About Cassel

When I was seven years old we moved from Kingston, Jamaica to Scarborough, Ontario. At nine I learned how to play hockey while also taking tap dancing lessons. At seventeen I saw the movie Fame and found my path.

The Best of Broadway was my first professional job at Canada’s Wonderland’s. There were dance scholarships with George Randolph in Toronto and Steps on Broadway in New York City. There were dance companies such as Judith Marcuse’s Repertory Dance Company of Canada, Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, and The National Tap Dance Company of Canada. Musical theatre shows, the Shaw Festival, the Stratford Festival; man I was dancing as fast as I could.

THEN came Canadian Stage Company’s, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika and a Dora Award nomination. Me? The dancer? Acting? That was unexpected. Even more unexpected was the opportunity to play ‘Mr. Bojangles’ in the U.S. National Tour of Fosse and to be directed by Ann Reinking. Wow, I was on my way I thought. That is when the passion suddenly left. One evening backstage while warming up for Fosse I said to the Stage Manager, “Artie, it’s not fun anymore.” It’s like that line from A Chorus Line, (in which I played in Vancouver) when the director, Zach, asks the company, “What would you do if you couldn’t dance anymore?” For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, I didn’t know.

Luckily I met a wonderful man who saw in me what I couldn’t see. We moved from downtown Toronto, and my position as a concierge at The Fairmont Royal York Hotel, to buy my parents’ house in a town thirty minutes north of Kingston, Ontario. And that’s when the passion started to come back. But it wasn’t dancing, it was acting; in community theatre shows and semi-professional productions. During one of those shows, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, for Bottle Tree Productions in 2018, I met a writer named Charles Robertson. I told him about a dream I had to create a show about Josiah Henson. See, back in 2004, during a very bad bout of depression, I saw a documentary about Josiah Henson. Something about his story penetrated deeply and stayed with me all those years.

Charles presented an idea to have one actor on a bare stage with no set and no props just two costume pieces that would become props. We worked together until 2022 creating the form and shape of the story. Each presentation of the production prompted another revision. The play has evolved over the years from a two- hour, two-act epic into an 80-minute fast, physical and focused dramatization. Recently, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it received four five-star reviews, an award for best performer, and a gold medal from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Theatre Awards. One reviewer placed the show sixth of the 122 shows reviewed. Not bad for “the little show that could.” To learn more about JOSIAH visit: www.josiahtheshow.com

The work is the play. The play is to inspire.