More than half a dozen of the city's lawyers are about to take a new platform--not a courtroom but a stage.

Each spring, Vancouver’s legal community performs The Lawyer Show, a fundraiser for Carousel Theatre for Young People and Touchstone Theatre. And this year they're putting their considerable acting and singing chops to the hit Canadian Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone.

The show is cast from legal professionals from all levels, from partners in large corporate firms to law students and retired practitioners.

Even this year's live band is made up of lawyers with mad musical skills: Arielle Ballance on keyboards, Cappone D’Angelo on sax, and Lindsay Goldberg on trumpet.

The funds that are raised through The Lawyer Show go directly to support the producing and community outreach activities of the two companies. A superb example of Business and the Arts working together for community benefit, The Lawyer Show model has been copied in several cities and professions.

In the show, a person in a chair appears on stage and puts on her favourite record: the cast recording of a fictitious 1928 musical that quickly comes to life. The Drowsy Chaperone somehow ends up being both a loving ode and a warm-hearted parody of the old-style musical, complete with a couple on the eve of their wedding, a trio of gangsters, and a desperate theatre producer.  

The show runs from tonight to Saturday (May 3 to 5) at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island; find more info here.