Actor-playwright Faly Mevamanana embraces the weird in The Baking Show Show: The Play
In this left-field comedy, the obsessive lead character is driven by the same perfectionism that her creator has learned to leave aside in life
The Baking Show Show. Photo by Emily Cooper
Ruby Slippers Theatre presents The Baking Show Show: The Play at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts from February 5 to 7, and at Presentation House Theatre from February 12 to 15
SUGAR, SPICE, AND everything nice… on the outside. Inside, however, Grace is anything but.
Written by and starring Faly Mevamanana, The Baking Show Show: The Play follows Grace, a competitor on Canada’s most prestigious baking television program who is obsessed with taking home the top prize. Just how far will she go to win?
Mevamanana, an award-nominated actor and playwright (with writing shadow credits on This Hour Has 22 Minutes and acting credits with Neptune Theatre, Western Canada Theatre, and the Grand Theatre, to name a few), is “very grateful” to be putting up her show so close to home.
“I grew up in Coquitlam, so to have my first produced production in the province where I grew up is really, really special,” she says.
The Baking Show Show: The Play examines the lure of stardom and popularity in the age of social media and reality television, as Grace’s ambition curdles into obsession.
Mevamanana tells Stir she was recently inspired as a writer by a conversation in Variety’s “Directors on Directors” series, in which Martin McDonagh stated that when he writes, he aims to surprise himself. Writing in a free-flow state, where characters are allowed to take over, proved especially intriguing to the self-proclaimed recovering perfectionist.
“The idea that I could just write and then surprise myself with what I came up with, and to have something a little bit left-field, was so fun and freeing,” she says. “This play, I think, has quite a bit of that. There are a lot of moments that will surprise and delight people in really wonderful, weird ways that I’m super excited about.”
At its core, The Baking Show Show wrestles with the personal cost of perfectionism, a tension that mirrors Mevamanana’s past relationship to her craft.
Faly Mevamanana. Photo by Sam Gaetz
“I think I’ve learned through my life just how detrimental [perfectionism] is to my mental state, and my life, and the decisions I’m able to make, and how much I can overthink, and my level of anxiety when I need and want everything to be perfect and to be the way that I planned it out,” she explains.
“So, in writing this play, I put a lot of myself into that character, into that feeling of ‘You’re not good enough’ and ‘You have to be better’ and ‘If you work so hard, then you’ll get there,’ when oftentimes in our lives, that’s not true. Working really hard, harder than anybody, does not mean you will succeed. Unfortunately, sometimes it really just is out of your hands.”
As her practice has evolved, Mevamanana has learned to drop some of these tendencies and instead trust her instincts, adopting a new personal mantra of “Embrace the weird” in her writing.
“When I know something’s good, I’ll write it and my brain will go, ‘That's stupid.’ Like, great. Then that means it’s good,” she says.
Bringing that sensibility to the stage in The Baking Show Show are director Jasmine Chen and co-stars Sharon Crandall and Andy Marie.
“Jasmine is able to really take the things I imagined and bring them to life in such a wonderful way,” Mevamanana says. “I think on some level, when you write, you only see things in a certain viewpoint. So being able to give that to someone else and seeing their take on it is really fun, and then being able to have discussions where we figure out something that works for both of us has been so great.”
This spirit of collaboration has been central to the development of the show. Through a series of workshops in 2025, Mevamanana, Chen, Crandall, and Marie deepened their understanding of the work, refining its rhythms while leaning into its strangeness and play.
Speaking of her co-stars, Mevamanana says: “I would not be able to do the show without them. I play the lead character and only the lead character, but both of them play five or more characters in the show, and they are constantly switching between them, and it’s so funny and so specific. It’s been so fun, and I just feel like I spend my time onstage trying not to laugh.”
And what is Mevamanana most excited about bringing to audiences? Joy and cookies.
“Honestly, I want [audiences] to just come out feeling like their day is a little bit better than it was before. You know, it’s a very fun show and what I’ve been saying is: ‘I cannot promise anybody will like it, but I feel like I can promise you you’re going to laugh at some point.’ I think that this can give someone a little bit of joy.” 
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