Sochi Fried and Eponine Lee in Wait Until Dark (Shaw Festival, 2025) | Photo by Michael Cooper
I’ve seen both the film (as a child) and a very intimate stage production (just shy of a decade ago) and remember finding both highly compelling; I was underwhelmed, though, and often completely baffled by this very handsome production of Wait Until Dark presented by the Shaw Festival. While the cause for my confusion over plot elements is easily identifiable, reasons for the show’s overall flatness are harder to suss out as nobody seems to have obviously dropped any balls here.
Frederick Knott’s play, which is set in Greenwich Village of the 1960s, has been shifted to the 1940s by Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation. He moved it to the period of the Second World War, where the characters’ psyches, circumstances and language seem a little more congruent. He has also made the bad guys’ plan—and our heroine’s discovery of it—far more convoluted. I spent the first act just trying to figure out what the hell they were talking about.
Susan (a very dapper Sochi Fried, channelling some 1970s Faye Dunaway) is a nervous yet intrepid blind woman newly married to Sam (JJ Gerber), a photographer and recently injured soldier back from the war. His behaviour towards her can seem a little condescending as he orders her to perform mundane tasks by herself, but it comes out of love and concern; he wants to ensure her independence. He has enlisted an upstairs neighbour, the angsty adolescent Gloria (Eponine Lee), to check in on her. Susan and Gloria have a mutually antagonistic relationship that I recall paying off with a precarious yet poignant alliance—my favourite relationship of the story as I remembered it—though it never quite gelled here.
Into this quaint little scenario, the play drops a charming former war buddy of Sam’s, Mike (Kristopher Bowman), and two bad guys, Carlino (Martin Happer) and Roat (Bruce Horak), in search of a child’s doll, which contains something very valuable and is apparently somewhere in Susan and Sam’s apartment. This has been determined through an overly complicated set of plot machinations that are simply too cumbersome and perplexing to comfortably wrap my head around, though I did try—at the expense of any proper immersion in the story.
Even before Susan is forced into a life or death situation where she must use her wits to gain advantage over her sighted attackers, the first act has her picking up on subtle clues through her other heightened senses. There is supposed to be great satisfaction in watching her identify patterns of suspicious behaviour from recurring odd sounds, but it was hard for me to invest in her mounting paranoia and vigilance. The highly mannered performances don’t quite land with enough perceptible authenticity; so as the puzzle pieces all fall neatly into place, I never quite felt why I should care.
Lorenzo Savoini’s vast and highly textured set suggests the exposed brick, plumbing and water-damage of a reasonably-affordable Manhattan basement apartment. Though gorgeous, it is a little too grand and open to properly evoke the claustrophobia and danger upon which the suspense of the story relies. It seems better suited to farce than thriller. All motivated lighting is clearly established within the geography of the apartment with prominent fixtures, these figure crucially into the play’s climax. In her lighting design, Louise Guinand does some atmospheric, film noirish sculpturing. The hint of light visible underneath the main apartment door is a subtle, eerie touch. John Gzowski’s original score has a charming cinematic quality and Ming Wong’s costumes, especially Susan’s very elegant tan pant-suit with orange cardigan, are also on point.
Atmospheric and effectively blocked, director Sanjay Talwar’s functional staging is undeniably stylish. Wait Until Dark is sufficiently well produced, it just lacks transcendent charm and doesn’t quite add up to a whole greater than the sum its parts.
Wait Until Dark
June 25 to October 5, 2025
Festival Theatre
(10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake)
2 hours, 20 minutes (including one intermission)
Sochi Fried and Kristopher Bowman in Wait Until Dark (Shaw Festival, 2025) | Photo by Michael Cooper