Klif Entertainment's Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody played a short run in Toronto before travelling east to Just for Laughs in Montreal.courtesy of Soulpepper Theatre/Supplied
- Title: Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody
- Written by: Dylan MarcAurele
- Performed by: Aaron Alcaraz, James Daly, Shakura Dickson, Steffi DiDomenicantonio, Ron Pederson
- Director: Alan Kliffer
- Company: Klif Entertainment
- Venue: Soulpepper Theatre, then Espace St-Denis
- City: Toronto, then Montreal July 17-19
When gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry barrelled into the hearts, minds and Crave queues of millions of fans late last year, its impact was near-immediate.
But in the months since Heated Rivalry’s release in November, 2025, the show, adapted by Jacob Tierney from Rachel Reid’s smutty Game Changers series, has become a bona fide phenomenon. Stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie are household names; the Prime Minister has a framed photo with Williams, the actor sporting his now-iconic Team Canada fleece, in his office. A certain theatre reporter and critic for The Globe and Mail continues to contemplate getting a Heated Rivalry-themed tattoo.
All to say: Heated Rivalry, perhaps more than any other viral TV show of the last decade, had all the makings of a musical parody. The first season’s few missteps were just minor enough to make great joke fodder; the show’s target audience overlapped just enough with Broadway’s for potential deep-cut musical references to land.
So it’s no surprise that Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody exists – or that Dylan MarcAurele’s script, wet with double entendres, is some of the most fun I’ve had in a theatre since the last time Monks played in Toronto.
What’s more startling is how long it’s taken Klif Entertainment’s New York-born production to cross the border to Canada. (And it’s still arguable as to whether the show has fully landed in this country: The version performed at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, and slated to travel to Just for Laughs in Montreal later this month, is a reading with music stands rather than a complete staging.)
Even so, it’s hard not to feel charmed by MarcAurele’s sassy spoof. Narratively speaking, the musical is a straightforward retelling of the TV show: We follow star hockey players Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander through a decade or so of quick hookups and deepening feelings for one another. Much like the series, MarcAurele’s script occasionally digresses into subplots – a particularly fun one involving an underwritten side character named Maria is a hilarious recurring gag.
And while the audience participation baked into MarcAurele’s confection might deter the spectators who didn’t choose to be there – the boyfriends, spouses and mildly concerned friends brought along as plus-ones by zealous Heated Rivalry buffs – there’s little to fear. The cast takes ample care of their voluntold victim, and at the performance I attended, the good-natured spectator cast as hockey giant Scott Hunter was terrific.
The whole thing is strung together by a frame narrative involving the “Susans” – the overwhelmingly cisgender, heterosexual housewives who helped launch Heated Rivalry into the stratosphere when it first premiered. The Susans speak with Minnesota-ish accents and sport voluminous hairdos that rival those of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader – we are them, and they are us, they proselytize to the audience, filled with devout Susans of all creeds.
Musically, too, Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody soars. Its pop-tinged score, not dissimilar to 2010s darlings such as Dear Evan Hansen or Be More Chill, makes intelligent, surprisingly obscure references to other musicals. (One extended melody from Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk’s Say the Word landed especially well with this musical theatre devotee.)
And the performances? Outstanding, obviously – they’re given by some of the most in-demand actor-singers in this country. James Daly offers a sultry take on Ilya (as well as a personified version of one of Ilya’s more titanic body parts), while Aaron Alcaraz soulfully croons as shy Shane. Both actors are masters at parody, never pushing a joke too far or playing a scene too (sorry!) straight.
A three-person ensemble, dressed in a rotation of increasingly awful wigs, makes up the rest of Heated Rivalry’s dramatis personae, from Shane’s mom (pushy, obsessed with Reeboks) to Ilya’s dad (bald, bald). Shakura Dickson, Steffi DiDomenicantonio and Ron Pederson make a fabulous trio, delivering performances note-perfect both in comedy and in pitch.
That said, there are kinks to iron out: MarcAurele’s score is too good to be performed without a live band, for one. Prerecorded tracks cheapen the experience, which would be fine for a worse show – but Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody, with its refreshingly sophisticated songs, deserves better than that.
And while director Alan Kliffer’s staged reading configuration of the show’s first Canadian engagements works, kind of, it’s clear the project will be all the richer when it inevitably returns north of the border for a full production in the months and years to come. (The fully staged version is currently playing off-Broadway, and, starting this fall, in Britain.)
These are legitimate quibbles, even irritations. But even so, Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody achieves the near-impossible. It captures the restless beating heart of Reid’s novels, and Tierney’s screenplay, without once punching down at the material. It doesn’t even make fun of the Susans, not really – in its way, it celebrates them, weaving together wine-mom silliness with highly technical witticisms and tuneful songs.
From one Susan to another, I invite you to join me in waiting for Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody to return to the country of its source material’s origin. I’ll doubtless be there, harmonizing with my fellow fans to songs about a fictional Russian hockey player’s rear end.