Michael Bawtree has worked in Canadian theatre and television for over forty years, and is the author of a number of plays, including The Last Days of the Tsars (Clare, Irwin), and a book on music theatre, The New Singing Theatre (Oxford University Press). Founding artistic director of the Atlantic Theatre Festival in Nova Scotia, he has also served as associate director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario and was for many years director of drama at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. He is currently executive director of the Joseph Howe Initiative, celebrating Joe Howe in his two-hundredth-birthday year.