Long before Canada had a national broadcaster or any mandate to promote its own culture, its stages were already shaping how Canadians saw race — and, just as often, undermining it. Staging Blackface in Canada uncovers a twenty-year period, roughly 1898 to 1919, when the same Canadian stages that staged blackface and ethnic caricature also hosted some of the first Black musicals and operas the country had ever seen, sometimes within the same theatre, the same season.

This was an era when Canada had no professional theatre industry of its own. Instead, the stage borrowed its themes from amusement parks, social dance halls, the new technology of recorded music — and blackface travelled with it, reshaping burlesque, comic opera, and variety shows into a popular entertainment that drew white, Anglo-Protestant, English-speaking audiences in the thousands, even as it drew criticism in its own time.

Drawing on theatrical reviews, images, and archival records from a period with no media regulation and no official story about Canadian identity, this book traces how popular entertainment became one of the main venues where Canadians imitated, mocked, and occasionally reckoned with race while Black performers created stages of their own in the middle of it all.