That was the instruction Bec Weldon got from her dad when he let her watch Lord of the Rings at the age of eight.
“Which, eight feels a bit too young to me now,” Weldon says. That bit of cinematic father/daughter stealth, however, is one of the reasons the world of J.R.R Tolkien stuck with Weldon over the years. She remembers feeling like the film was a kind of graduation from the world of kids’ movies into more complex worlds and nuanced storylines. That, and the concept of second breakfast was appealing.
“I loved the idea of being able to eat eight meals a day,” she says, laughing. “I’m a very big fan of the hobbit lifestyle.”
Weldon is just one in an all-Whitehorse cast performing in the Yukon Arts Centre’s rendition of The Hobbit, set to take the stage this October 15 to 18. The play, YAC’s first-ever in-house production (cast and crew are being paid for their time), was cast last spring. When Weldon tried out, she had zero expectations.
“I just wanted to be involved,” says Weldon, who moved to the Yukon in 2025 after growing up in Perth, Australia. “I thought I might be a puppeteer and make some community.”
She certainly didn’t expect to be cast as Bilbo, which kind of makes her the perfect pick for The Hobbit’s unlikely hero. Weldon acted in her teens, but as she got older, she gravitated towards working behind the scenes as a creative director, or focusing on solo performance, including burlesque and circus arts. She says it’s been a thrill to be involved with something so collaborative and to be working as part of a team that includes Katelyn Morishita.
Morishita, who is the artistic associate for Handsome Alice Theatre in Calgary, is directing the play. She visited the Yukon in the spring for casting. She returned to the territory in early September to start leading the cast and crew through the month and-a-half of 30-hour work weeks it would take to prepare for the production.
Morishita was impressed at how quickly the cast gelled (everything was ahead of schedule within the first two weeks), particularly since, for some of them, theatre was a new experience. The cast is made up of a mix of first-timers and theatre regulars, including Kyle MacDonald as Gandalf and John Glynn-Morris as Gollum. One of the things that’s delighted Morishita about this blend is that the emerging actors feel comfortable asking the more experienced cast members for help and the seasoned actors are happy to give it.
“There’s no pushing or pulling which has been great to see,” she says.
In addition to a variety of experience levels onstage, Morishita says everyone also has varying levels of familiarity with the play’s source material.
“Some people are hardcore,” she says. “Like, have [LoTR] tattoos on their body. Like ‘I will die to be in this show.’ And some people have little or no knowledge of it.”
Having a bit of distance from the original story can be helpful. For Weldon, stepping into Bilbo’s shoes (metaphorically-speaking, of course. Hobbits don’t wear shoes) caused her to re-visit her childhood connection to the character in deciding how to play him. When she was a kid, she remembers being confused by how inconvenienced Bilbo seemed by the whole adventure he was on. “I was like, ‘I’d love to fight spiders and trolls and explore and find a magic ring,’” she says. “Now that I’m an adult, if I was living my life and this happened, I would also be kind of nervous and frustrated.”
She has avoided going back and re-watching The Hobbit during rehearsals because she doesn’t want to replicate onstage what already exists in the movies. Not that a Peter Jackson imitation is what audiences are in for. The stage play is an adaptation (done by Canada’s own Kim Selody) of The Hobbit. It’s a faster-paced version of the beloved book, so doesn’t follow Tolkien’s telling exactly. But Morishita says everything readers love about the book is there, supported by incredible local work, including lighting by the Yukon’s Martin Nishikawa, costumes by Chantal Lefreniere, music direction by Hannah Mazurek and puppets by Annie Johnsgaard.
The puppets alone are incredible, says Weldon. At one point during rehearsals, one of the puppets turned to look at her and she had to remind herself it wasn’t real.
“I genuinely squealed because I was like ‘oh my god, I’m about to be eaten,’” she says. She’s surprised every day by new elements being added to the production and thinks audiences will be floored by the love and labour that’s gone into bringing the story to life.
“I hope the sense of scale and artistry will really wow people,” she says.
“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” The simple introduction to Bilbo, the story’s protagonist, could have been anyone’s introduction, including Sheldon’s.
“In a house on a hill, there lived a human named Dustin,” Sheldon says over the phone in late September. The humble beginnings of Bilbo, more homebody than traditional hero, suggested adventure could be in the cards for anybody. Even (or maybe especially) you, sitting in an armchair reading about it rather than experiencing it in your own life.
The book spawned J.R.R. Tolkein’s trilogy, Lord of the Rings, as well as Simarillion, and innumerable adaptations for film, television and theatre. One of those, Kim Selody’s stage adaptation, is coming to the Yukon Arts Centre in October. Sheldon’s visual art exhibition, Form-lines and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Art Show, is a companion piece to the play.
Mary Bradshaw, director of visual arts, contacted Sheldon in March of 2026. At the time, he was painting a Magic: The Gathering-inspired mural on the exterior walls of Titan Gaming, so he was already in the headspace of fantasy work.
When she asked if he was interested in creating an exhibition to coincide with YAC’s theatre production, he initially imagined indigenizing the book’s characters in a detailed, fantasy style. Ultimately though, he found himself turning to form line to convey Mirkwood, Bag End, Smaug and a map of Middle Earth.
The finished pieces, done in white form line on black, look ancient and runic, like oracle or tarot cards. Sometimes, Sheldon says, when he’s walking around in downtown Whitehorse, he starts seeing everything in form line. It just seemed to be the right treatment for the subject.
To produce the work, Sheldon dove back into the book he’d read as a kid, but he also researched various artists who have illustrated Lord of the Rings over the years, including John Howe and the Brothers Hildebrandt. He watched interviews with actor Benedict Cummerbatch, who spoke about the way he moved to try and embody Smaug, the dragon, during filming. Sheldon also dug into the lesser-known lore behind Tolkein’s characters and looked at various covers for different editions. He adhered strictly to the written word, at one point going back and re-doing an entire piece because the book described two trees in a certain scene as leaning into each other, while he had illustrated them standing parallel. You can’t make those kinds of mistakes with this book, Sheldon says. At the show’s opening, someone even approached him to let him know the images weren’t arranged chronologically. The way they hung in the gallery didn’t follow the book’s action.
So it’s tough enough to interpret something as beloved and widely represented as Tolkein’s work, but Sheldon had the added challenge of weaving Middle Earth together with his own heritage. He experimented with a version of Gollum in Tlingit weaving, eagles perched on ovoid cliffs, sketches of Tlingit armour and weapons, before he landed on the work ultimately included in the exhibition.
“It was dicey trying to walk that fine line,” he says. “But with this show, I think I’ve really done it.”
