Blyth Festival review: Curveball: The Fast-Pitch Ladies from the Factory Floor celebrates an important piece of Stratford sports history with song and dance

Kirstyn Russelle, Shaina Silver-Baird, Alyssa LeClair and Madison Hayes-Crook in Curveball: The Fast-Pitch Ladies from the Factory Floor. Blyth Festival 2026.

By: Galen Simmons

In recent years, the story of Stratford’s Kroehler Furniture Factory’s women’s softball team and their championship-winning 1953 season – the same year that saw the opening of the Stratford Festival – has become the stuff of local legend.

That is in no small part thanks to the tireless efforts of Kelly McIntosh, both as a playwright and as the general manager of the Stratford Perth Museum. Through research, hours of interviews with members of the Kroehler Girls softball team and the development of a play telling that story as part of the inaugural Here For Now Theatre season in 2021, McIntosh has brought this truly incredible piece of Stratford sports history into the spotlight.

At the Blyth Festival this season, McIntosh, along with fellow playwrights Andy Pogson, Stacy Smith and director Severn Thompson, and Stratford singer-songwriter and musician Dayna Manning, have once again put that story on stage with their new musical adaptation, Curveball: The Fast-Pitch Ladies from the Factory Floor.

Having now seen both the musical and its non-musical predecessor, I can say with confidence the Kroehler Girls’ story is made even more entertaining with Manning’s exceptional compositions. Beyond her incredible solo performance of an introductory song at the beginning of the production and her brief role as the wife of Stratford Festival actor Alec Guinness, Manning spends most the play in the organist’s booth at the ball diamond, playing the music that drives the story forward – a mix of her signature folk style with the kind of high-energy music one might hear at a baseball game.

Out on the diamond, at centre stage, the rest of the cast brings to life a Stratford of the past that feels both historically accurate and familiar to those of us who live in the Festival City today.

The story is linked to the Stratford Festival’s opening through a relationship between Kroehler Girls novice pitcher Georgie (Shelayna Christante) and rookie actor James (Aiden Altow), bringing into play the looming disruption the festival poses to the Kroehler Girls’ Saturday night game schedule. While fastball takes centre stage in this play, it is augmented seamlessly with bits and pieces of authentic Stratford and Stratford Festival history delivered by CJCS radio host Chick (Alyssa LeClair) and in conversations between the Kroehler Girls, James and the other characters on stage.

As someone who isn’t much of a baseball fan, I found the development and growth in each of the members of the Kroehler Girls team to be as rewarding, if not more so, than their thrilling final championship win.

From star player Honey’s (Madison Hayes-Crook) journey in overcoming her grief for her brother Charlie’s (Altow) death during the Second World War to Georgie learning to become a team player while retaining the unique skills that make her a force to be reckoned with on the pitcher’s mound, each of the actors took their characters to new levels of emotional depth and understanding through their relationships with one another.

And that’s not always an easy thing to do in a musical, when high-intensity moments almost always lead into song-and-dance numbers. In this production, the musical numbers felt like natural extensions of the dialogue on stage and didn’t, at any point, feel forced or as if they were an add-on to the main story. Instead, the actors sang beautifully together, and as soloists, and performed this production’s simple yet entertaining and effective choreography with perfect timing. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the excellent physical work each of the Kroehler Girls achieved, along with sound effects by Manning, that made me believe I was actually watching a fastball game, despite there never being a baseball on the stage.

Though this play was developed for the Blyth Festival’s outdoor Harvest Stage, poor air quality caused by wildfire smoke forced the production inside on the Margaret Stephens Stage at the Blyth Memorial Hall. While I had initially questioned whether seeing the play inside would alter my experience in any way, I have to give full credit to the cast and design team for building in the flexibility they needed to pivot to an indoor performance.

Whether the onstage ball diamond is indoors or outside, the games feel real and the characters hit home.

Curveball: The Fast-Pitch Ladies from the Factory Floor runs on the Byth Festival’s Harvest Stage until Aug. 22.