The Triumphant Return of ‘JOSIAH’: A Conversation with Cassel Miles
In the week leading up to the winter solstice, I sat down with a handful of local theatre-makers to reflect on the year, learn about people’s upcoming projects, and find out what was keeping them warm through the short, dark days of December. This interview with Cassel Miles is the second in a series which will appear on the Kingston Theatre Alliance’s Performance Blog in the early months of 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In the middle of a prolific career as a dancer and Dora-nominated actor, Cassel Miles found himself losing his passion for performance. After a period of depression, which turned into a ten-year hiatus from professional theatre, he moved from Toronto to the Kingston area—where community connections and a long-awaited project rekindled his passion and brought him back to the stage.
On top of being a notable presence in local theatre companies—with recent appearances in Grapevine Theatre’s Harmonia and Theatre Kingston’s Bakersfield Mist—Miles has become well-known in Kingston for his one-man show, JOSIAH, co-created with playwright Charles Robertson. When we spoke in December, he was deep in rehearsal for a new iteration of the play, which opens this week at Alumnae Theatre in Toronto.
When Miles first entered the local theatre scene in 2015, he was surprised to see Theatre Kingston producing Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop—a play about Martin Luther King Jr. set on the eve of his assassination. “I thought, why on earth would you be doing that show here? I’d had a horrible experience in 1988 when I was here doing the show Ain’t Misbehavin’, where I encountered some rampant racism during a walk in City Park. I thought, ‘I’m never coming back to this hell hole again.’ Well, here I am, and it’s been 10 years.”
The connections that Miles made in Kingston over those years would lead to his return to stages across Ontario. “I owe a lot to the players here, because they accepted me, and I got chances to play and to get back on my acting feet.” In 2016, Miles was cast as Captain Stokes in Theatre Kingston’s adaptation of Morgan Wade’s novel Bottle and Glass, a site-specific tavern crawl set in Kingston at the end of the War of 1812. Soon after, playwright John Lazarus suggested that Miles play Mesholem in Village of Idiots at Domino Theatre. “I never thought I would play these roles, because back in my day, I wasn’t allowed to play these roles. Now everything has changed completely, and I’m just still catching up.”
It was while working on Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike at Bottle Tree Productions in 2017 that Miles met future JOSIAH collaborator, Charles Robertson. “When I told him about the story of Josiah Henson, he undertook to write it. Then I mentioned it to John Lazarus, and he wanted to do a full production.”
While names like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass often come up when we’re taught about the Underground Railroad, most Canadians have never heard of Josiah Henson. It wasn’t until 2004 that Miles first learned about Henson while watching a documentary on TV. “That story touched my heart, my soul, uplifted me, got me out of my chair and standing up to say, ‘Who is this man, and why don’t I know this story?’”
In 1830, at the age of 42, Henson escaped enslavement in Maryland and made the daring journey to Upper Canada, where he would play an important role in supporting refugees from slavery and helping to free over 118 more people. “This is a man who overcame so much when people would normally crumble. He kept finding a way to stand up, to rise above… He brought his four kids and his wife with him on a 700 mile journey from Kentucky to Fort Erie, going through incredible difficulty and challenges, carrying two of his youngest on his back the entire way there. But he didn’t stop there—he became a leader in the community, and he founded the area by Dresden, Ontario that became known as the Dawn Settlement.”
Miles believes that it’s important to keep telling Henson’s story, particularly in the current political climate. “Especially given what we’ve just experienced with the November elections in the States, and that whole idea of going back. This is what the story is about—slavery, oppression, division, second classism—all the things we do not want to do anymore. Though some will say, ‘We’ve heard this story about slavery and what the white people did.’ Have you? Have you really? Because the people that voted him in still think that’s possible.”
Drawing from Henson’s autobiography, Robertson’s script for JOSIAH took a sparser form than Miles expected, which was a daunting prospect for a performer accustomed to larger-scale productions. “Charles came back with one person on a bare stage with a cap, a hanky, and a bucket. I was going to play all these roles, and I was going to create all the scenes. And I thought, ‘Oh, I have never done anything like that.’ I came out of the musicals—Crazy For You, Cats, Miss Saigon—the big, big musicals where everything is given to you.”
JOSIAH opened in 2019 during Black History Month, and over the following years, it took on numerous lives in Kingston. By 2022, Miles thought the show had run its course. “We’d done it at the Baby Grand, we’d done it one night at the Grand, we’d done it at the Storefront Fringe. We had a stint with five high schools through the LDSB [Limestone District School Board], where I’d give an hour-long pre-show talk about racism, why the N-word was used in the play, and what it meant. And then we did it out at the Legion, near the airport.”
It was while Miles was working on Bakersfield Mist in 2024 that director Jim Garrard proposed revisiting the show in 2025 and taking it to Toronto. To prepare, he pulled away from all other commitments from September to December 2024, focusing solely on JOSIAH. “I’m in my studio now, working every day. It is as hard as the very first time, but in a different way. I know what I’m doing, and this time, I’m working with Jim, who is pushing me relentlessly, wonderfully in all the rehearsals.”
In addition to bringing Henson’s story to a wider audience, Miles hopes that the Toronto run will help put Kingston on the map. “There are wonderful artists in Kingston, but they don’t go anywhere. And outside of here, no one knows what’s going on here. In the shows I was doing in Toronto and across Ontario, no one knew anything about Kingston. And I thought, ‘Well, why would you? I didn’t either until I came here.’ But we can use things like JOSIAH to go out and spread the word about the Kingston arts scene here and how wonderful we are—because we are.”
Cassel Miles stars in JOSIAH at Alumnae Theatre in Toronto, January 29 to February 9, 2025. Tickets and more information can be found here.
