Biography | Peter Cullen — The Crest Stage on Mount Pleasant Where He Joined Toronto Repertory

People remember Peter Cullen as a booth actor who arrived already formed. The year after Canada's National Theatre School sent out its first class, he was in a Toronto repertory house learning how a company actually runs.

On 22 October 1963 the Crest Theatre opened John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at 551 Mount Pleasant Road. The published cast list for that production carries Cullen's name among the principals, next to Sean Sullivan, Ken James, Jackie Burroughs, William Brydon, Michael Snow and Chris Wiggins.

The building had opened on 17 March 1927 as the Belsize, a Murray Brown neighbourhood house for Famous Players. In 1953–54 the Davis siblings converted it for live work and founded the Crest Theatre company, then a rare year-round Canadian repertory on a commercial street.

Cullen had finished the National Theatre School acting course in Montreal that same year. Animation World Network's later account of his training places a year with this company after a Stratford summer.

The Crest closed its last live season on 30 April 1966 after more than a hundred productions. The house went back to film, took the name Regent in 1988, and received a Part IV heritage designation.

It is closed again now, with a live-theatre reconstruction planned behind the protected façade.

What a visitor sees on Mount Pleasant is still the 1927 front. The stage Cullen worked is the fact inside it.

Photo: the building as the Belsize in 1942, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The Crest conversion came later; the walls are the same.