No lengthy preamble this month. Let’s go!
For Mark Mothersbaugh, scoring a film means interpreting the language of the director
(Stir, October 1, 2026)
Scoring Pee-wee’s Playhouse was an entirely different proposition. It kept Mothersbaugh just as busy, but he was delighted to spend most of his working hours in the studio as opposed to slogging it out on the road.
“On Monday they’d send me the tape,” he recalls. “On Tuesday I would write 12 songs’ worth of music. On Wednesday I’d record it. On Thursday I’d put my reels of tape in the mail and send them to New York, and on Friday they’d mix it into the show—and on Saturday we watched it on TV. And then on Monday they sent me another tape. I was like, ‘Oh, wow, sign me up for this job.’ I just loved the idea of getting to write more instead of this long cycle of touring. That’s what got me into scoring things. The show was pretty successful, and I got lots of calls after that…”
Vancouver Opera Takes a Trip to Italy
(MONTECRISTO, October 7, 2026)
Last year, using information gleaned from the astoundingly comprehensive website Operabase, the Chicago public-radio station WFMT put together a list of the 20 operas most frequently performed in the 21st century.
Taking the top spot was La Traviata, Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 tear-jerker based on the play La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. According to WFMT, there were 18,732 performances of La Traviata between 2000 and 2025.
Coming in hot in the number two slot was The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with 18,332 stagings during the time frame in question.
And so it goes, with Carmen, La Bohème, The Marriage of Figaro—opera’s greatest hits, essentially. Opera companies worldwide are savvy enough to program crowd pleasers: mostly Italian masterpieces composed in the 19th century.
Vancouver Opera’s general director, Tom Wright, understands this reality better than most, thanks to hard-earned experience…
Bury the Hatchet reopens the century-old case of the Borden murders
(Stir, October 13, 2026)
In 1892, someone wielding a hatchet murdered Andrew and Abby Borden—Lizzie’s father and stepmother—in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home. Lizzie was tried for the murders in 1893, and a jury acquitted her. Even so, Monster unequivocally depicts her committing the gruesome crimes, and even throws in an unsubstantiated secret romance between the alleged killer and the family’s live-in maid, Bridget Sullivan.
None of this sits right with Sasha Wilson, who wrote and stars in Bury the Hatchet, a stage musical based on the Borden case that’s coming to New West’s Anvil Theatre.
“You have to be mindful of the fact that these were living, breathing human beings with wishes, dreams, fears, hopes,” Wilson tells Stir on a Zoom call from her home in London. “You can’t just turn this into a lesbian murder fantasy because you feel like making a new season of television…”
The Array: Supermassive Black Hole explores cosmic themes through experimental theatre
(Stir, October 14, 2026)
BLACK HOLES ARE very much in the news these days, and we’re not talking about the dead eyes of whatever soulless lizard person the Trump White House has wheeled out as its new press secretary this week. No, we mean real black holes. The outer-space kind.
On October 13, for example, the website IFLScience reported that astronomers are close to discovering the source of anomalous “ghost particles” coming from a supermassive black hole at the centre of the delightfully named Squid Galaxy. Just the day before, SPACE.com told its readers that a different team of astronomers had witnessed another supermassive black hole at the heart of the Perseus Cluster “burping radio jets 300 days after a heavy cosmic meal”.
The timing could not be more perfect, then, for Upintheair Theatre to present a show called Supermassive Black Hole. This is the sixth installment of The Array, a series in which Upintheair asks local theatre artists to create new works inspired by recent developments in science…
Ghibli Jazz Orchestra pays a big-band tribute to beloved animation studio’s soundtracks
(Stir, October 15, 2026)
HANG AROUND WITH enough musicians and you’ll hear all sorts of high-concept ideas for new bands. For example—hear me out!—what if there were an outfit that only played Michael Jackson songs in the style of the Ramones, and it was called, of course, the Shamones?
Okay, that might be a terrible example, but sometimes an idea is too good to pass up, like the one Isabel Leong came up with back in her student days at Capilano University.
“I was in my second year of university at Cap, studying jazz, and a couple of my friends and I were talking about cool ideas for bands and things like that,” she tells Stir in a recent phone interview. “And I mentioned, ‘I think it would be really cool to have a full big band play some music from Studio Ghibli,’ and all of them were like, ‘That would be really cool. You should do it.’ So I did…”
Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors takes a bite out of the gothic-horror classic’s sexual politics
(Stir, October 19, 2026)
It’s anyone’s guess what Stoker would make of the Arts Club’s production of Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, which subverts the sexual politics of his novel by not only having Mina played by a man (Jeff Meadows), but also by casting the title role with a woman, Synthia Yusuf.
“I believe she’s going to be the first woman to play Dracula in any version of this script by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen,” says Steffanie Davis, who plays three roles in the show. “Which is awesome because she gets to play with and express Dracula’s masc presence, but through the lens of a woman. It’s very interesting to see those words and also that physicality and the intentions of that character, but through her eyes, so you can see how ridiculous and outdated those words and that character is even more so through her lens…”
In Death and Taxes, Brass Tax and Gerardo Avila celebrate life through music and clowning
(Stir, October 20, 2026)
GIVEN HOW LONG they’ve known each other, it’s surprising that before now, Gerardo Avila and Nathan Barrett had never worked together. Barrett is the trumpet player and leader of the band Brass Tax. Mexican-born Avila is an artist of many talents, from mime to magic, but he’s probably best-known for his work as a clown, which includes a stint with Cirque du Soleil.
In a Zoom call with Stir, Avila notes that he has known Barrett all his life.
“I have worked with Nathan’s father for many years—Ross Barrett, famous saxophonist of Vancouver—and Nathan is also my godson,” he says. “This is our first collaboration in a show.”
Barrett, who is seated next to Avila on the call, a baby on his knee, adds, “Gerardo has been very influential to me. He’s a master clown and an amazing performance artist, so I grew up watching him running around with my dad; my dad would be playing saxophone and Gerardo would be clowning. It really informed my approach to performance art, too, just watching Gerardo work…”
With BlackGate, Ireland’s Caimin Gilmore steps into the spotlight
(Stir, October 20, 2026)
IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT a new-music composer finds himself performing for an audience of 13,000 people, but Caimin Gilmore isn’t just any new-music composer. The Irish musician is also an in-demand freelance double-bass player, which explains why, when Stir gets him on a Zoom call, he is fresh from a gig with Hozier at Dublin’s 3Arena the night before.
The occasion was the kickoff show of American rap superstar Macklemore’s three-show Free Palestine benefit tour. Hozier was a surprise guest at the concert, and Gilmore and other string players joined the Irish singer-songwriter for a six-song set that included the hits “Too Sweet” and “Take Me to Church”.
“This is the first night I’ve been at home in about six weeks,” Gilmore says. “I’ve been out on the road. I was actually just in Canada, in Montreal, with Teaċ Daṁsa, which is an Irish dance company, doing a piece called MÁM. I’m on the road with another two Irish singer-songwriters, called Declan O’Rourke and David Kitt, over the next couple of months…”
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