To open its 2026-2027 season, The Arts Club Theatre Company presents the BC Premiere Arun Lakra’ Heist at the historic Stanley BFL CANADA Stage from September 17 to October 18.
The thrill-a-minute, Ocean’s Eleven-style caper captivates with witty dialogue and high-tech theatrics as it follows a team of four brilliant thieves—the conman, the hacker, the cat burglar, the muscle—and the mastermind who brought them together as they orchestrate the perfect crime to steal a multimillion-dollar gem.
When the job goes awry, the team discovers that this caper is far more than it seems. With the stakes rising, they must calculate who they can trust and who will stab them in the back. Arun Lakra’s script blends suspense, humour, and shocking twists, in a nonlinear story told through present action and revealing flashbacks, inviting the audience to connect the clues in a whodunit full of unexpected turns.
“Heist is a fast-paced, cinematic stage thriller that brings a classic crime caper to life at full tilt,” said Ashlie Corcoran, Arts Club Theatre Company Artistic Director. “What I love about this play is how cheekily it takes a story we all instinctively read as cinematic, and says, nope, theatre can do this too. It has the pace, humour, and jaw-dropping twists of a great heist movie but it’s engineered for the stage, using theatrical structure and surprise to pull off its biggest reveals.”
Heist was originally developed and commissioned by Constellation Stage & Screen (Chad Rabinovitz, Artistic Director), where it also received a workshop production in 2022 under the title “Fortunato Heist” (Bloomington, IN). It received additional development at the Citadel Theatre Playwright’s Lab in 2022 (Edmonton, AB) and support from the Black List x Warby Parker Writer’s Vision Grant. Heist received its world premiere production with Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre (Jack Grinhaus, Artistic Director) in February of 2024 and now comes west to The Arts Club Theatre Company for its BC Premiere.
Running September 17 to October 18, 226 at the Stanley BFL CANADA Stage, Heist is directed by Andrew Kushnir, leading the cast of Patti Allan Charlie Gallant, Tainui Kuru, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Andrew McNee, and Jennifer Tong. Visit artsclub.com for showtimes and tickets