Adam Cohen brings Everybody Knows, the first official family-produced tribute to Leonard Cohen, to Théâtre St-Denis on Wednesday 4 November and Thursday 5 November. The shows mark ten years since Leonard Cohen’s death on 7 November 2016, and they put three generations of the family on one stage: his songs, sung by his son, with his 19-year-old grandson Cassius Cohen on bass.
Special guests on 4 November are Ariel Posen, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright. Leif Vollebekk joins them on 5 November. The show pairs the songs with archival photographs and film footage, with visual design by Montreal studio Moment Factory. The Canadian run opens at the Grand Théâtre de Québec on 2 November and closes at Toronto’s Meridian Hall on 7 November, before European dates in early 2027. It is the first official production built around Cohen’s catalogue since the 2017 memorial concert at the Bell Centre.
“My father was grateful to his audience for keeping his songs alive,” Adam Cohen said in the tour announcement. “That’s what we intend to do, and I never imagined I’d be doing it standing beside my son. I doubt my father did either.”
Cohen talked about the tour on CBC’s Q with Tom Power, recorded at Hotel2Tango, the Montreal studio run by Howard Bilerman. It was where, while producing his father’s 2016 album You Want It Darker, he recorded the choir from the synagogue Leonard Cohen attended as a child, a session he described as pivotal to the record. “He’s worked with three generations of Cohens,” he said of Bilerman. “He’s worked with my dad, myself and my son.”
He was frank about why the tour is happening now. The estate, he told Power, has been caught up in litigation for years, and he did not want to wait for better conditions to mark the anniversary. “There is an act of resistance and a satisfying act of gratitude towards my dad in holding up this little wild bouquet despite the conditions not being perfect,” he said. He added that he would rather have read about another artist staging the tribute, but “the cookie didn’t crumble that way” and he was left to do it himself.
Cohen had declined offers to perform his father’s songs for most of his career, partly because Leonard Cohen thought the idea was boring and had, in Adam’s words, “not so secretly wanted me to become Prime Minister of Canada.” Before these shows he had never carried a full set of the material. Relearning the lyrics, he said, has meant reading them properly for the first time, and he singled out Take This Waltz for chord changes he did not know his father had in him.
Cassius Cohen left college this year to make music. His father’s response was to hand him the bass chair for the tribute’s first two dates, an outdoor festival in Athens in front of 12,000 people and a multi-artist show in Berlin, followed by rehearsals in Montreal. “He’s much more proficient than I am as a musician,” Cohen said. “He’s cool as a cucumber.” Cassius knew his grandfather from regular Friday night dinners at the family’s Montreal house, where the first song the three of them sang together was Avalanche. He now corrects his father’s interpretations: “I don’t know if granddad would like that.”
On the setlist, Cohen said he picked his favourites and the songs “you can’t not do,” naming Bird on the Wire, So Long, Marianne, Suzanne and Who by Fire. Hallelujah is the exception. He would rather hear it in other voices and said he has been looking for guests to take it, which makes the Wainwrights’ presence in Montreal worth noting. He also offered a reason of his own. At 12 or 14, living in New York, he was invited to sing on the chorus when his father recorded the song, then told later that summer in Greece that his part had been cut. “I got cut from Hallelujah,” he said.
Everybody Knows in Montreal
- Wednesday 4 November 2026, Théâtre St-Denis, 8 pm, with Ariel Posen, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright
- Thursday 5 November 2026, Théâtre St-Denis, 8 pm, with Ariel Posen, Leif Vollebekk, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright
Tickets for both nights are still available through evenko.ca and ticketpro.ca.
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