Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:11:00

The theatre was carved out of a bigger theatre - a 1,727-seat Broadway house cut into two rooms when the mega-musical era ended. The Lyric Theatre at the Meridian Arts Centre, 5040 Yonge Street in Toronto's North York, seats 561 in what was once the auditorium of one of Canada's most ambitious performing arts complexes. The building opened on 16 October 1993 as the North York Performing Arts Centre, designed by Eberhard Zeidler and managed by Garth Drabinsky's Livent - which sold naming rights to Ford in 1994 and premiered its mega-musicals here: the lavish Show Boat revival opened the complex, with Sunset Boulevard and the world premieres of Ragtime and Fosse following before Livent's fraud scandal and 1998 bankruptcy handed the building to the City of Toronto. The Main Stage outlived its market: after Dancap Productions' touring era ended in 2012, the 1,727-seat house sat underused, and an 8-million-dollar renovation by Diamond Schmitt Architects divided it - the stage end becoming the 296-seat Greenwin Theatre under the 90-foot fly tower, the auditorium end reborn in 2016 as the Lyric Theatre with a new proscenium and LED-backlit acoustic panels that shift colour with each show's design. The complex completes the campus: the acclaimed 998-seat George Weston Recital Hall - opened by Kiri Te Kanawa in 1993 - and the Studio Theatre share the building, now branded Meridian Arts Centre and operated by TO Live, the city agency that also runs Meridian Hall and the St. Lawrence Centre downtown. The Lyric's calendar is deliberately broad: theatre, dance, chamber music, comedy, cultural galas and community productions suit the 561-seat scale - orchestra, loges and a small balcony wrapped close to a 45-foot proscenium - making it North York's mid-size stage of record. Practical notes: North York Centre station on Line 1 connects underground to the complex - winter arrivals never step outside; the orchestra's 467 seats carry the room with no bad sightlines, paid parking fills under the towers on double-show nights, and Mel Lastman Square next door supplies the pre-show stroll.