Rogers Communications is everywhere. Ubiquity is their business model and aesthetic: the brand paints our screens Rogers-red, and their marketing hounds me literally daily to level up my Internet to family-wide cellular. Even if you’re not a client, you’re always in the sights of their heat‑seeking sales efforts, and if you’re a a sports fan, you’re in the thrall of their Blue Jays-Maple Leafs-Raptors empire. And when their massive network collapses, as it so memorably did in 2022, the consequences ripple across our vast nation and ruin small lives: Interac payments stall, ATMs and online banking falter, and 911 access is imperiled.
So it’s an interesting proposition to shine a bright red dramatic spotlight on this pervasive company in all of its steroidally jacked-up, vertically integrated market muscle. It’s a potential irritant to those suffering from Rogers over-exposure, but it’s also a potential object of fascination. It’s a head‑scratcher and a no‑brainer. And so it’s probably no surprise that tickets for Rogers v. Rogers are moving briskly, and the show has been extended to January 17.
The play, adapted by Michael Healey from journalist Alexandra Posadzki’s nonfiction chronicle of the Rogers family and the boardroom, arrives at Crow’s Guloien Theatre at Streetcar Crowsnest with Chris Abraham directing and Tom Rooney starring … as everyone. Healey’s bona fides are unimpeachable — not least his award-winning, theatre-packing, and Toronto politics-inspired The Master Plan, which also ran at Crow’s in 2023.
Rogers v Rogers is spun from the same local interest cloth, but is a very different dramatic experience. The story intertwines three vectors. The first is the controversial years-long bid by Canada’s second‑largest telco, Rogers, to swallow the nation’s fourth-largest telco, Shaw. The second is the messy, Succession‑like battle of Rogers family members and others for control of the company after patriarch Ted Rogers’s death. And the third is an alternating‑current duet between two principals: Edward Rogers and Matthew Boswell. Rogers, of course, is the much-maligned son of Ted – and we get insight here into his childhood, career, and ascension to CEO, with the Shaw takeover serving as a capstone. Matthew Boswell, Canada’s Commissioner of Competition, uses data and common sense to warn that the consolidation of the Shaw takeover will inevitably harm consumers … even as his Bureau loses at the Competition Tribunal, and later on appeal.
The show program and the opening sequence insist loudly that this is a work of fiction: Healey has assembled and interwoven fictional monologues and dialogue atop the substance of Posadzki’s deeply reported book, which is a 2025 National Business Book Award winner. The book’s journalistic spine is felt in the show’s march through events, its “inside baseball” corporate vibe, and in Boswell’s quick, confident lessons about how over-consolidation happens, and why it so often manages to stick.
Abraham’s staging is at once corporate and frenetic. Joshua Quinlan’s set is the brand distilled: ubiquitous Rogers red, a boardroom table with screens behind and squares on the floor. It’s simple, functional, technological … and insidious. The action happens around, on top of, or beside that table, which is a metaphor for commercial dealmaking – while excursions into the principals’ pasts happen behind it, sometimes just out of sight. Measured exchanges of ideas are vanishingly rare. Instead, we get a succession of solipsistic monologues. When they lapse into dialogue, it’s breathless hot air and icy put‑downs, at a tempo that keeps sneaking the metronome faster.
In a virtuosic performance, Tom Rooney plays every single character in the show — with little more to mark the changes than swift, sly costume tweaks (Edward’s jacket; his wife’s garish earrings), voicework that catches Edward’s stutter and some accents, and quick changes in position. COVID‑era board meetings unfold with Rooney at the table as Edward, and Rooney also on all of the screens behind him, as each remote Director. Thanks to very clever choreography of live performance and camera work, he speaks all the parts in the meetings (most hilarious is his matriarch Loretta Rogers). We are engrossed, never confused.
Rooney’s greatest trick is eliciting sympathy for both Edward and Boswell, who are ironic opposite sides of the same coin. Part bemused and part despairing, Boswell is a smart, articulate regulator who guides us through the toothlessness of Canada’s Competition Act. The product of a good, normal family and a good, normal work ethic, he is persistently incredulous at the failure of his arguments to stop the Shaw takeover. His only satisfaction is some modest regulatory improvements that he points to at the very end of the play. By contrast, Edward is self‑declaredly unimpressive. A man-child, he is consistently belittled and mocked by his parents, siblings and business contacts. Nobody expects him to amount to anything, but he refuses no company role—no matter how demeaning—and learns just enough, and in his own way is tireless enough, to outwit, outplay, and outlast his rivals and become the CEO.
At one point, Edward notes that Ted did all the inspired, difficult work of building the company, so the successor CEO’s job is is easy: just train “the fire hose of cash” back into the company. Rogers v. Rogers is ultimately like that fire hose—spraying the audience with a frenetic, frequently funny deluge of corporate Canadiana, politics, family infighting, mockery, and little‑guy pluck.
Healey’s most overt lessons land hard: Rooney‑as‑Boswell literally teaches us how the Competition Act, which is meant to protect the public interest, really doesn’t. And in a memorable sequence, he even maps the regulation‑evading corporate structures and strategies of behemoths like Dollarama, Loblaws, and Canadian Tire. (I’ll never look at that maze of endless numbered aisles in the same way.)
And both Edward and Boswell ultimately hang their hats on “doing a thing”, which validates them with a measure of success, achieved despite their differently bad lots. But the inarticulate nature of the description – “a thing” – is telling. Though in at least in some way admirable, their separate accomplishments are objectively small: warmed-over leftovers from the dinner of Ted Rogers. And the casting only sharpens the critique: the fact that they—and Loretta Rogers, and sisters Martha and Melinda Rogers‑Hixon, and Board members David Peterson and John Tory, and CEOs Nadir Mohamed and Joe Natale —are all played by the same actor suggests their near interchangeability.
By show’s end, we’ve laughed – a lot – at these small, indistinguishable people, who achieved small “things” that, on balance, have made our small lives incrementally worse. So if we’ve learned anything, it’s that the joke’s on us. The only solace I can find is this: in a country where infrastructures are private fiefdoms (and within them, it’s open season on us), satire may just be our last true public utility. And it’s one that, in the 90 bracing minutes of Rogers v Rogers, provides a jolt of true power.
Rogers v. Rogers runs until January 17, 2026 at Crows Theatre. Tickets are available at crowstheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
