Tell Tale Harbour At The Royal Alexandra
I think it’s fair to say that many people in Canada hoped that Tell Tale Harbour, the new musical featuring songs by Alan Doyle, co-founder and lead singer of the Newfoundland folk-rock group Great Big Sea would prove to be the next Come From Away.
Sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings, but is just ain’t so. Still, that’s not stopping the audiences that have been packing the Mirvish Company’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto since the show opened from leaping to their feet in joyous appreciation at the curtain call. Indeed there’s more than enough in Tell Tale Harbour to celebrate as long as you don’t arrive expecting transcendence.
It seems that Tell Tale Harbour, a small community somewhere in Canada’s Maritimes, is facing an existential crisis. The major employer, a fish processing plant, is closing. The town’s one hope for economic survival is being selected from among other communities in a similar plight as the site for a factory turning out frozen French fries.
As always, there’s a catch. The capitalist overlords have decreed that the chosen location must have a certain minimum population and (here’s the clincher) a full-time local physician.
As it happens, “Dr. Chris” (as he is known in the programme; his surname escaped me), an English doctor, is coming to Tell Tale Harbour for six weeks as a “locum physician,” the Canadian term of art for a doctor who spends a limited amount of time in communities with no resident doctor. Why English? I have no idea. (See also, the Stratford Festival.)
Fortunately, feisty local Frank (Alan Doyle himself) rises to the occasion and orchestrates a grand scheme to solve the town’s problems by convincing Dr. Chris (Kale Penny) to settle in Tell Tale Harbour permanently. Two small problems: Dr. Chris is engaged to someone back home and Frank’s choice of the local beauty who will seduce him, his niece Kathleen (Melissa Mackenzie), wants no part of the deal.
And so the game is afoot. Frank enlists the willing residents of Tell Tale Harbour to convince Dr. Chris that they are ardent cricket fans and love “warm beer,” while simultaneously convincing the French fry moguls that Tell Tale Harbour is substantially larger than it is.
I don’t think it qualifies as a spoiler to say that there is a happy ending, that true love rears its adorable head, and that the curtain falls on Tell Tale Harbour joyously turning out tons of French fries.
Tell Tale Harbour is an adaptation of Don McKellar’s 2013 film, “The Grand Seduction.” Both book and music are credited to, in addition to Doyle, Adam Brazier, Bob Foster, and Edward Riche – a group effort in other words, which may explain why the book and music seldom rise above the level of “serviceable.”
The music in Tell Tale Harbour is a mixed bag, which is not altogether a bad thing. Some, like “You Never Looked So Good,” lean heavily to the Irish-inflected music that was Great Big Sea’s forte. “Just Imagine” is something of a throwback to the forties. Others, like “Maybe It’s Moonshine,” an affecting duet between Dr. Chris and Kathleen as they are falling in love, are pure pop. It is all easy listening, but nothing in the score struck me as “timeless.”
The adaptors have tried to leaven the madcap and, frankly, hard to swallow machinations of the townsfolk, with more serious themes. Frank, we learn, was abandoned by his father as a child and his long-suffering wife is leaving Tell Tale Harbour to find work. Kathleen, too, experiences a certain anomie as a single woman in a fading backwater who has put her shop up for sale.
This is the sort of thing that Newfoundland and other maritime provinces suffered with the collapse of the cod fisheries in the 90s, social tragedies that folk musicians, Great Big Sea included, sang about as they were unfolding.
Including this sort of thing is a worthy effort but it makes for lumpy storytelling. Is this an upbeat tale of regular folk banding together to prevail over big city types or is it a downbeat story of social dislocation? One result is that Tell Tale Harbour is not what one might call a full-scale musical. No dance breaks. No show-stopping production numbers.
The big draw in Tell Tale Harbour is Alan Doyle, founder of Great Big Sea. He quite obviously has a huge following and he received a rapturous reception when he stepped on stage the night I saw the show. It’s easy to see why. He radiates an easy-going charm and, aside from being a bona fide folk-rock superstar, he is a damn good actor. He also bears a more than passing resemblance to Brendan Gleeson who played the corresponding role in the 2013 film.
There are other standouts in the cast. Melissa Mackenzie makes a most attractive Kathleen. Susan Henley as Vera and Laurie Murdoch as Yvon make a fun couple in Act Two, although in Act One they don’t seem to know each other. Indeed Vera at first seems a bit of the town tramp making herself available to any eligible man.
Director Brian Hill keeps the proceedings moving along briskly and Robin Calvert has provided efficient choreography for this company of non-dancers.
A major contribution comes from Michael Gianfrancesco, whose airy sets made maximum use of the Royal Alexandra’s soaring proscenium and its fly space. Davida Tkach lit it all quite nicely. The sound design by Josh Leibert left something to be desired, at least for me. It was plenty loud, which seems to be the entry-level quality these days, but it had a tendency to blur some of the singing. Perhaps advances in AI will solve these problems.
Tell Tale Harbour continues at the Royal Alexandra Theatre through November 2, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Mirvish Company website.
Footnote: To paraphrase Jonathan Swift, larger fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and smaller fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum.
Tell Tale Harbour is a show biz exemplar of this timeless wisdom. As noted, the current musical is an adaptation of the film “The Grand Seduction,” which I saw and quite enjoyed. But “The Grand Seduction” is itself an adaptation of a French-Canadian film called “La Grand Séduction,” which has much the same plot set in a remote village in Quebec and which I haven’t seen. I have it on excellent authority that it is well worth seeking out.
For a complete index of reviews CLICK HERE.
Don’t miss another review or blog post! SUBSCRIBE HERE
