The playbills in this collection focus on performances in Saint John, Fredericton, and Halifax. A few relate to productions at other centres in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Playbills come from the Harvard Theatre Collection's playbills of eastern Canada, the Archives of the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, and the New Brunswick Museum collection in Saint John. The Harvard playbills (about 600 references) cover productions from the 1820s through to the end of the century. The UNB playbills (120 citations) deal, largely, with theatre in Fredericton in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The 60 playbills of the Museum collection reflect the theatrical scene in Saint John during the J.W. Lanergan years of the 1860s. The three collections are here integrated into one data base.

To provide a context for the many touring companies represented in the maritime playbills, this data base also includes the Harvard Theatre Collection's holding of Maine playbills (about 550 playbills). Roughly half of these are for productions in Portland, the rest chronicle touring activity around the state by various companies.

Every effort has been made to cite this material as accurately as possible for the search engine below. In cases where various authors have produced texts with a common name, it is difficult if not impossible to be certain as to which version of a play was performed on a particular date. Inaccuracies will be corrected as discovered. Should you wish to research a much larger data base for information concerning productions relating to 19th century Atlantic Canada, please use the Performance Calendar text-based search engine which you can access from the homepage of this site.