The Last Waltz – A Musical Celebration 50 Years of The Band

Oct 9, 2026 8:00 PM
Showplace Performance Centre

Fifty years later, the music still feels like a handshake and a gut-punch at the same time — and that’s exactly what The Last Waltz: A Musical Celebration – 50 Years of The Band is bringing back to life. By popular demand, one of Ontario’s most talked-about roots-and-blues productions returns to the Showplace Performance Centre in Peterborough on Friday, October 9, 2026 at 8:00 PM, raising a glass to The Band’s final concert in 1976 and their lasting contribution to our shared Canadian musical heritage.

This isn’t a casual tribute. It’s an all-star Canadian cast of award-winning musicians, assembled and directed by JUNO Award–winning producer and musical director Lance Anderson, built to recreate the spirit, the swing, and the sweat of that legendary night. The show has already proven it can pack a field or fill a hall — thrilling crowds at Mariposa, Beaches Jazz, Kitchener Blues, Ottawa City Folk, Peterborough Music Fest, the CNE Bandshell, and the Norfolk County Fair, and selling out theatres in Ottawa, Peterborough, Uxbridge, London, Orillia, Gravenhurst, North Bay, and beyond. In 2016, they even took it west, rolling through casinos, theatres, and festival stages like a road band should.

The lineup is stacked, with Jerome Levon Avis — Levon Helm’s godson — on drums and vocals, joined by special guests and a nine-piece band designed to bring the material to full colour. And there’s a rare extra ingredient you don’t usually get in productions like this: Bill Avis, Jerome’s father and former road manager of The Hawks/The Band, steps in to share a story or two from his time out on the road — the real backroom history that lives behind the songs.

The goal is to recreate the atmosphere of The Band’s “Last Waltz” — the American Thanksgiving 1976 farewell at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, later immortalized in Martin Scorsese