Residents and out-of-town visitors alike attended the Music of the Night: The Concert Tour at the Sanderson Centre for Performing Arts on Tuesday, March 10, 2026.
The concert celebrates some of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most iconic music and has been touring through Canada on and off for seven years.
“We’ve been running this since 2019, and then, of course, with the pandemic, we had a break, but we’ve toured quite consistently since 2022,” said Alan Corbishley, producer and co-creator of the tour and founder of Sound the Alarm: Music/Theatre. “We go out once a year, sometimes twice, to different regions across Canada and focus on each area. This is the third time we’ve been in Ontario, but the second in southern Ontario.”
The tour, which started in Hamilton on March 6, is in its final run, making 17 stops in Southern Ontario and four more in the Maritimes. The final show will take place in Moncton on April 4, 2026.
While the show has a rotating cast of ten different singers, Tuesday’s concert featured performances from Adam Fisher, Alexandra Grant, Nathan Keoughan and Cailin Stadnyk. The four were also accompanied by four on-stage instrumentalists.
Throughout the evening the eight came together to perform 24 of Webber’s theatrical hits including songs from Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Sunset Boulevard, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and more.
When asked what makes Webber and his music so special, Corbishley said it was the way the composer inspires people.
“I think for many people, and those on stage in particular, his work is a point of inspiration that ignited what they want to do in their life. Maybe they went to see Phantom, or they went to see one of his other shows in the 80’s or 90’s, and it just sparked something in them,” he said. “I think for most people who go to see his musicals, they’re just so struck by how dramatic and beautiful and lush his music is, and how satisfying the production level is, that it just sticks with people for life, which is why he was such a phenomenon in the 70’s and 80’s in particular.”
Corbishley said while they were only three performances into this leg of the concert, the audience’s reaction to the show, as it usually is, has been positive.
“People always love the show and they tend to feel very connected to it in the end,” he said. “As much as it is a concert, there’s some theatrical settings to it and we do build this kind of emotional connection as you go through the whole evening and it just feels very intimate. It’s very satisfying to do something like this and the audience has had a great response to it.”
After the concert wrapped up, the audience gave the cast and crew a standing ovation.
Outside of the theatre, Jenna Galama, who traveled from the Hamilton area with her family to see the show, said she enjoyed it.
“I really liked it, it was good,” she said. “They really hit all those notes.”
Noting that they were all Andrew Lloyd Webber fans, when they were asked what their favourite Webber musical was in general, she and several of family members agreed in unison, “Phantom, for sure.”
They also said they were interested in seeing Sound the Alarm’s next tour, titled A Whole New World.
Corbishley said the tour would likely go on next year.
“It’s a whole evening of movie musicals,” he said. “The first act is all Disney, the second half is all Hollywood movie musicals. We premiered it last June, and it’s a great show. The lighting and the vocalists are just spectacular.”
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
