Rogers v. Rogers is v good

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• Title: Rogers v. Rogers
• Written by: Michael Healey, based on Rogers v. Rogers: The Battle for Control of Canada’s Telecom Empire by Alexandra Posadzki
• Directed by: Chris Abraham
• Starring: Tom Rooney
• Company: Crow’s Theatre
• Venue: Guloien Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs to Jan. 17, 2026

Critic’s Pick

Many nations have a symbol that represents the last straw from oppression run amok, the inspiration that mounts an uprising of concern from the depths of complacency.

For Canadians, it may well be the $4 tomato.

All right, it may not have the same ring to it as a battle cry from William Wallace, but, as Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell explains, the feeling of intense frustration and slight stupidity you get when realizing you’ve little choice but to purchase overpriced produce is really the feeling of your freedoms slowly slipping away.

Boswell is one of two key figures in Rogers v. Rogers, a dizzying one-man showcase for Tom Rooney brought to you by much of the Crow’s Theatre team behind recent smash The Master Plan, including playwright Michael Healey and director Chris Abraham. Like that show, it’s another distinctly Toronto story of business intrigue and incompetence that results in life becoming slightly worse for everyone, a financial education wrapped in a direct-address entertainment package full of jokes about how very little we know about the forces shaping our lives.

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A fictionalized, satirical version of Globe and Mail journalist Alexandra Posadzki’s National Business Book Award-winning Rogers v. Rogers: The Battle for Control of Canada’s Telecom Empire, it chronicles the bumpy rise of nebbish heir Edward Rogers, who seeks to supplant the memory of his father, Ted, with a successful Rogers-Shaw merger, and the government commissioner tasked with stopping him.

Rogers v. Rogers’ focus on family drama means that it doesn’t quite match The Master Plan’s frenetic heights of urban bureaucratic madness. However, it still delivers a sizzling, rapid-fire tale served with a side of consumer protection righteousness that will have audiences ready to throw some corporate tomatoes … or possibly just switch mobile phone providers.

“Canada was a company before it was a country,” says Boswell. A deeply angry man (who has been to therapy and apologizes for his constant swearing), he channels his rage into trying to protect Canadians from the near-infinite ways they can “get screwed” by corporations providing the illusion of choice, owning multiple brands so that they’re only competing against themselves. His job is a laughably losing battle, arguing cases before a tribunal that has never fully blocked a merger between two major companies.

Appropriately for a man with no exit, he’s standing in set designer Joshua Quinlan’s boardroom of the damned drenched in Rogers red, backed by a phalanx of wraparound screens and supported by a glowing floor that’s half tech toy and half metaphorical window to hell.

Running the audience through a simplified version of the legislation and history behind our current monopoly-heavy predicament driving up prices on everything from vegetables to funerals, he promises not to bore us.

But Boswell’s story, he recognizes, is not why we’re here; in the matchup of Rogers v. Boswell, one of the parties is barely acknowledged and swatted like a bug. Even the commissioner realizes he’s somewhat ancillary to a dishy story about a family empire and its near-mythical central figure who refuses to be unseated even after his death.

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Just like how Canadian Tire offers you five brands all owned by Canadian Tire, Healey shows that the competition here is coming from inside the house. The one-man nature of the show calls attention to how much destruction gets caused by a family fighting itself for dominance in the public eye, nobody seemingly more at fault than Edward Rogers, the disregarded, socially awkward son who grovels in the background before attempting a hostile takeover.

Healey outlines the making of a sociopathic businessman, Rooney becoming at turns the family’s sympathetic butler, a rival cable provider, and Edward’s wife Suzanne (sporting garishly large Christmas tree earrings from costume co-ordinator Elaine May) to tell a tale of familial neglect framed as self-sufficiency and a son who will stop at nothing to fight his own demons, even if he isn’t especially good at it.

Rooney emphasizes Edward’s halting delivery and awkward presence, a man responsible for connecting most of Canada who’s unable to connect with another human being. A scene where Healey contrasts Edward’s confident recollection of a business dinner with his guest’s terrified memory of the evening is a glorious masterclass in skewed perception.

As the walls close in on the merger, a brilliant, showy Zoom call becomes a triumphant marriage of performance and technology that allows Rooney to embody the entire Rogers board simultaneously, playing each speaker in real time by merging prerecorded snippets with live video.

While his take on Edward is so strong that it occasionally bleeds into other roles, his caricatures of siblings Martha and Melinda Rogers and the formidable matriarch Loretta made me long for a one-man Rooney Twelve Angry Men. Perhaps next year.

Meanwhile, video designer Nathan Bruce’s work places this squarely in the Master Plan cinematic universe, projected cityscapes, faceless icons and organizational flow charts showing us who’s on top and who’s out.

Rogers v. Rogers’ need to balance corporate and familial intrigue while incorporating an outside narrator sometimes makes things feel a little unstable. There’s a promising thread that compares Edward’s neglectful parents to Boswell’s supportive ones, casting the latter as victims of fate, that comes in a little late to be a truly satisfying parallel.

But three cheers for this new brand of branded Canadian stories coming out of Crow’s, which give us a chance to make sense of the corporate disasters that shape our lives.

Because whether we like it or not, that’s just the way the tomato splats.