Brampton Artist Profile: Allison Edwards-Crewe, Actor

Allison Edwards-Crewe has been singing and acting from a young age, at Christ Church Brampton and Beatty Fleming. She went on to study voice, participating in numerous Peel Music Festivals, and singing at Caribram's Caribbean Pavilion. During her time at St. Augustine S.S. she continued to surround herself with the arts, playing trumpet, singing in the choir, and performing in their annual plays and musicals. Her first two roles were Grace in Annie and Audrey in Little Shoppe of Horrors. Allison started her postsecondary training in dance, drama, and music in the prestigious Musical Theatre Performance Program at Sheridan College. Graduating early, Allison had the pleasure of starting her professional career at the historic Grand Theatre in London playing a lead in Dreamgirls Since then, she has been traveling across Canada performing on stage and screen. Her selected credits include: Theatre: Much Ado About Nothing, Les Belle-Soeurs, Little Women, All’s Well That Ends Well (Stratford Festival), Serving Elizabeth (Western Canada Theatre); The Color Purple (Citadel Theatre & Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); School Girls; Or the African Mean Girls Play (Obsidian & Nightwood Theatre); How Black Mothers Say I Love You (Factory Theatre); All Shook Up (The Globe Theatre); Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley (Citadel); Girls Like That (Tarragon Theatre); Da’ Kink in My Hair (Theatre Calgary, National Arts Centre); Dreamgirls (Grand Theatre). Film/TV: The Handmaid’s Tale (MGM/Hulu), Baby in a Manger (BrainPower), Surviving Evil (Cineflix), Black Actress (JungleWild) Audio Dramas: Liming (Expect Theaatre/CBC), Every Second of Every Day (Factory Theatre) Social Media: Insta: @alllisonec Twitter: @allisonecrewe. Right now you can watch All’s Well That Ends Well on Stratfest at Home, and see her in Season 4 of Handmaid's Tale on Hulu.

We interviewed Allison for this Teacher Resource Package and asked her to say a few words about her experience with Shakespeare. Here are a few quotes from that discussion

On Shakespeare’s use of language… “I’ve been looking up words from the [Shakespeare] shows I'm doing now, and it’s so interesting how many words in the English language we don’t use. We have all this slang, it’s the easiest way to get our point across. But there is just something about Shakespeare that uses poetry that I love, elevated language. You have to use your whole mouth to speak, and your whole mind to understand. As my director said, you never get every piece, or figure everything out. I love that it's a constant challenge and there's always something to think about.”

On how the stories translate to our present-day realities… “I'm also interested in how tricky some of the stories are in a 2023 reality. There are a lot of problematic ideas. But there's something about the history of us as humanity that is locked into these pieces: what was accepted, what was expected. We get to see these things through the lens of the plays. And the beauty of it is that it’s public domain. You can make adjustments and look at things the way that you would like to.

“For example, I’m doing Much Ado About Nothing this season at the Stratford Festival. My character Hero is going to marry Claudio. There's a rumor that she’s cheated on him. He believes it, and rejects her on their wedding day. In the final scene he's at the altar to marry someone else, and it's actually her who's under the veil. Their interaction is three or four lines and then she marries him. He had previously fully rejected her! But within four lines, she says ‘OK, that's fine, we'll still get married.’ So this production has actually added dialogue written by Erin Shields in order to find a place where we as an audience can feel that, yes, there is a world in which you have a conversation that makes it easier for you to forgive and continue your relationship as opposed to, ‘Well, he says he'll marry me, so I'll do it.’ I love that that there's a history and a time and a place that's locked into these plays, but also the ability to change and explore those ideas.”