Jim Cuddy adds four Ontario theatre shows with Billianne opening

Jim Cuddy has added four more Ontario dates to his autumn touring, taking the Jim Cuddy Band's November run to eight shows. Exclaim reports that Orillia, Brantford, Peterborough and Blyth join dates already announced in Keswick and Morrisburg and a two-night stand in Meaford, with the singer Billianne opening the newly added shows.

The routing is all theatres and halls rather than arenas, which for a man who has spent forty years fronting Blue Rodeo is a choice rather than a fallback. The run opens on 12 November at the Stephen Leacock Theatre in Keswick and moves to the St. Lawrence Acoustic Stage in Morrisburg on 14 November, where Sam Polley supports instead.

From there it is the Orillia Opera House on 19 November, the Sanderson Centre in Brantford on 21 November and the Showplace Theatre in Peterborough on 24 November, before two nights at Meaford Hall on 25 and 26 November and a close at Blyth Memorial Hall on 27 November.

Those are small Ontario towns rather than the Toronto-Ottawa-Hamilton spine most Canadian tours run on, and the venues are the civic theatres and opera houses that sit at the middle of them. An eight-date run built entirely out of those rooms reaches an audience that does not travel to a city to see a show, and it keeps a band working through November, which is not a month anybody tours for fun.

Billianne, an Ontario singer-songwriter who came up through short-form video before releasing her own records, opens four of the eight. It is a useful pairing in both directions: an established name gets a support act with a young audience, and a young act gets a fortnight in rooms with proper sightlines.

Tickets for the previously announced dates are already on sale through Cuddy's own website, and the new ones go up on 24 September at 10am local time. The rest of the Canadian autumn is filling in around it, with Marianas Trench adding a January date in Windsor and tripleS booking Toronto and Vancouver into a November run. Our tour guide carries the dates, and the country hub has the rest.