This week in theatre rounds up the most noteworthy live theatre playing right now in Toronto. It includes just-opened shows as well as productions that are about to close.

Global Cabaret Festival / Young Centre for the Performing Arts / Various times / $15-$25
The annual Global Cabaret Festival celebrates its fifth anniversary this year with 100 of Canada's leading performing artists collaborating on over 20 original one-hour cabaret performances. The programme offers a diverse selection of genres—Broadway, barbershop, Leonard Cohen, opera, and Dickens—as well as a new focus on dance with the Young Centre Dance Awards. This is a festival of music and performance that just keeps getting bigger and better.

Tear the Curtain / Bluma Appel Theatre / 8:00pm/2:00pm / $24-$79
Kim Collier's Electric Company marks yet another collaboration with Canadian Stage, this time on a play by Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr. In Tear the Curtain!, a theatre critic finds himself stuck between those who control Vancouver's theatres and the those at the head of its cinemas. The play relies heavily on the style of 1930s film noir in exploring the cross-roads between theatre and cinema. Expect this one to be an intellectual journey through beautifully composed stage pictures.

Sister Act / Ed Mirvish Theatre / 8:00pm/2:00pm / $35-$100+
The singing nuns have touched down in Toronto. With music from Alan Menken and storyline and characters from the campy film, you can't get more feel-good than Sister Act. While I'm sure the comedy won't match the pairing of Whoopi Goldberg's Deloris Van Cartier and Dame Maggie Smith's Mother Superior, this is a great theological warm-up to The Book of Mormon scheduled for Mirvish's Spring 2013 calendar.

This Must Be The Place: The CN Tower Show / Theatre Passe Muraille / 7:30pm/2:30pm / $15-$35
The CN Tower has always been an object of mystery to me. It's an iconic landmark that certainly reminds me of home, but I'm at a loss to explain what the mass of concrete truly represents. Architect Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille consider more closely Toronto's tall tower and the circumstance surrounding its construction in the 1970s. In This Must Be The Place: The CN Tower Show, the collective hopes to confront the Toronto of now to uncover how far we've come and how far we still need to go.

Saucisse: A Foo Musical / Pia Bouman School for Ballet / 8:00pm/2:00pm / $10-$20
A clown musical about friendship, fate and, yes, meat, Saucisse: A Foo Musical profiles an unlikely friendship between a nomadic clown tramp and a new-age vegetarian pig. Sounds like a match made in heaven. With direction from Susanna Hamnett and composition by Matthew Reid, Saucisse features the talents of Helen Donnelly, who spent time at Cirque du Soleil and is an annual regular at the Toronto International Circus Festival.

Photo from the Global Cabaret Festival