Victorian era Juliet embarks on a journey through a feminist matrix order at the High Performance Rodeo Festival, Juliet: A Revenge Comedy
By Abbas Hussain, March 2 2026—
High Performance Rodeo is an annual performing arts festival here in Calgary, put on by One Yellow Rabbit during the month of January. Founded in 1986, High Performance celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. This year’s lineup includes a plethora of shows, including Dream Machine, Goblin: Gala and Juliet: A Revenge Comedy, written and performed by Monster Theatre, which ran from Jan. 21 to 24.
Juliet: A Revenge Comedy is a comedy that starts off following the classic story of Romeo and Juliet, where a boy and girl fall in love despite being from feuding families. The premise of the classical tragedy is that they are forbidden to see each other, but end up marrying each other secretly anyway. After Romeo is banished for killing Juliet’s cousin, believing Romeo is dead, Juliet kills herself, leading Romeo to also kill himself; bringing the end to the story; at least that’s how it’s supposed to go.
But instead, in this comedic act, Juliet tries to kill herself repeatedly, but there is a secret force which keeps rewinding time until Juliet realizes that she doesn’t have to kill herself, but realizes that she doesn’t want to marry Romeo because she has only known him for three days.
She spends the rest of the story attempting her fate, and eventually she breaks out of this Shakespeare play set in Italy and explores the rest of Shakespeare’s repertoire. She then goes on a recruiting mission across the Shakespeare universe, landing in Scotland to recruit Lady Macbeth, Denmark to recruit Ophelia, Egypt to recruit Cleopatra and a mysterious island to recruit Miranda. Then they all set out on a journey to change their fates from certain death and misery.
Along the way, they meet the force, first in the form of the three witches in Macbeth Or they meet one of the three, as the other two are binge-watching the hit television series, Heated Rivalry. Following the witches, they come across the wizard whose superpower is shouting “Storm, storm, storm!”.
Eventually, the squad of female protagonists finally meets Shakespeare, who is at first dismissive of the squad, but when they steal his notebook, Shakespeare is rightfully terrified of these women. Learning that they would all die if Shakespeare were killed, through great courage, they eventually kill Shakespeare, and all the women live happily ever after.
The comedy itself is quite remarkable, a headspin on a traditional tragedy written from a patriarchal perspective, where the woman is always subservient to the man and suffers a worse fate than the man. The social commentary of the production itself stands out as pushing the boundary of what’s acceptable to society.
What stands out the most, though, is the choices they made in how to act out this play. From the topical references to Heated Rivalry, to Juliet breaking out from the play to interact with the audience, the wizard shouting “Storm, storm, storm!” without anything happening and the chase around the theatre between Juliet and Shakespeare. All of these details added an extra layer of immersion but also produced lots of laughs from the audience.
More about One Yellow Rabbit and the High Performance Rodeo Festival can be found on their website.