There was a virtual explosion of musical activity in Canada in the second half of the 20th century. Choral music societies sprang up across the country. Opera grew; Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver had regular opera seasons, and the Toronto-based Canadian Opera Company toured extensively, often to remote parts of the country. Construction of a permanent opera house in Toronto began in 2003. Many cities have their own symphony orchestras, particularly those with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) broadcast centres, where musicians can be sustained by radio and television assignments. The symphony orchestras of Toronto and Montreal are internationally recognized. Worldwide acclaim has also been won by musical groups such as the Orford String Quartet, the Festival Singers of Canada, and the Canadian Brass.

Individual Canadian performers who have received international renown include singers Maureen Forrester and Lois Marshall, pianists Glenn Gould and Austrian-born Anton Kuerti, guitarist Liona Boyd, country musician Hank Snow, and jazz musicians Maynard Ferguson and Oscar Peterson. Notwithstanding the vibrant music scenes in most major cities in Canada, the lure of the gigantic American market has long attracted Canadian performers, and, though many Canadians have made important contributions to the history of rock and pop music, often they have done so as expatriates—including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and all but one of the members of the Band. On the other hand, the Guess Who, international hit makers of the 1960s and ’70s, and the Tragically Hip, the most consistently successful Canadian recording and touring group of the 1990s, decided to remain in Canada and became sources of national pride. Other Canadian pop performers of note included Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray, Bruce Cockburn, k.d. lang, Céline Dion, Sarah McLachlan, Bryan Adams, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Barenaked Ladies, and the Cowboy Junkies. Canada has a large and flourishing recording industry, which has been able to find a substantial niche in the international market and, owing to Canadian content regulations imposed on broadcasters, at home.

Canada can claim three top-ranking professional ballet companies: the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (founded in 1939), the National Ballet of Canada (founded in 1951), and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (founded in 1957). Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal is a dynamic dance company that combines ballet technique and jazz music. The National Ballet is the largest and most widely traveled company; it tours throughout Canada as well as in the United States and Europe.

Canada’s professional theatre evolved out of the amateur little theatre movement, which involved Canadian playwrights and performers and which developed a knowledgeable and appreciative audience. Several year-round repertory groups in the largest cities became professional. In 1953 the Stratford Festival was founded in Stratford, Ontario, and it became an immediate success, drawing audiences from across Canada and the United States to see performances of the plays of English playwright William Shakespeare. Another celebrated theatre is the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, which stages the plays of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. The Blyth Festival, in rural southwestern Ontario, specializes in Canadian plays on rural issues. In Quebec during the 1960s and ’70s, drama expressed the Québécois society’s social and political aspirations. By the 1980s French Canadian theatre again became concerned with broader universal issues. Toronto became a hotbed of improvisational comedy in 1973, when Chicago’s famed Second City theatre established a troupe there that became a proving ground for a number of Canadian actors who went on to become motion-picture stars, including Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, John Candy, and Martin Short.

Although most Canadian amateur and professional musical theatre companies frequently present Broadway musicals, Canadians continue to compose musicals on Canadian topics. A most distinctive group is the Charlottetown Festival, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (founded 1965), which produces Canadian shows exclusively. Its most successful show, Anne of Green Gables, an adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel, has been staged both in London and on Broadway.

The enthusiasm engendered by the success of theatre ventures set off a new Canadian determination to have professional theatre on a regular and nationwide scale. Spectacular new theatres were built across the country after 1958, among them the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown; Place des Arts in Montreal; National Arts Centre in Ottawa; Hummingbird Centre (formerly O’Keefe Centre), St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts, and Pantages Theatre in Toronto; Centennial buildings of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Northern and Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditoriums of Edmonton and Calgary, respectively; and Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. The trend has continued and even moved to the outskirts of cities; for example, North York (formerly a suburb of Toronto but since 1998 part of the Toronto metropolis) has some of the area’s best recital and performance venues.

Filmmaking

Canadian artists and technicians are prominent in every aspect of the motion picture industry—in Toronto and Vancouver, but also, and most notably, in Hollywood. Among the actors and directors who have achieved international renown over the years are Mack Sennett, Norman Jewison, Ted Kotcheff, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Denys Arcand.

The National Film Board of Canada was established by the federal government in 1939 to produce films, filmstrips, and still photographs that reflect the life and thought of Canada and to distribute them both domestically and abroad. It has earned international acclaim for the imaginativeness as well as the artistic and technical excellence of its work, winning both awards from film festivals around the world a reputation for the country as a leading international centre of documentary filmmaking. In 1967 the federal government established the Canadian Film Development Corporation to foster and promote a feature-film industry through investment in productions, loans to producers, and grants to filmmakers. The weakness of the Canadian dollar relative to U.S. currency as well as the skills of its filmmaking industry have enabled the country to attract a number of international film and television productions, with Toronto and Vancouver providing the locale for films set in other major cities. The impact of television on filmmaking is evident by the fact that about three-fourths of the films produced as features, advertising, trailers, newsclips, and newsreel stories by Canada’s private and governmental filmmaking agencies are for television.