Theatre 2025: Rogers v. Rogers @ Crow's Theatre

Rogers v. Rogers is a new play by acclaimed Canadian playwright Michael Healey, who is known for writing “The Drawer Boy” and “Master Plan”.  His new endeavour was commissioned by Crow’s Theatre and is based on Globe and Mail business journalist Alexandra Posadzki's 2024 book Rogers v. Rogers: The Battle for Control of Canada’s Telecom Empire.  It deals with the epic familial power struggle between the heirs of Ted Rogers’ telecommunication company Rogers Communications.  Ted began building his empire by purchasing the Toronto FM station CHFI in 1960, then continuously added cable TV, broadcasting, internet, wireless mobile, and media operations over the decades until the various entities incorporated as Rogers Communications in 1987.

Facing his mortality amid health concerns, Ted wanted to ensure that his company remained under the control of the Rogers family.  To that end, shortly before his death in 2008, he established a Control Trust that holds about 97.5% of the company’s Class A Voting shares.  The trust is overseen by an advisory committee plus a corporate trustee (Bank of Nova Scotia). Ted assigned his immediate family members including his wife Loretta and four children (Edward, Melinda, Martha and Lisa), as well as a close cousin David Robinson and a few trusted outsiders to the advisory committee.  Edward was named the Chair of the Trust which gave him the most power, and Melinda was designated the Vice-Chair.  While this group works independently from the Rogers Communications Board of Directors, it wields control over the board due to this overwhelming majority voting block.

The power struggle for control of Rogers Communications began after Joe Natale, former CEO at Telus, was brought in as CEO in 2017.  He held this position through 2021 as he helped navigate the contentious attempt to merge Rogers with Shaw Communications, a move which Canada’s Competition Board sought to block.  Wanting to become CEO himself, Edward cited dissatisfaction with Natale’s performance due to Rogers’ low share price and its customer growth lagging behind Bell and Telus, as well as Natale’s mishandling of the merger.  Edward’s push for the ouster of Natale led to the Rogers board attempting unsuccessfully to remove Edward as Chair of the Control Trust.  He countered by using that power as Chair to remove 5 dissenting board members.  All this led to court battles with Edward facing off against his sisters Melinda and Martha and his mother Loretta who challenged his authority to unilaterally fire board members without a shareholders’ meeting.  The fight played out in the press, leading to comparisons to the hit TV show Succession which was popular at the time. Ultimately, Edward won the court challenge and his victory was complete when the Shaw merger was also successful.

Michael Healey’s play Rogers v. Rogers delves into this turmoil, with actor Tom Rooney playing all the characters in a one-man tour-de-force performance.  The set consists of an office boardroom with a long table and many swivel chairs, a multi-windowed digital screen along the back wall and a digital floor that changed colours throughout the play.  The back screen provided visual context for to clarify explanations provided by the various characters.

Instead of directly focusing on the dysfunctional Rogers family, Healey opens the play with the character of Matthew Boswell, the commissioner and head of Canada’s Competition Bureau.  Using the back screens like a digital blackboard, Boswell acts as a narrator, providing background about the Competition Act of 1985 including its deficiencies and the adverse effects on consumer prices when there is a lack of competition.  He gives multiple examples where companies such as Loblaws and Dollarama create the illusion of competition by swallowing up or merging with a slew of smaller companies which are rebranded but actually all owned by one parent company.  Rooney represents Boswell as a moral, passionate, and frenetic character who throws around “F-bombs” at will.  In his initial rant, he alludes to the stressful time his team went through in trying to oppose the merger between Rogers and Shaw Communications, with more details coming out throughout the play.  Boswell’s frustrated diatribes are tempered by calming words from his wife, who Rooney transforms into via a mere sidestep and a change of tone, demeanor and posture.

By donning an apron and speaking with a European accent, Rooney next becomes the Spanish butler Ricardo, the de facto parent-figure who provided the day-to-day childcare for the Rogers children.  Through this character we learn about Ted Rogers’ difficult childhood with a father who died when he was five and an alcoholic mother who shipped him off to Upper Canada College boarding school between the age of 7-17.  Throughout these years, Ted was not allowed to go home even though he was a mere 9 blocks away from his house.  Despite these hardships and the loneliness that he endured, Ted was determined to exceed his father’s achievements, spurring his own drive and risk-taking mindset.  As a result of his ambitions and workaholic nature, Ted was not around much for his children, as noted by the butler.  He also set extremely high standards which his offspring found difficult to meet.  Edward was described as a weak, insecure and neglected child who craved his father’s approval and compensated by overeating, while Melinda was seen as the intelligent, competent child who was a natural leader, but somehow still not good enough to take over the company, perhaps owing more to her gender than anything else.

By the time we finally see Edward and Melinda as actual characters, they are young adults that have been pitted against each other by their father in competition for his approval.  Rooney flips between the pair by having Edward hold a cup of coffee which he sets down and crosses the stage to reply as Melinda.

Visual cues were used to differentiate between the various characters, especially in terms of dress and wardrobe.  Matthew Boswell’s character usually appeared jacketless, unless he was in a rapid-fire back and forth conversation with Edward, who usually wore a suit jacket with a red pocket square once he reached adulthood.  Edward’s wife Suzanne wore large gold, dangling earrings and at one point when Edward and Suzanne had a conversation with each other, Rooney would sport the earring on only one ear and would turn from side to side to represent each character.

We continue to learn more about Edward through stories told by others. In one scene, an American telcom executive, wearing a cowboy hat and speaking with a southern drawl, describes a meeting that he had with Ted who wanted to take over his company. Ted brought Edward along and there was a strange incident with Edward trying not to eat all the pie slices on the table.  The interaction highlighted Ted’s ruthlessness and Edward’s insecurities.

In a hilarious scene where he is seated at the end of the table, Rooney portrays both Edward and a senior exec that he is trying to woo as he seeks allies to support his bid for CEO of Rogers Communications.  Rooney switches between the two characters, describing conflicting points of view of the dinner that Edward organized at the Windsor Arms.  From Edward’s perspective, the dinner was a huge success and he majorly impressed the exec all night with scintillating conversation.  Interspersed with Edward’s comments are the exec’s quips where he mocked the venue (somewhere his grandma would go), thought Edward strange and uncommunicative, and the meal lasted only 45 minutes.

Boswell returns to provide more background about the events that led to showdown between the Edward, his family and the Rogers Board.  Boswell describes the Rogers CEOs that succeeded Ted Rogers after his passing, each time bypassing Edward who vied for the job.  These included Nadir Mohamed, Vodafone “rock star” Guy Laurence and finally Joe Natale.  With each additional snubbing, the resentment grew in Edward until he finally realized that as Chair of the Control Trust, he could override the board, fire Natale, install his own figurehead CEO in Tony Staffieri (the current CFO) and then run the company from his role as Trust Chair.  We learn about the infamous “butt dial” scandal where Staffieri accidentally discussed the plans for Natale’s removal, not realizing that Natale was listening in on his cell phone.

This led to the highlight of the play, which was a masterclass in staging.  The board meeting held in September 2021 to vote on firing Joe Natale was virtual due to pandemic restrictions.  To represent this in the play, the entire stage was transformed to represent the Zoom meeting with each panel of the multi-windowed digital screen inhabited by one of the board members, all played by Tom Rooney!  The images were pre-taped but it was amazing how he made each person seem distinct with different expressions, hairstyles, some wearing glasses and matriarch Loretta sporting a cigarette in her hand.

The floor of the stage contained all the buttons of a virtual meeting including volume and mute.  Rooney sat in the chair at the middle of the long table, speaking into a microphone.  He started the meeting in the role of Edward before shifting to David Peterson, Melinda, Martha and Loretta.  As each character spoke, their video feed was enlarged on the screen, simulating Zoom’s “Active Speaker View”, reflecting Rooney who was speaking live.  Humorous moments occurred when Loretta was on mute and we only saw her lips moving while the other characters were all calling for her to unmute.

Although in reality the events happened on different days, for dramatic purposes, the vote on Natale, the pushback from the board, the call for removing Edward as Chair of the Trust, and Edward’s ultimate powerplay of invoking his rights as chair, all happened in the same Zoom meeting.  Also added to the meeting for exposition purposes were other humorous, real-life events that highlighted the dysfunction within the Rogers Family.  At one heated moment, Martha started to tweeting insults hurled at Edward and the tweets appeared on screen. In another absurd moment, Edward’s wife Suzanne inexplicably popped up to highlight two embarrassing and inappropriate events.  First was the 2021 photo with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago that sparked public backlash for poor optics.  Then she streamed a video that she commissioned (actually in 2022) where Brian Cox from Succession congratulated Edward on his “real-life Succession” board victory.

The result of this fabulously chaotic meeting was surreal, mesmerizing and mind-blowing as we watched all those images of Tom Rooney interacting with each other on screen while also watching the actual actor on stage.  Kudos to Crow’s artistic director Chris Abraham for some ingenious stagecraft and for Tom Rooney who pulled it off.

Just as Matthew Boswell opened the play, he got the last word to wrap it up as well.  Although his valiant efforts to prevent the merger of Rogers and Shaw were unsuccessful, he did achieve a conciliatory victory for Canada.  There was so much public outrage over the deal that the government felt pressured to pass Boswell’s proposed changes to the Competition Act of 1985 which should result in better protection for consumers going forward.  Bill C-59 (2025) strengthened rules on mergers, greenwashing, and hidden fee (drip) pricing, while expanding market study powers.

Michael Healey has done a fantastic job in writing a play that begins by proclaiming itself part satire, part documentary, and part work of fiction. For the audience, the play was totally entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny.  Considering all the political, economical, and organizational details about monopolies, mergers, and stock voting rights that he had to convey, this work could easily come across as dull or overly complex. But by focusing on the fallibilities, ambition, and greed of Edward Rogers and contrasting it against the Don Quixotesque passion of Matthew Boswell as he fights for the rights of consumers, Healey has turned this into a human interest, Goliath v David story that was fascinating from start to finish.  It is no wonder that this show sold out its original run in record time and then sold out again despite being extended for several more weeks.  Hopefully this play is remounted in the future, so that more people can watch it.

It would be interesting to hear what members of the Rogers family or executives of Rogers Communications think about the play, since Healey pulls no punches in depicting both the corporation and Edward Rogers in a negative light. The show even ends with a not too subtle plug for Freedom Mobile as a way to lower your cell phone bills.  The message definitely hit home since during the post-show Talkback discussion about the play, several members of the audience who responded to a question prefaced their answers by expressing feelings of shame or regret for being Rogers’ customers.