Forget the sports: in my opinion, the best thing about Vancouver’s upcoming Olympic party is the blue-chip entertainment that’s set to claim the spotlight in 2010.

The so-called Cultural Olympiad is bringing some gold-medal talent to the West Coast–notably Canadian theatrical legend Robert Lepage next February.

If the world’s best theatre talent ever duked it out for medals in an international arena, Lepage would definitely be the man to beat.

The Quebec-born multimedia artist and director (described by London’s The Guardian newspaper as an “alchemist of modern imagistic theatre [and] one of the most challenging and chimeric directors of our time”) launched his meteoric international career in 1985 with the first installment of his boundary-breaking The Dragon’s Trilogy.

That show toured the globe, and now Lepage is bringing the story’s dramatic conclusion—about a restless Quebec artist who confronts his past and future in a modern China where progress, ethics and relationships are at odds—to the world again. Or rather, the world will come to him when The Blue Dragon/Le Dragon Bleu opens in British Columbia at the new Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre in downtown Vancouver on Feb. 2, 2010.

It’s definitely a coup for Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts which is producing the much-anticipated show in English (and in French, with the cooperation of Théâtre la Seizième) to launch the school’s new home in Gastown, on the former site of the once-grand Woodward’s department store.

(Full disclosure: I work for SFU, but I don’t work for Lepage–and I’m a big enough fan that I’d sing his praises even if he was appearing at that other university across town!)

Vancouver loves Lepage—his shows always sell out—so take advantage of the early-bird discounts and reserve your tickets now. Hockey schmockey: you’ll be so buzzed after this performance, you won’t even remember to be mad that you couldn’t get tickets to the gold-medal game…