Consolidation plan Actor takes on challenge of multiple roles in one-man show By: Ben Waldman Posted: 6:12 PM CST Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026

When playwright Michael Healey wrote a Succession-tinged, one-person show about the family saga of the Rogers telecommunications dynasty, there was no competition when it came to selecting his performer.

It didn’t matter that Tom Rooney was a lifelong Telus customer.

A 13-year veteran of the Stratford Festival, Rooney was eager to dig into Rogers v. Rogers as soon as the script showed up, seeking out a gig he calls the most challenging of his career.

Based on the 2024 book by Canadian business journalist Alexandra Posadzki, Healey’s semi-fictionalized account centres on the $20-billion merger of Rogers and Shaw, a massive corporate union that warranted the attention of the federal competition bureau.

Under the surface, however, is a story of inheritance, competition and control that Rooney compares in substance to Shakespearean drama.

“The story is incredibly Canadian.”

“I think the story is incredibly Canadian. It’s about what it is to be Canadian in this market,” says Rooney, who last acted with Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in a 2014 production of The Seagull.

Like current Rogers executive chairman Edward Rogers, the company’s controlling shareholder, Rooney was the only son in a family of daughters — three for Edward, six for Tom.

But the circumstances of their upbringing were markedly different: at Upper Canada College and the University of Western Ontario, Rogers was groomed for corporate success — a blue-blooded beneficiary of nepotism whose father, Ted, got him hired at American giant Comcast immediately after graduation to learn the ins and outs of the cable business he himself pioneered.

Rooney, meanwhile, was raised in Prince Albert, Sask., by working-class parents and got a degree in vocal performance from the University of Saskatchewan, where he plied his future trade in school theatre productions.

Early career breakthroughs came in the 1990s with Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan and in the 2000s at the National Arts Centre. In 2008, he joined the company at Stratford, where he’s played dozens of roles, including Tartuffe, Richard II and Miguel de Cervantes in Man of La Mancha.

Rogers v. Rogers, which premièred last year at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre, marks Rooney’s third collaboration — after Benevolence and Courageous — with the Governor General’s Award-winning Healey.

The actor says the playwright’s gift is in cutting through the corporate lingo one might expect from the subject matter with a clear grasp of the authentic emotional arc — fathers and sons, the complications of grief and the art of letting go — driving the narrative.

“He’s an extraordinary writer, and he’s combined the cold business world with a very human story,” says Rooney, who also tackles the roles of Rogers sisters Melinda and Martha, a fictional butler, and former Ontario premier David Peterson.

“I think why he wanted to make this a one-man show is that there’s an aspect of these people being alone inside of these stories. It really is about individuals inside this world, trying to make connections.”

“He’s an extraordinary writer, and he’s combined the cold business world with a very human story.”

It’s not the first time Rooney’s played more than 10 roles in a single show, having topped out at 40 in playwright Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife. But Rogers v. Rogers, which had Rooney laughing when he first read through the script, also had him slightly terrified.

“Amid the laughter was the terror of thinking, ‘I don’t know if I can do this or not.’ I was so intrigued and excited by the challenge of it, and it’s been probably the biggest challenge of my life as far as my acting career,” he says.

“It’s 90 minutes of me on the stage talking and doing a lot of running around.”

Another challenge? Finding a cellphone plan that works for him, says Rooney, who feels chained to his device.

“They all basically have the same plans, the same prices, so there’s nowhere to go really. I’ve been seriously thinking about switching to Freedom,” he says.

“It’s difficult to find your way around the cell-plan business, because amongst all these companies there’s a varying degree of madness, I feel.”

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