‘JOSIAH’ Comes Home from Edinburgh to Kingston
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“On all those maps of Underground Railroad travel, they’d show the South, and the arrows go up and spread out… and they get to the border of Canada and stop. What happened after they fled?”
In our interview, Cassel Miles, Co-Creator and performer of JOSIAH: The Show, posed and answered a question I have wondered about after years of history classes.
After a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this past summer, earning rave reviews and multiple awards, JOSIAH returns to Kingston for a two-night run this weekend with proceeds benefiting Theatre Kingston.
The story begins in 2004: “My depression was sinking deeper and deeper: then on TV came this documentary about Josiah Henson… I don’t know what it was, but I started to sit up and listen.”
“The idea kept coming: how come I had never heard of this man?… It was always about Harriet Tubman, other important people, but not to do with Canada.” From that moment, he knew he wanted to eventually bring the story to the stage, but the timing wasn’t right: Miles would not perform on stage again for ten years.
When he moved to Kingston in 2014, Miles also returned to acting, performing with local companies including the Domino Theatre, Theatre Kingston, and most significant to JOSIAH, Bottle Tree Productions. “It was during a Bottle Tree production of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike that I met Charles [Robertson]… I told everybody that I came in contact with about this idea I had to do a play about Josiah Henson. When I mentioned it to Charles, he, understated as he is, kind of took it away, said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’”
Unbeknownst to Miles, Robertson began working on a draft of the play after reading Henson’s autobiography. A few months later, in autumn 2018, the first draft of the play, then titled Josiah Henson: From Slave to Saviour was complete. “It would be a one-person play on a bare stage with no set, no props, and I would play all the characters. And I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?!’”
After performing in large-scale musicals like Starlight Express and Crazy for You throughout his career, being the sole performer in a simply-staged play was out of Miles’s comfort zone, but work on the play continued. At the very end of 2018, Bottle Tree Productions, then helmed by Anne Marie Mortensen—the owner of Bottle Tree, and the show’s lighting, sound, and costume designer—and Robertson, staged a public reading of the play. It was also where Jim Garrard, who went on to direct the most recent iteration of the production, first saw the story come to life. “I’d never done a public reading… I didn’t quite know what I was doing. This feeling of not quite knowing what I’m doing lasted up until last year with this play, because it was all being created,” Miles said of the experience.
Miles continued to perform and work on the show until 2022, when he felt it was time to move onto other projects. That was, until Garrard approached him in 2024. “[Garrard] said, ‘You should do JOSIAH again. You should take it on the road. It’s got legs. It’ll do well on tour.’”
Miles was unsure at first, unhappy with the current state of the story. After he was convinced, the pair began to rework the script until it was down to 90 minutes with an intermission for its 2025 run at the Alumnae Theatre in Toronto. Miles and his partner, Sandy McFadden, continued to push for the show to be produced across the country, but were repeatedly denied, told “It’s either a Black History Month thing, Emancipation Day thing, or too unknown for their audiences.” Miles knew they “needed to have one final plunge somewhere big, where what is said about the play will matter.”
It was this thought that led JOSIAH to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, one of the largest arts festivals in the world. The team refined the play further, distilling it to one act. Its run was not without its hardships, including a scorching hot theatre space at the festival, saying “Every single night was a fight.”
“I passed out on the first night because it was so hot, and I couldn’t breathe… After that, I began to understand [Josiah Henson]: ‘I will show you that I will triumph over this. I will show you.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s your fire.’” Miles woke up surrounded by paramedics and had to finish the opening performance, but continued on to complete the full run of the physically demanding show, which includes bright spotlights and no offstage breaks. Despite this, he completed a successful run, and gained the traction needed to begin preparing for a tour of the production in 2028.
For Miles, telling the story of Josiah Henson as separate from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which was based on Henson’s autobiography, but alters much of his identity—is essential to ensuring his story is remembered and celebrated. As we close our discussion of the history behind Henson, Miles tells me about a speech documented in Susan Cooke Soderberg’s book, My Name Is Not Tom: The Life of the Reverend Josiah Henson: “He begins the speech with, ‘No doubt you’ve come to see Uncle Tom. Well, let me assure you, my name is not Tom. Never has been, never will be. I am and always will be, Josiah Henson.’”
Cassel Miles is an award-winning professional actor living in the Kingston area. He has recently returned from a critically acclaimed, award-winning run of his one-person play, ‘JOSIAH,’ at the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He is looking forward to playing in ‘Waiting For Godot’ for Kingston audiences next year.
‘JOSIAH: The Show’ runs from September 26th to 27th at the TK Studio in the Tett Centre. For tickets and more information, click here.
