VideoCabaret's founding playwrights have written many enduring works. The company designers, actors, and directors are celebrated for their unique stagings of plays, multi-media cabarets, and musicals.

VideoCabaret debuted in a Toronto gallery in 1976. Characters included: playwrights Michael Hollingsworth and Deanne Taylor; the Hummer Sisters performance troupe; art-rock composer Andrew Paterson; video-prodigy Chris Clifford. Together we created the first theatre productions integrating video-cameras, piles of hot-wired TV’s, and live rock'n'roll -- genre-mashing spectacles staged across Canada, in New York and London.

In the early eighties, VideoCabaret moved into The Cameron House, a music club on a scruffy stretch of Queen Street West. We wired the building for video, joining our upstairs studio and the Cameron stage in a half-real half-virtual theatre space, where Michael staged adaptations of BRAVE NEW WORLD and 1984, while Deanne and the Hummers created political video-cabarets such as HUMMER FOR MAYOR, involving hundreds of actors, musicians, writers and painters.

Through the eighties and nineties VideoCab enjoyed co-productions with Theatre Passe Muraille, Factory Theatre and the Theatre Centre. Core artists invented the 'black-box' style for Michael's twenty-one-part cycle: THE HISTORY OF THE VILLAGE OF THE SMALL HUTS, and honed the 'video-cabaret' style for Deanne's plays about mass-media politics and other themes. With Shadowland Theatre, we joined with artists from Trinidad & Tobago and from Toronto's Caribbean and Indigenous communities to create Mas(querade) Bands for Toronto's Caribana and to study Mas-making in T&T.

From 2000, VideoCab rehearsed and performed our plays in a tiny theatre we built in the backroom of the Cameron. Apparently we had become too small to fail, so Stratford discovered us in 2012 and co-produced THE WAR OF 1812 for two sold-out months. A remount at Soulpepper in Toronto and the Magnetic North Festival in Ottawa kicked off a five-year association with Soulpepper that expanded our scale of production, and our vision for the future.

At the Deanne Taylor Theatre on 10 Busy Street, VideoCab will be able to seat 50-90 for different stagings. The company is looking forward to exploring new and multidisciplinary works for our theatre space going forward. Our 2024-2025 season has a record number of programming. For instance, for the Summer of 2025, we will present our first ever contemporary dance program featuring works from award-winning choreographer Jera Wolfe and Peggy Baker. We have also partnered with Puppetmongers to bring puppetry to our space for this past holiday season which brought in very young audiences to our theatre space. The next generation of theatre-makers will be supported with time and technology to develop, design, rehearse, showcase, and perform, marvelous scripts and stagings.

VideoCabaret's work has been recognized by scores of Dora Nominations, dozens of Awards, and many peer honours. In 2018, Richard Clarkin (John A. Macdonald), the Ensemble of Actors, and Costume Designers Astrid Janson and Mel McNeill were nominated for Doras. The Dora Award for Outstanding Actor went to Michaela Washburn for her portrayal of Louis Riel.

VideoCabaret received the 2016 Critics’ Award for Outstanding Body of Work and Ensemble Extraordinaire.

Michael Hollingsworth is a recipient of the Silver Ticket Award for outstanding contribution to Canadian Theatre.

Layne Coleman who is the current Interim Artistic Director is also a recipient of the Silver Ticket Award.