Year in review: Best moments of 2024 on Vancouver stages
Random scenes and songs that stood out across music, theatre, opera, and dance
Vancouver Opera’s Carmen, with Latin American-flavoured sets from Opera Philadelphia. Photo by Emily Cooper; Cirque Alphonse’s Barbu at the Cultch. Photo by Frédéric Barrette
FROM HILARIOUS NEW TWISTS on circus arts to stunning opera and ballet, the year was full of memorable moments onstage.
Some of them were quietly chilling; others were awe-inducing; and still others were perspective-shifting.
What follows is just a random assortment of the ones that stuck with us most. And here’s to many more magic moments in 2025.
Barbu
A Cirque Alfonse production at The Cultch Historic Theatre
This raucous Quebec circus party had loads of laughs—say, bearded acrobats stopping in the audience to guzzle patrons’ beer—but one gravity-defying stunt had the crowd momentarily stunned into silence. Fierce performer Laura Lippert twirled high above The Cultch audience from her braided mane, hanging from her hair as she swung around mere feet over people’s seats. Ouch.
Carmen
Presented by Vancouver Opera at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
When Sarah Mesko’s Carmen sang Georges Bizet’s iconic “Habanera” in Vancouver Opera’s visually sumptuous, vintage-Latin American-feeling production, the sky magically switched from golden daylight to dusky purple behind silhouetted palm trees. Faded yellow-plaster colonial buildings and peeling bullfight billboards completed the transfixing highlight in a show that had atmosphere to burn.
Dawn Petten in Bard on the Beach’s Twelfth Night. Photo by Tim Matheson
Twelfth Night
Presented by Bard on the Beach at Vanier Park
Dawn Petten absolutely killed as Malvolia in this music-filled, big-top-set Twelfth Night. In the hit summer show’s funniest sequence—the one where a trio of pranksters convince her to don ridiculous yellow stockings—she was blindfolded and spun around on a carnival Wheel of Fortune. Outrageous and hilarious—okay, even if it was objectively cruel.
lossy
A Company 605 production, at SFU Woodward’s as part of Dancing on the Edge
In one of the coolest sequences in this knockout, neon-lit premiere, a group of dancers pulsed together to a rising house beat, their feet frozen in place on a central rug. Suddenly their grooving fell into such powerful synch that they started to slide the carpet across the floor. But it didn’t just look awesome: the moment was metaphorical, embodying the way humans can finally find a way to move beyond the inertia of grief—often with the help of others.
Otto Tausk.
Tausk Conducts Shostakovich and Adams
Presented by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum
It took 39 years for John Adams’s minimalist-infused defence of tonality, Harmonielehre, to finally premiere in B.C. It was worth the wait. Music director Otto Tausk led the VSO through a dazzling performance of the captivating work, which opens with relentless hammering blasts of horn and timpani and moves through pulsating polyrhythms with an unyielding forward momentum, building over 40 minutes to an ecstatic E-flat major chord. What a ride.
Choir Boy
Presented by the Arts Club Theatre Company and Canadian Stage at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage
The highlight of this musical about a group of young, Black students at a prep school was the hymns and spirituals, arranged by Floydd Ricketts and Dawn Pemberton with the cast. And amid the gospel songs, a resounding highlight was “Motherless Child”, rising in an a capella chorus from something mournful to a crescendo of hope, fire, and resilience.
Jakub Józef Orliński and Il Pomo D’Oro
Presented by Vancouver Recital Society at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
The Polish countertenor (and model! and breakdancer!) kept Vancouver audiences rapt in his local debut. One of the top concerts of the year reached its zenith with the spine-tinglingly sorrowful finale “Lungi dai nostri cor” (from just-about-unknown Sebastiano Moratelli’s sublime, 17th-century La faretra smarrita)—leading to Orliński climbing into the audience and launching into a series of encores.
Pli at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Photo by Loïc Nys
Pli
Presented by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and Chutzpah! Festival at the Vancouver Playhouse
This utterly unique dance-circus work from France’s Les SUBS was so nail-biting, one audience member actually let out a scream during its most suspenseful scene on opening night. Performer Inbal Ben Haim had climbed a rope made from paper sheets that was hanging from the rafters, where she remained impossibly suspended nearly 20 feet above the stage floor. It was when she began ripping off the sheets below her, one by one, that the nerves really set in. But the last knot of paper held, and with no connection back down to the floor, Ben Haim hung from it upside down with her arms dangling for what seemed like ages. The split second was a true testament to finding strength in fragility—and to the mind-boggling possibilities offered by the humble piece of paper.
The Tempest Project
Presented by Music on Main at the Vancouver Playhouse
In The Tempest Project, audience members got to venture into the sprawling underbelly of the Vancouver Playhouse, to view short works inspired by the themes of love, revenge, forgiveness, and freedom found in Shakespeare’s 1611 play The Tempest. A memorable moment came when a couple dozen guests filed into a dressing room with mirror-lined walls and vanity light bulbs. Each person took a seat while Music on Main’s artistic director David Pay and pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa wordlessly directed audience members to take part in an a cappella storm soundscape. It started with whistling “whhhhooooshhhh” sounds and rubbing hands together for a sandy “shhhhhh” noise. Then came the feet stomping, hands banging on countertops, and coat hangers rattling against wardrobe walls—what a riot.
Gravity & Other Myths’ The Mirror. Photo by Andy Phillipson
The Mirror
A Gravity & Other Myths production, presented by DanceHouse and The Cultch at the Vancouver Playhouse
The Aussie circus mavericks’ saucy spectacle featured cinema-like wipe edits, via dancers moving a giant black curtain back and forth across the stage. And so it was that it passed in front of a massive, gravity-mocking sculptural tower of people standing on each others’ shoulders; then, within seconds, it pulled back the other way to reveal a guy, standing in his underwear, wondering where the hell his mates went. Laughs with serious acrobatic chops.
ANOHNI and The Johnsons
At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
It was stunning to witness ANOHNI sing through the darkness backed by a small orchestra of nine, white-suited musicians, but it was her fragile, eco-warning “Manta Ray”, performed only with pianist Gael Rakotondrabe, that was most riveting. The haunting lament for ocean extinction was mesmerizing yet unsettling—a lullaby for the end of the world.
Ballet BC dancers Rae Srivastava and Jacalyn Tatro in Frontier by Crystal Pite. Photo by Michael Slobodian
DAWN
Presented by Ballet BC at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
Late in the local premiere of choreographic star Crystal Pite’s Frontier, masses of “shadow figures” in black hoods and face masks pooled across the stage, moving like a single, liquid entity. The Ballet BC dancers became a spreading black hole, a throbbing void of dark matter, a gathering force of the unconscious. Stunning, sinister, and a testament to the power of sophisticated choreography to conjure the impossible and intangible.
Rachel Fenlon
Presented by the Vancouver Recital Society at the Vancouver Playhouse
UBC Opera alum and soprano Rachel Fenlon delivered a uniquely intimate recital when she accompanied herself on piano through Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle. Her captivating and wholly immersive performance peaked with her emotional delivery of the 23rd and penultimate song, “Die Nebensonnen”. Those who missed it (or want to relive it) are in luck: the performance also marked the launch of Fenlon’s debut album, the first recording of the song cycle featuring voice and accompaniment by a single artist.
Fat Joke
A Neworld Theatre production presented by The Cultch at the Vancity Culture Lab
Early in Cheyenne Rouleau’s fearless riff on body shaming—part TED Talk, part standup, part theatre monologue—the actor primed her audience with a tongue-in-cheek flow chart. Titled “Can I laugh at this problematic joke?”, it was followed by an even more absurdly complex one to help decide “Is it more offensive not to laugh?”. The hilarious “lesson” worked on multiple levels, acknowledging that a lot of her comedy would be deeply uncomfortable but also getting the audience to let its guard down and open up to truly perspective-shifting ideas. (If you missed it, catch the show when it sees a remount at the Anvil Centre from January 31 to February 2.)
Vicky Chow. Photo by Jan Gates
Vicky Chow
Presented by Music on Main at Christ Church Cathedral
Following up on her acclaimed 2023 performance of Book 1 of Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes, pianist Vicky Chow returned with Music on Main once again, picking up where she left off with a dazzling, sold-out performance of Book 2. The Vancouver-raised virtuoso clearly relished bringing out the twists and turns of these later studies, emphasizing their tonal contrasts and rhythmic U-turns with a sense of fearless abandon. But it was the final lullaby-like “Etude 20”, a gentle and impressionistic study that Chow delivered with delicate sensibility, that lingered on long after the final notes had faded.
Social Tango
Presented by DanceHouse with the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre at the Vancouver Playhouse
Following this sultry Argentinian production that brought to life an authentic Buenos Aires milonga onstage, patrons gathered in the Playhouse salon after the show for a real-life tango happening that went on well into the night. It was a perfect illustration of the power of tango—and a magical moment of a performance spilling out into real life.
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