Concerts & Events This Weekend in Montreal

Things to do in Montreal this weekend

A Montreal weekend has its own grammar. Friday usually starts at five or six on a terrasse — Crescent Street and the McGill ghetto if you are uptown, Saint-Denis or Mont-Royal Avenue if you are on the Plateau, the lanes of Old Montreal if you are downtown — and rolls into a dinner that runs late on purpose, because nothing in this city is in a hurry.

The first concert sets at MTELUS, Beanfield Theatre and Club Soda go at eight or nine; the Centre Bell drops puck at seven on Habs nights and pushes the bars on rue de la Montagne and rue Crescent into overdrive by ten. Saturday is the long day: a brunch on Plateau Mont-Royal, an afternoon on the Lachine Canal or at Jean-Talon Market, a walk through Mural Festival territory on Saint-Laurent if it is summer, then a back-half that can run anywhere from a francophone theatre piece at Theatre du Nouveau Monde to an indie show at La Sala Rossa to a 2 a.m. session at one of the after-hours clubs on Saint-Laurent.

Sunday is a softer pivot — afternoon matinees at Place des Arts, jazz brunches at Upstairs and Diese Onze, neighborhood walks in Mile End and the Plateau — and an early evening show that lets you start the week without ruining it. Montreal weekends reward people who do not try to schedule them too tightly.