Ottawa marks 10 years since Leonard Cohen’s death with ‘Ten Years Gone’ at the Gladstone, running through Saturday

Bear & Co.’s ‘Leonard Cohen: Ten Years Gone’ is playing at the Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa, marking 10 years since the death of the Canadian singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. The show runs from now through Saturday, and tickets can be purchased online.

Cohen died on Nov. 7, 2016. According to Roots Music Canada, Bear & Co. performer Rachel Eugster got the news while onstage in ‘Jacques Brel is Alive and Well Living in Paris’; at the end of that show, the actors invited the audience to sing ‘Hallelujah’ with them. That experience led them to create a Cohen tribute, first staged in 2017.

Not the 2017 show: 22 songs, a new cast member

Director Eleanor Crowder said the 10-year mark felt like the right time to revisit Cohen’s music: “It’s not the same show [as the 2017 tribute], it’s a different show, but it obviously shares a great deal of the same DNA.” This year’s tribute features 22 of Cohen’s songs, performed by vocalists and multi-instrumentalists Rachel Eugster, Nicholas D. Amott, Robin Guy and Scott Richardson.

This year’s performance also includes songs that had not even been released when the company created the 2017 show, such as ‘Happens to the Heart’, released posthumously in 2019. Eugster called it “just stunningly beautiful”, adding that it “clearly comes from an artist who had reached full maturity”. Among the performers’ picks: Eugster’s ‘Suzanne’ — she first heard Judy Collins’ cover when she was 15, which captivated her into picking up the guitar and singing; Amott’s ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Take This Waltz’; and ‘Story of Isaac’ and ‘Who by Fire’, drawing on Cohen’s Jewish heritage.

No narration: let the poetry speak

Crowder said Cohen’s songs are enough to tell his story and no narration is needed, as it might “dilute his terrific poetry”. Amott said Cohen “sings about finding hope in darkness whether that’s politics, or life, or love”; Eugster quoted one of his most quoted lines: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

Show photo by Stefania Wheelhouse. Source: Roots Music Canada, Nov. 4, 2026.