Year in review: Looking back on a few standout moments in Vancouver’s theatre and dance scenes in 2025
Provocatively reimagined endings to opera and Shakespeare were among the random scenes that stuck with us from the year onstage
(Left to right) Nozomi Kato, Yasko Sato, and Myles Hunter-Gibbs in Vancouver Opera’s Madama Butterfly (Emily Cooper Photography photo); Peeping Tom’s Diptych (Virginia Rota photo); Melissa Oei and Marianna Zouzoulas in Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project (David Cooper photo).
INNOVATION WAS THE overriding impulse in the 2025 stage scene, whether in form-pushing multimedia theatre, reimagined classics, or surreal, mind-bending dance programs.
Some of the shows that made the biggest impact spoke strongly to the world today, through a twist at the end of a century-old opera or audience members stepping up to talk about how climate change has affected their lives. Others offered pure, dizzying escape.
Here are a few, but by no means all, of the stage moments that stood out to us in 2025. What were some that stuck with you?
Diptych
Presented by DanceHouse at the Vancouver Playhouse
In what was the dance year’s hottest ticket, visual trickery met choreographic sleight of hand for a surreal, cinematic experience. The bold Belgian company Peeping Tom built its hallucinatory double bill toward an astonishing climax of disembodied heads and screeching seagull sounds. After an array of inventive dance amid a vintage cruise ship and a No Exit–like room, the final break with reality marked a full, mind-blowing descent into insanity. And fittingly, the audience went crazy for it.
Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project
Presented by Electric Company Theatre at The Cultch
Music moved through Fire Never Dies, tracing Tina Modotti’s life across decades of art, revolution, love, and struggle. Cumbia carried the bohemian hubbub of 1920s Mexico City, while the Spanish Civil War reverberated through the solemn folk anthem “¡Ay, Carmela!”. As the noise of history temporarily fell away, the play tightened sharply around Tina and her heart. After spending the play colliding with each other, the two finally moved in step; Marianna Zouzoulas’s Tina danced opposite Melissa Oei, whose embodied corazón had long given form to the desires the titular character kept trying to outrun. Set to the taut, aching tango of Argentine composer Ástor Piazzolla, James Gnam’s choreography kept the two bodies pressed close, circling with a tension that held both grief and reconciliation inside its sensual precision.
Bard on the Beach’s production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Photo by Tim Matheson
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Presented by Bard on the Beach
There has always been something a little queasy about how The Two Gentlemen of Verona ends, and Bard on the Beach’s bright, ’80s-inflected production of the early Shakespeare comedy didn’t pretend otherwise. When Proteus cornered Silvia in this shoulder-padded, hairsprayed version, she didn’t freeze or wait to be rescued; she fought back, dropping the sleazy character before the smitten Valentine had a chance to play hero. What followed was classic teen-movie logic: the two boys made up, clasped hands, and jogged off together to the bombastic sound of Chariots of Fire. Silvia and Julia, however, didn’t rush to follow, and as they satisfyingly joined forces, the play’s giddy momentum only swelled.
Madama Butterfly
Presented by Vancouver Opera at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
Japan-born, Italy-based soprano Yasko Sato stunned audiences in VO’s post-Second World War–set version of Puccini’s classic, leaving them wiping away tears for the famed “Un bel di, vedremo” aria. But it was her altered final scene that made the biggest—and most timely—impact. Sato’s Butterfly lay dead, draped in a white kimono with blood-red lining, while her attendant Suzuki coaxed her young son to leave with U.S. naval officer Pinkerton to be raised by his new wife. But as the final chords rang out and the curtain came down, the boy dropped his Mickey Mouse doll and ran back into Suzuki’s arms in an act of wordless defiance.
Artists of Ballet BC in LILA by Sofia Nappi. Photo by Millissa Martin
TRILOGY
Presented by Ballet BC at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
To launch a season where audience energy feels like it’s reached new heights at Ballet BC, Italian sensation Sofia Nappi’s LILA opened the program; the full-throttle, whole-company group work was as cool as it was emotionally charged. Dancers dressed in rich hues of burgundy, camel, and black heaved, hunched, and lunged, rooted low to the ground, pumping their arms skyward—a throbbing mass caught in chiaroscuro light.
Lend Me a Tenor
Presented by Metro Theatre
It was a whirlwind of fun chaos as characters flew in and out of doors at the height of the farcical Lend Me a Tenor. The pitch-perfect Ken Ludwig comedy was notable for its attention to detail: every time a character swung open a door, you could glimpse what sat behind it, including packed closets and long hallways.
Neworld Theatre’s Eyes of the Beast. Photo by Chelsey Stuyt
Eyes of the Beast
Presented by Neworld Theatre at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
After about an hour of vividly embodied testimony—stories of floods, fires, and heat domes, carried by a nimbly coordinated ensemble from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts—Eyes of the Beast reached a moment when the show shifted hands. The cast stepped away, and with the help of a moderator, the audience, alongside a policy expert, was invited to reflect on their own experiences with climate disaster. Someone spoke about driving through smoke from the Lytton fire. Another talked about community efforts during the 2021 heat wave in the Downtown Eastside. Someone else spoke about what it did to their body. A man in the audience said it best: the play had moved his empathy “from the head to the gut”.
The Effect
Presented by Rumble Theatre and ITSAZOO Productions at Progress Lab 1422
The visual world of the bold, Kafka-esque The Effect, penned by Succession writer Lucy Prebble, heightened the story of two participants in a mysterious four-week drug trial of a new antidepressant. Monica Emme’s projections of brain diagrams, intake forms, and dosing charts mixed with Phil Miguel’s provocative lighting—from neon magenta through to electric blue—to intensify the characters’ emotional states and the drugs’ strange side effects. An exciting experiment in modes of storytelling.
The Arts Club Theatre Company’s Cambodian Rock Band. Photo by Moonrider Productions
Murmuration
Presented by DanceHouse, with community partner Canada Ice Dance Theatre, at Kerrisdale Cyclone Taylor Arena
This breathtaking piece from Le Patin Libre saw ice skaters gliding effortlessly around a rink as they mimicked a flock of birds. With contemporary and street dance influences, the performers hit formation after formation, all requiring the utmost precision—and executed beautifully. At one point, they converged into a flamboyance of flamingos and stuck their arms up one by one, curling their hands into beak shapes. Watching them putter across the ice, jerking their “beaks” to and fro, was a moment of delightful comedy in a piece chock full of exhilarating risks.
BOGOTÁ
Presented by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and New Works at the Vancouver Playhouse
Andrea Peña & Artists brought conceptual brilliance to the stage with this work that examined how colonization and genocide have impacted Colombia, layering historical and mythological elements in the process. Amid scenography that resembled a stripped-down concrete jungle, complete with a three-storey-high scaffolding structure, dancers leaned into animalistic ritual, with nudity emphasizing their rippling muscles and technical skill. One of the most thought-provoking scenes came when a dancer used a long wooden rod to whack a black piñata as Colombia’s national anthem sounded out through the theatre—and when it was all over, choreographer Peña walked humbly onstage, cleaning up the debris by using a Colombian flag as a rag.
Cambodian Rock Band
Presented by the Arts Club Theatre Company at the Stanley BFL CANADA Stage
Early on in Cambodian Rock Band, fictional group the Cyclos whipped the Stanley into a genuine rock-concert high. Just as Kimberly-Ann Truong’s powerhouse vocals and the band’s psychedelic Cambodian riffs rang out, loud, layered, and driving, the character of Comrade Duch (Nicco Lorenzo Garcia, as the Khmer Rouge prison commandant who would later oversee mass torture) stepped in and cut the fun short. From that point on, the show made sure that the songs couldn’t be heard without the history vibrating inside them, but it also never let up on its hypnotic and unruly concert energy. 
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