Frontmezzjunkes reports: TIFT’s All The Cows Are Dead

By Ross

There are certain theatre companies I trust enough that, even when I can’t immediately get myself into the room, I still want to pay attention. Talk Is Free Theatre is firmly one of them. Over the years, TIFT has earned a reputation for asking big questions with rigour, emotional intelligence, and a refusal to play it safe. And their upcoming world premiere of All The Cows Are Dead sounds very much in that lineage.

Written by Ben Page (Leaving Eden) and opening January 23 in Barrie, All The Cows Are Dead is described as a new Canadian musical about an artisan butcher and his misanthropic nephew, a premise that already feels delightfully sideways. What’s compelling isn’t just the odd-couple dynamic, but the idea at the heart of it; that the butcher and the poet are, somehow, the same person. It’s a poetic provocation about craft, mastery, masculinity, and creation. It’s about what it means to make something with your hands, and what it costs to do so. In a theatrical landscape that too often treats musical theatre as either comfort food or spectacle, this feels like a piece aiming for something meatier, stranger, and far more intimate than I personally can imagine.

Artistic Producer Arkady Spivak’s description of the work as epic yet intimate, dark yet hopeful, and generous with the musical form while interrogating it only heightens my intrigue. There’s a confidence in how TIFT talks about this show that suggests a company deeply aligned with the material, and with an emerging writer whose voice they believe in enough to give it a world premiere. Directed by Will Dao and starring Mike Nadajewski (Shaw Festival’s Gnit) and Taylor Garwood (TIFT’s The Frogs at the Shaw), the production also boasts a lean, thoughtful creative team and a site-specific staging that promises immediacy rather than polish for polish’s sake.

What makes this moment particularly exciting is that All The Cows Are Dead is arriving alongside TIFT’s upcoming production of Company, which I’m eagerly anticipating. To see a company place a brand-new Canadian musical in conversation with one of Sondheim’s most searching works feels intentional, even poetic. Both projects seem preoccupied with loneliness, craft, and the ache for connection. One through is a haunted bachelor’s mind, the other is through the unexpected kinship between butcher and poet.

Even from a distance, All The Cows Are Dead, directed by Will Dao (Lady Luck’s Gulp), reads like the kind of risk I want theatre companies to keep taking: new work, emerging voices, bold form, and real thematic ambition. If this is what TIFT is bringing into 2026, then it’s a season worth watching closely.