Songs of Soul

Jan 22, 2027 7:30 PM
Showplace Performance Centre

Women of Soul isn’t just a revue. It’s a full-throated celebration of the women who took popular music by the lapels, shook it awake, and taught it how to testify. This captivating production reaches back into the great soul canon and brings those timeless songs roaring back to life, with a spotlight fixed squarely on the female artists who gave the genre its fire, grace, and emotional force.

The show pays tribute to giants — Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, and Chaka Khan among them — but it also digs into the stories behind the songs, tracing the lives, struggles, swagger, and staying power that made this music hit so hard in the first place. Expect an evening of big voices, bigger feeling, and the kind of songs that practically dare an audience not to clap along.

Fronting the production are three formidable Canadian performers who know exactly how to handle material of this calibre.

Cleopatra Williams arrives with the credentials of a true powerhouse. One of Canada’s leading vocalists, she has shared stages with an eye-popping list of stars, from Sting and Justin Bieber to Deborah Cox, Foreigner, and The Black Eyed Peas. A seasoned music-theatre performer with turns in Kinky Boots, Jersey Boys, We Will Rock You, and West Side Story, she’s been called a “powerhouse” by The Globe and Mail — and by all accounts, she lives up to it.

Suzie McNeil, the Juno-winning dynamo, brings rock pedigree and pop polish in equal measure. Some will remember her as the last woman standing on CBS’s Rock Star: INXS; others will know her from chart hits, a gold-selling single in “SuperGirl,” or from lending her voice to artists like P!nk and Aerosmith. Her song “Believe” found its way onto The Biggest Loser, Oprah, and even into the orbit of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. She’s the kind of singer who doesn’t just hit notes — she plants a flag on them.

Then there’s Ayla Rodney, a Toronto-born vocalist and seasoned session artist whose style moves easily through soul, R&B, pop, and dance. With more than a decade of stage and studio work behind her, and years spent performing across Asia in high-profile venues, Rodney brings both polish and personality. She has the kind of charisma that makes the distance between stage and audience disappear fast.

Together, these women don’t merely perform soul classics — they inhabit them. Women of Soul promises an evening of powerhouse vocals, hard-earned stories, and songs that still carry the charge of something real. In other words: show up ready to sing, clap, and remember why this music never went out of style.