Spoonfuls of sugar Nia Vardalos’s stage adaptation finds the beauty in book of advice columns By: Ben Waldman Posted: 6:08 PM CDT Tuesday, Apr. 7, 2026

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/04/2026 (191 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When she dials a 204 phone number for an interview about her latest venture in Canadian theatre, Nia Vardalos is on the move.

“I’m driving into Beverly Hills for a meeting,” the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of My Big Fat Greek Wedding tells the Free Press. “There’s nothing more L.A. than what I just said.”

But even though Vardalos has lived stateside for the bulk of her estimable career on television, stage and film, readers had better be careful before referring to the Shaftesbury High School Wall of Famer as a past-tense local.

“The only time I’ve ever been insulted by a review was when it referred to me as ‘former Winnipegger Nia Vardalos.’ I was like, ‘How dare you, sir.’ Once you’re a Winnipegger, you’re always a Winnipegger,” she says.

This week, at least one piece of Vardalos’s creative self is coming home in the form of Tiny Beautiful Things, a stage adaptation of writer Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar advice column, which ran anonymously on the website The Rumpus from 2010 to 2012.

Co-created by Vardalos, Marshall Heyman and Hamilton director Thomas Kail, the epistolary production premièred at New York’s Public Theater in 2017 with Vardalos starring as the central adviser.

When Tiny Beautiful Things opens Wednesday at Prairie Theatre Exchange, local actor Laura Olafson will play the soul-searching writer helping her correspondents heal.

More frequently called upon for her musical theatre talents at Rainbow Stage and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre — performances as Cynthia Weil in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and as Becky in Waitress are recent career capstones — Olafson will play in her first straight role in six years. (For her work in 2020’s Theatre Projects Manitoba’s staging of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) Olafson won a Winnipeg Theatre Award).

Both Vardalos’s adaptation and Strayed’s original book — which was adapted into an Emmy-nominated miniseries starring Kathryn Hahn in 2023 — frequently knocked Olafson back with their “visceral, beautiful, descriptive and, at times, heartbreaking” writing.

It took Olafson three months to finish reading Strayed’s 2012 bestseller.

“I would burst into tears and have to put it down, then I’d pick up again and burst into tears again,” she says.

“Once you’re a Winnipegger, you’re always a Winnipegger.”

Vardalos can understand where Olafson is coming from. After she turned down a role in Kail’s directorial version of the basketball drama Bird/Magic — she had just adopted a child with her former partner — Vardalos says Kail vowed that they would work together some day.

“True to his word, a few years later, he handed me a book and said, ‘I think this is a play. I think you can adapt it, and I think you should play Sugar,’” recalls Vardalos.

“When I read it, I knew that I would have to be pushed outside my comfort zone.”

Vardalos quickly but to no avail contacted Strayed’s agency in 2014. Still motivated, she reached out over social media, and when Strayed told her she would be in Los Angeles the next day, the two writers met for tea.

Strayed was going to be in town for the première of the film adaptation of her book, Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon, whose book club helped launch Strayed’s writing career into the stratosphere.

Vardalos interviewed Strayed dozens of times over the course of three years.

“When I read it, I knew that I would have to be pushed outside my comfort zone.”

“I asked her so many questions and she didn’t have any boundaries, which was incredible. She told me stories and truths about herself, which helped me find the overarching theme of the play — love, the pursuit of it and the safety of it and the security of it,” Vardalos says.

Strayed’s writing about topics including sexual assault, domestic abuse and drug usage felt visceral and honest — attributes that made Vardalos nervous at the prospect of mishandling the material; she’d felt that way before when writing about her own “big fat Greek” family, but it was markedly different when portraying the inner lives of an outside voice.

“I stopped and started (the script) many, many times, until I just sat down one day and said, ‘Come on. You want this? Go for it.”

Vardalos, who regularly mentors emerging storytellers through the Writers Guild of America, also wasn’t too shy to ask the advice columnist herself for feedback.

Strayed was flown to New York for a workshop production. Afterwards, “when I’d had a good cry,” Vardalos returned to ask Strayed for her notes.

“One of the things I found completely audacious was that I had to write in Cheryl’s voice while trimming, connecting or adding whole pieces that didn’t exist in the book. But Cheryl gave me permission in this way, with her generous heart, and said, ‘The book exists. The play is yours,’” says Vardalos.

“Cheryl gave me permission in this way, with her generous heart, and said, ‘The book exists. The play is yours.'”

Strayed gave Vardalos, Kail and Heyman the rights to the book on a handshake, and in the nine years since its debut, the play has been licensed more 250 times. Tiny Beautiful Things has been staged in Korea, Sri Lanka and Australia. Last May, the production ran in Greek at Athens’ Pallas Theater.

Now, Vardalos’s hit play arrives in Winnipeg, a city that was once and continues to be her hometown.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman