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music, lyrics & book by Ben Page, directed by Will Dao

Talk Is Free Theatre & Bluff City Theater, 80 Bradford Street, Barrie

January 24-31, 2026

Anton: “Death and I are friends”

Just a week after launching a new production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company in Toronto, Talk Is Free Theatre has given the new Canadian musical All The Cows Are Dead by Ben Page its world premiere in Barrie, its home base. Cows is musical just as unusual as its title. It’s funny, cerebral and outlandish all at once. Strange as its subject matter may be – the relationship between a butcher and a would-be poet – Page’s music is always inventive while the libretto delves into no lesser topics than life, death and art. It receives an extraordinarily imaginative production and features impeccable performances from Mike Nadajewski and Taylor Garwood.

Most two-person musicals deal with close relationships of some kind. Andrew Lippa’s John & Jen (1995) looked at the relationship of a brother and sister, Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years (2001) at the lives of a once-married couple and Neil Bartram’s The Story of My Life (2006) at the relationship of two male friends. Cows moves this model into new territory. It looks at the relationship of a master butcher Anton and his nephew Louie, his unwilling apprentice.

The musical is conceived as Louie’s narrative of his life with Anton. It begins as a hate-hate relationship and only gets weirder from there. When Louie is orphaned, Anton takes him in on the assumption that Louie will become a butcher. Louie, however, says he is a poet, the main problem being that he has never written a poem. Through the majority of the show, we see Anton attempt to instruct Louie in the art of butchering, hurling vicious abuse at him for the mistakes he makes. Meanwhile, Louie complains that Anton’s instruction is preventing him from writing.

The difficulty with taking Louie seriously is that all his notions of what a poet is come from the Romantic period of the 19th century. To Louie, being a poet is about suffering, being ugly and being an outcast from society. Louie feels he fulfils all these qualifications. All he needs to do is write something.

There is a turning point when Anton and Louie sit down to a special cut of beef for dinner. Anton thanks the cow for giving its life, just as some Indigenous people do before a meal. Like a sommelier with an unusually fine nose, Anton can detect not only whether the cow was happy or not and what it was eating but also what the weather was on its last day and what it was looking at. Anton expresses these ideas more poetically than anything Louie has said. Anton’s idea is that cows, in general, live happy lives. Death is quick, and then it is the task of the butcher to extend their lives by butchering them perfectly and making packets of meat that will bring pleasure to all who consume them.

We begin to realize that despite Anton’s ill treatment of Louie, Anton may be more of an artist and more of a poet than Louie. As an exercise, when Anton asks Louie to mark all the cuts of meat on Anton’s own body, we see how closely Anton identifies with the raw material of his art and how much he conceives of his work as beautiful. After the dinner scene the musical moves in extremely surprising directions.

Ben Page’s music closely inhabits the same world as Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979) in its use of songs written in slightly off-kilter dance rhythms in minor keys. Like Sweeney Todd the music and the text combine both comedy and foreboding tension. Page has scored the 75-minute-long piece for keyboard and cello, though a countertop call bell has the important function of signalling the start and finish of each scene. Perhaps the best scene before the unexpected conclusion is the comic duet for Anton and Louie where Anton tries to show Louie how to ingratiate himself with the clients.

Shaw and Stratford Festival veteran Mike Nadajewski is superb as Anton. Nadajewski has the ability simply through tone of voice to lend irony to anything he says. He can also easily harden his voice to make Anton’s constant abuse of Louie feel excessive. On the other hand, Nadajewski can also show us a completely different side of Anton that sincerely reveres beauty and nature. As usual, he commands a powerful singing voice.

We last saw newcomer Taylor Garwood as Dionysus’ trusty servant Xanthias in Sondheim’s The Frogs at the Shaw Festival last year. Garwood wonderfully conveys the innocence of Louie as well as Louie’s general naïveté about what a poet really is. Anton humiliates Louie so often that we can’t help but sympathize with the character even when we begin to think that Anton has correctly assessed his nature. Garwood sings with a fine voice full of emotion.

TIFT has become an expert at staging theatre in found locations. Cows is staged in one of the smaller rooms in the warren-like Barrie-By-the-Bay building at 80 Bradford Street. The room seats only 20 around three sides of the room. In keeping with the theme, designer Alessia Urbani has the audience enter the room through freezer strip curtains of which there are more at the back of the room in front of a metal prep table.

Urbani has clad both Anton and Louie in collarless shirts with bow ties and vests that seem to set the action in the late 1800s or early 1900s. Only a reference Anton makes lets us know Anton’s shop is in Canada.

Urbani’s cleverest idea of all, one of the cleverest I’ve seen in any show for a long time, is using balloons of all sizes – pink, red and maroon – to represent the cuts of meat hanging from the ceiling of the butcher shop. Sand-filled balloons plop onto plates with just the same impact as the cooked meat they represent. One of the funniest sequences in the show involves Louie singing about work while he uses a manual balloon pump to create “sausages” while he sings.

Director Will Dao has managed to choreograph dance sequences in the small playing area, and fight director Anita Nittoly has ingeniously devised a fight scene between Anton and Louie while they are both holding meat cleavers that never lets anything, so to speak, get out of hand.

In short, All The Cows Are Dead combines elements of comedy and the grotesque with a unique perspective on death and dining that should make the show popular as a cult musical. Since Urbani’s design is key to maintaining the show’s semi-absurdist atmosphere, I think further productions should be required to use it. For a Torontonian, Cows was certainly worth the drive through blowing snow to see. It’s one of those rare musicals that lightens the mood and tickles the brain at the same time.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Taylor Garwood as Louie and Mike Nadajewski as Anton; Mike Nadajewski as Anton and Taylor Garwood as Louie; Mike Nadajewski as Anton. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.tift.ca.