Romeo and Juliet scheduled for Valentine’s dinner date

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on January 7, 2025.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

If you’ve ever had trouble deciding between going out for dinner and going out to a show, Experience Theatre has got a deal for you.
The new and upcoming troupe is excited to venture into dinner theatre with Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet scheduled for Valentine’s Day week.
Jesse Thibert, owner and director of Experience Theatre, says he created his theatre to provide an opportunity for local talent to showcase their writing, design and directing talents within the local market.
“I was born and raised in Winnipeg, Man., and I grew up with dinner theatre being very prominent in my city,” says Thibert. “So I really wanted to bring that experience to Lethbridge and build on it from there.”
He moved to Lethbridge in 2017 to attend the University of Lethbridge, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre. He started the Experience Theatre because he saw a lot of his fellow classmates leave Lethbridge due to a lack of opportunities within the city. “It came down to the sentence ‘there is no work for us,’ so I decided to make work for them,” says Thibert.
Experience Theatre has been operating for a year now and did four original shows in 2024, performing at Casa and The Owl, and have eight more original shows set to take place throughout 2025. But Thibert he wanted to take his theatre to a new level and offer audiences an opportunity to experience dinner with their shows.
“I figured Valentine’s week would be a good time to do the most well-known romantic tragedy known to man, so I partnered up with the Italian Canadian Cultural Centre.”
The centre was the ideal setting for his Romeo and Juliet dinner theatre show because it offers an authentic three-course Italian meal, and the idea was to do a show set in Italy that is recognizable along with a complementary Italian menu.
It’s just another local aspect of what will be an entirely local show.
“The majority of our shows are written by people who live in Lethbridge,” says Thibert, “who have gone to the University of Lethbridge, acted by Lethbridge actors, designed by local designers. It is very Lethbridge-oriented,” said Thibert.
And even though Romeo and Juliet was written by Shakespeare, Thibert said he edited the script slightly to bring the romantic tragedy to modern times.
“Shakespeare was a great guy, but some of the stuff from the 1500s didn’t age well. So I took out this one page where it says that Juliet is 14 and she should be married and how women who were younger than her were married.”
Thibert says he took it out because it also implied that it is the woman’s job to marry a man and he did not want that in the show, among other parts of the script.
“I believe the un-edited version is about 100 pages and my version is 96, so I only cut about four pages. Other than that, is the original Shakespeare’s version.”
Thibert says the theatre crew has become its own community, with a variety of ages and experience levels.
“We have two actors from Taber who are high school students,” he points out. “The ages range from about 14 years old to about 40 years old.”
The show runs nightly from Feb. 10-15. For more information or to purchase tickets, go to http://www.xptheatre.ca or email experiencetheatrexpt@gmail.com.

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