle with her inner demons is made literal in this fable in which a strange and soothing beast kidnaps her lover Abel and holds him in a disconnected trance. Will Princess give in to the beast and spiral downward into shame and self loathing or will she rise to the challenge of radical self love? Initially developed with Theatre Outre, the show was further developed and made its Nova Scotia debut at the 2016 Halifax Fringe Festival and has since played in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Lethbridge, Halifax, and Fredericton. A special live digital production was created for the NAC’s CanadaPerforms program.
From the 2021 Masterworks jury:
“The Princess Show is a powerful realization of contemporary Nova Scotian identity. It holds an important space for queerness and invites audiences to consider different ways of being.”
Karen Gross is a queer Nova Scotian theatre producer. She spent more than five years as the
Managing Producer of 2b theatre company, producing Masterworks Winner Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story and Masterworks Finalists What A Young Wife Ought to Know and When it Rains. She is also the Creative Producer with the Accidental Mechanics Group, where she has produced Let’s Not Beat Each Other to Death (touring to the PuSh Festival in Vancouver, Festival TransAmériques in Montréal, SummerWorks Performance Festival in Toronto, and Mayfest in Bristol UK). She is currently developing a national project entitled The Unfamiliar Everything in collaboration with The Theatre Centre and artists including Rae Spoon, Cris Derksen, Sammy Chien, and Tanya Davis. She has served as a peer juror with Arts Nova Scotia and the Canada Council for the Arts and regularly works with numerous arts organizations and individual artists as a consultant with Strategic Arts Management.
