I e-mailed the play’s director, Nina Lee Aquino, a couple of questions about how these surtitled performances came about (and have condensed and edited her answers). More than 82,000 Torontonians speak Tagalog as their mother tongue, and it’s the third most-spoken language at home that’s not English or French after Mandarin and Cantonese. This romantic comedy by Filipino-Canadian playwright Marie Beath Badian is a sequel to Prairie Nurse, her hit about a pair of Filipino nurses working at a Saskatchewan hospital in the 1960s. This month, however, Toronto’s Factory Theatre is presenting several performances of The Waltz (running Oct. You find that much more often in Quebec than in the rest of the country. Ideally, surtitles would be used in Canadian theatre not just to persuade the English-understanding majority to watch theatre in other languages – but to make certain performances accessible or more enjoyable for linguistic minorities, too.

When I travel in Europe, for instance, I will often plan my itinerary entirely around when English- or French-surtitled performances are scheduled at that continent’s many great repertory theatres. Surtitles in theatres have also become common in other parts of the world. They’ve since become common in the international and multilingual opera world (though “surtitling” smartglasses have been emerging as an alternative). Surtitles (projected translations, sometimes called supertitles) were invented in Toronto almost exactly 40 years ago by the Canadian Opera Company.

Opera glasses for sale