What to know
- Soulpepper’s The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience is running at Toronto’s CAA Theatre through Aug. 16.
- The production tells Leonard Cohen’s life story using only his own spoken and written words alongside performances of his best-known songs.
- The cast includes Divine Brown, Ben Caplan, Hailey Gillis, Travis Knights and Andrew Penner, backed by a live band.
- The 90-minute production features classics including Hallelujah, Suzanne, Bird on the Wire, Everybody Knows, and So Long, Marianne.
It’s no surprise that Soulpepper’s The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience, running through Aug. 16 at the Mirvish’s CAA Theatre in Toronto, starts with the opening lines to the late poet and musician’s most popular song “Hallelujah,” whose first verse contains the lyric that gives the musical its title.
“Now, I’ve heard there was a secret chord/That David played and it pleased the Lord/Buty ou don’t really care for music, do ya?” The way actor Andrew Penner delivers the line as he moves to the piano to plink out the next, “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift,” got a chuckle out of the audience on opening night, July 10.
But it’s what he says next that is paramount to the production: that all of the words have either been spoken or written by Cohen.
So, when you hear these words used in The Secret Chord to tell his life story, it reminds you what an extraordinary gift he had with language. It’s as if everything this man said was poetic and insightful. They are profound, romantic, conflicted, and often humorous.
Cohen died in 2016 at the age of 82.
Co-created by director Frank Cox-O’Connell, Mike Ross and Marni Jackson, Soulpepper first mounted The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience in 2018, then again in 2020 and 2023. It also had a run in Cohen’s hometown of Montreal in December 2024 into January; it returns Oct. 5-25, 2026.
Ross described the production “as above and beyond a tribute but made you feel a life.”
With a stellar cast — Divine Brown, Ben Caplan, Hailey Gillis, Travis Knights (also a tap dancer) and Andrew Penner — taking on Cohen classics and reimagining them as soul or sultry jazz or folk or faithful, they tell his story, including his love Marianne, his second home in Greece, his one-night stand with Janis Joplin, his five years in a monastery, and more.
Not to be trite but it really is well done.
The stage is simple, some chairs, a brick backdrop with floor-to-ceiling projections ranging from a photo of Cohen with Marianne to an aerial of Hydra in Greece to New York’s Chelsea Hotel.
The set list includes: “In My Secret Life,” “Bird On A Wire,” “Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” “Suzanne,” “Chelsea Hotel” with Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” “I’m Your Man,” “Everybody Knows,” “Take This Waltz,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Dance Me To The End Of Love,” “Future,” “You Want It Darker,” “Tower of Song,” “Closing Time,” “So Long Marianne,” and, of course, “Hallelujah.”
The band is also key: Jacob Gorzhaltsan (reeds), Joel Joseph (piano, music director), Tom Moffett (trumpet), Lowell Whitty (drums) and Roger Williams (bass), providing arrangements that range from understated to bold and soulful.
Tickets for the 90-minute show, are available at Mirvish.com or by calling 1-800-461-3333.
Mirvish suggests theatregoers watch the 44-minute Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen, in advance, the 1965 documentary from the National Film Board of Canada. It’s free to view here.
