Three choreographers. Moving stage pieces. A drum kit waiting for a singer who had never played one in public before. When Avril Lavigne walked onto the Air Canada Centre stage on April 7, 2008, the sold-out Toronto crowd got more than a concert — they walked into a party engineered down to the last costume change. Eighteen years after its European release on September 5, 2008, The Best Damn Tour: Live in Toronto remains a snapshot of an artist determined to turn a theater into a living room where anything could happen.
A tour announced at Whisky a Go Go
The tour itself had been announced in a setting that made the ambition clear from the start. On November 6, 2007, Lavigne stood inside Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood and told the room what was coming. This was her third concert tour, her first in three years since the Bonez Tour wrapped in 2005, and it carried the weight of an album that had shifted her sound toward something louder, brighter, and unapologetically brash.
That album was The Best Damn Thing, and its DNA ran through every corner of the production. Lavigne described the show's theme as a big party, and she backed that up with decisions that would have seemed excessive on paper. Three choreographers — Lindsey Blaufarb, Craig Holloman, and Jamie King — were hired to build the movement. Dancers joined her onstage. Costumes changed as the setlist twisted through moods. The stage itself was rigged with moving elements, turning the performance into something closer to theater than a standard rock show.
The setlist and the drum kit moment
The setlist pulled no punches. The DVD opened with "Girlfriend," a track that had already spent weeks lodged in brains worldwide, and kept the energy high with "I Can Do Better" and "Complicated." But the structure was clever. A dance interlude titled "Best Damn Dance Break" gave the show room to breathe. A video montage set to Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" let Lavigne step away while the attitude stayed in the room. And then there was the moment she sat behind a drum kit and played — not a gimmick, but a genuine shift that caught even longtime fans off guard.
And then there was the moment she sat behind a drum kit and played — not a gimmick, but a genuine shift that caught even longtime fans off guard.
The deeper cuts told their own story. "My Happy Ending" and "I'm With You" grounded the spectacle in the emotional directness that had defined her earliest work. "Losing Grip" reached back to her debut. "Hot" and "Don't Tell Me" bridged eras. A cover of Toni Basil's "Hey Mickey" landed somewhere between tribute and inside joke, while the title track "The Best Damn Thing" and "I Always Get What I Want" pushed the brashness to its logical extreme. The encore paired a remix of "Girlfriend" with "Sk8er Boi," closing the night on the song that had introduced her storytelling to the world.
Critical split and 12.3 million dollars
Critics were split. Some reviews praised the production scale; others questioned whether the polish had sanded away the raw edge that made Lavigne compelling in the first place. The tour routed through North America, Europe, and Asia, and by the time the numbers were tallied, industry reports showed it had grossed 12.3 million dollars. For a tour built around an album that had already divided opinion, the figure was a statement in itself.
The DVD release came with its own peculiarities. In North America, it arrived on September 9, 2008 — four days after the European date of September 5. The US market got two versions: one censored, one not. The choice was left to the buyer, a quiet acknowledgment that Lavigne's audience now spanned ages and sensibilities that didn't always overlap. RCA Records handled the release, and the package captured the full scope of the Toronto performance.
Television had its own version of the event. The Palladia network aired a 54-minute cut in HDTV on January 10, 2009, trimming the setlist down for broadcast. Songs like "I Can Do Better" and "Hot" didn't make the edit. What remained was a tighter, faster document — but anyone who had seen the full show knew what was missing. The censored DVD and the shortened TV cut became two different artifacts of the same night, each telling a slightly different story about what was deemed essential.
What lingers now, eighteen years on, isn't a single performance or a definitive version. It's the tension between the party Lavigne wanted to throw and the industry machinery that shaped how it was packaged, sold, and remembered. The drum kit moment, the three choreographers, the two DVD editions, the songs that got cut for television — all of it adds up to a question about control. Who decides what the "best damn" version really is?