Halifax Theatre History
Introduction: Theatre at the Pontac
Halifax has long held the reputation as a great little theatre town, beginning “just 19 years after some soldiers and some miserable and sickly settlers had began to hack the garrison town out of the woods. The scarlet coats and gold braid of soldier-actors dominated the city’s 
earliest theatrical efforts." (Bruce 5) Through successive eras of turbulence and change, a town whose theatrical past extends from eighteenth-century garrison days, much may be revealed about Halifax’s rich social history in reviewing the nature and influences of dramatic activity that has occurred over time.
Halifax’s early years witnessed an array of melodramas, farces, and comedies, typical fare of the period, put on by American and British touring companies and amateur efforts by the numerous of soldier-actors of the garrison town. Contributing to a community where “more than a hundred different plays, operas, and farces were presented in the last fifteen years of the 18th Century," (Ferguson 419), the first known theatrical performance is preported, though some would disagree, at the Pontac Coffee House at the corner of Water and Prince Streets. As a venue for the town’s first play, Jane Shore and the Virgin Unmasked, performed by the American Company of Comedians in 1768, the coffee house served as a multipurpose entertainment spot until the need for a new theatre building was met by the establishment of the New Grand Theatre on Argyle Street.
