It’s unusual to leave a show feeling genuinely unsettled, yet thoroughly exhilarated. Ben Page’s All the Cows Are Dead delivers that rare experience. This new Canadian musical — assuredly directed by Will Dao, performed with reckless abandon in an industrial space that reverberates with death and unexpected life — is a weird, wonderfully creepy two-hander unlike anything else playing in Toronto.
The venue is Soul Provisions, a restaurant and food provider at 68 Tycos Drive in North York. We enter through the rear of the building and proceed through the store to an intimate, white-walled space where Talk Is Free Theatre has mounted the Toronto premiere of the show, which debuted in Barrie earlier this year. The action and the sound are BIG, and we’re right up close with the performers. They look us in the eye, at times try to get us to laugh or acknowledge their point of view … even interact directly with us.
Mike Nadajewski’s Anton is an old-style neighbourhood butcher, perfectly coiffed in bowtie and white jacket. While smoothly managing his customers, he carves carcasses with an artist’s gusto and commitment to craft. He won’t willingly waste a morsel. Nadajewski plasters on the smile and delivers a deeply sinister, perversely heartfelt performance: he’s like a sausage casing packed with fondly misremembered “traditional” values seasoned with modern toxic masculinity. The space reverberates with his loud confidence, his menacing career advice, and the metallic thrust and parry of his cleaver.
Taylor Garwood’s Louie is Anton’s orphaned nephew. He’s a self-styled new kind of poet, who hasn’t written anything and apparently won’t … because he doesn’t want to start out by being bad at writing. Garwood’s performance is wonderful: oddly nervous and twitchy, yet naively assertive—until, under Anton’s tenderizing, it grows into something more.
Perhaps improbably, Anton wants the reluctant Louie to become a butcher like him—and All the Cows Are Dead becomes the garish, loud, implacable and sometimes violent story of Louie’s apprenticeship. Together, this duo makes magic, nowhere more so than in the songs: unexpected Sondheimesque delights, their harmonies fill the intimate room, backed by Page’s spirited keyboards and Kyra Crilly’s moody cello.
The design matches the performances in inventiveness. Alessia Urbani’s special brilliance is how coloured balloons in various combinations represent hanging cuts of meat and sausages. The tension created by sharp blades whirling in close proximity to balloons proves an elegant stand-in for the horror of blood-spurting butchery. The set is deceptively simple — little more than balloons across the ceiling, a metal table rolled in and out for cutting and for eating, some rags for cleaning, and a couple of cleavers. But the principals fill the space to bursting with tension, testosterone, and song.
What’s especially fascinating is that the show is NOT what it could so easily be. All the Cows Are Dead is not a treatise on animal rights or cruelty (unless it’s one so sophisticated that I missed it entirely). To the contrary, Anton is downright reverential in his discussion of cows and cuts of meat. Cows, he insists (Vegans, cover your ears), are the only animal whose death IS their purpose. They exist to become the cuts of meat that many of us consume. Anton laments the differentness of human life — where our purpose is uncertain and too much up for discussion—something which is the source of frequent, often funny disagreement between uncle and nephew
Instead, All the Cows Are Dead is for me a surrealistic treatise on how we find (or are caused to find, and make our peace with) our purpose in life. And the play’s shocking ending — a slo-mo, mood-lit, singing-choreographic tour de force set up neatly in an earlier song — offers pointed, provocative commentary on what finding purpose looks like for a young person like Louie and an older one like Anton … and how the two depend on one another, though they may not like it.
Weird, wild, wonderful—and sold out for its Toronto run. All the Cows Are Dead certainly proves that creator Ben Page has carved out their purpose.
All the Cows Are Dead runs through November 18, 2026 at Soul Provisions, 68 Tycos Drive, North York. Running time: approximately 80 minutes. For more information on this sold-out show, visit tift.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
