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by Adam Brazier, Edward Riche, Bob Foster & Alan Doyle, directed by Brian Hill

David and Hannah Mirvish & Confederation Centre of the Arts, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto

September 28-November 2, 2025

Frank: “There’s no foot in the grave that a shanty can’t save / and I’ve got a song for you”

When Tell Tale Harbour played at the Charlottetown Festival in 2022, it became the top selling show in the Festival’s history. From June through August this year the musical returned in a revised version with more characters, more songs and new design, costumes and direction. Viewed as “bigger, brighter and funnier”, the revised production is now playing in Toronto. It’s a fun, enjoyable show. It doesn’t aim to break new ground, but it does provide two hours of feel-good entertainment.

The musical is based on the 2013 film The Grand Seduction by Don McKellar which, despite its suggestive title, is about a small Maritime communality’s attempt to lure a doctor to live there. The musical by Adam Brazier, Edward Riche, Bob Foster and Alan Doyle changes the location from a fictional town in Newfoundland to a fictional town, Tell Tale Harbour, somewhere in the Maritimes. The musical begins by showing the locals happily working in a fish plant. Their happiness is interrupted by the appearance of Chip, a representative of the company that owns the plant. He says that the company is closing the plant in Tell Tale Harbour and those in neighbouring towns. A plant in one of those town will be selected to reopen as a French fry processing plant. The prime requirement is that the town have a resident doctor.

This sparks the competitive spirit of the town’s rogue Frank. Knowing that a British doctor is scheduled to spend a month in Tell Tale Harbour as a locum, Frank schemes to make the town so appealing to the new doctor that he will wish to stay. Frank’s enthusiasm fires the townspeople to beautify the town and to pretend that cricket is a local sport and warm beer the preferred drink. Frank is unscrupulous enough to ask his own newly single niece, Kathleen, to turn on the charm. As lie builds upon lie, the new doctor, known as Doctor Chris, despite having a fiancée back in Britain, does become smitten with Kathleen. Kathleen, however, wonders what will happen when the doctor discovers how Frank and the whole town have deceived him.

The musical is not aimed as confounding expectations but rather at fulfilling them. Frank is the stereotype of the incorrigible rural scalawag and the townsfolk are the usual pack of jolly Maritimers ready to sing and dance at the drop of a hat. The outcome of the plot is predictable and so is the outcome of the relationship between Chris and Kathleen. After all, they seem to be the only two single people of the same age in the musical. There are two main interests in the story. One is how far Frank will push his string of deceits to ensnare Doctor Chris. Two is how and why the forced relationship between Chris and Kathleen will turn into a romantic one.

With Alan Doyle, founding member of the group Great Big Sea, as one of the co-creators, it is no surprise that the majority of the songs in the musical are written in the style of Celtic-influenced Maritime music such as ballads, sea shanties, jigs and reels. Music for Doctor Chris, the outsider, reflects a soft rock influence, while music for Kathleen, who has returned from away, fittingly falls sometimes into the folk category, sometimes into the soft rock category. Well into Act 2, the creators give us “Maybe It’s Moonshine”, a slow pop song that sticks out because it falls into neither category. Appropriately this is the song that signals that the forced relationship between Chris and Kathleen may be becoming deeper.

All the songs are charming and so is Michael Gianfrancesco’s set design. Along the cyclorama he has a row of waist-high houses and a church that represent Tell Tale Harbour. At the start of the show, they are all grey, but by the end of the renovation song “The Greatest Place on Earth”, the cast rotates the buildings 180º to show them all painted in bright colours just like so many villages one sees in Newfoundland. Scene changes are fluid with set pieces like the Legion bar or Kathleen’s store that can be pushed in and out.

As the major trickster of the the village, Alan Doyle is the mischievous presiding spirit of the show. As Frank, Doyle is engaging and funny with the fine husky voice of a folksinger. Doyle has Frank project an unshakeable optimism that guides the townsfolk through his most outrageous machinations.

Kale Penny as Chris and Melissa Mackenzie as Kathleen both have impressively full, ringing voices in contrast to what one might call the character voices of most of the cast. Both are adept at conveying complex feelings behind whatever they say or sing, an ability that makes their characters stand out as more rounded than the others. Penny is able to make Chris into a sensitive, thoughtful person, but he shades Chris’s voice with a slightly mournful quality that suggest he is not as happy as he’d like to be. The clarity and power of Mackenzie’s voice helps characterize Kathleen as a strong woman with goals much larger than running a small shop in town. Mackenzie’s soulful account of the folksong-like solo number “You’re Coming Home” is one of the highlights of the show.

I can’t cover all thirteen members of the cast, but two more who stand out are Susan Henley as Vera and Laurie Murdoch as Yvon. Both have a gift for comedy. Henley has the middle-aged Vera not so subtly throw herself at any available man, while Murdoch, playing a Quebecker who has somehow stayed in the Maritimes, is always quick with a sharp riposte. The funniest scene in the play involves an outraged Yvon, whom Frank suddenly pronounces an dead as part of his plans.

One odd flaw in the show is that Vera and Yvon are depicted very differently in Act 1 as opposed to Act 2. In Act 2 we learn that the two have had a long-standing romance which was not at all evident in Act 1. In any case, this (new) fact allows Henley and Murdoch to sing a lovely 1940s-style duet “Just imagine” which already sounds like a Canadian classic.

The main difficulty with the story is that it ends too rapidly. I would have liked more of a confrontation when Chris realizes he has been deceived. Or, even better, I would have liked some suggestion that Chris begins to realize he is being deceived and starts to play along with Frank, in turn deceiving Frank about his true intentions.

All in all, Tell Tale Harbour is a treat, rather like comfort food in the form of a musical. It is not another Come From Away. In that musical the creators had to find imaginative new ways of presenting a very new kind of subject. Here the creators are quite happy to use old-fashioned ways of presenting an old-fashioned subject. Many times the plot of the show reminded me of the great Ealing comedies of the 1940s and ’50s, especially the locals-tweak-the-authorities comedies like Passport to Pimlico (1949) or Whisky Galore! (1949). Tell Tale Harbour is a show about making an outsider feel welcome, and it will certainly make audiences feel not only welcome but charmed and delighted. The show is sure to be popular all across Canada.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Cast of Tell Tale Harbour, © 2025 Wade Muir; Alan Doyle, © 2025 Adam Hefferman; Kale Penny as Chris and Melissa Mackenzie as Kathleen; Melissa Mackenzie as Kathleen and Kale Penny as Chris, © 2025 Wade Muir. 

For tickets visit: www.mirvish.com.