Theatre 2022: Mirvish - Shark is Broken, Mean Girls, Fisherman's Friends

The 2021/2022 Mirvish subscription season ended with a bang with the stellar musical Singing in the Rain.  My husband Rich and I looked forward to the start of the new 2022/2023 season since the lineup sounded fantastic.  We have finally upgraded our subscription seats to the second price tier in the Dress Circle and will be sitting next to our friends for the entire season.  No more looking jealously at their seats two rows ahead of us!

Unfortunately, the first show of the new Mirvish season started with a whimper.  The Shark Is Broken is a play about the troubles that arose during the making of the 1975 hit movie Jaws that starred Robert Shaw as Quint, a professional shark fisherman, Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper, an oceanographer and Rob Schneider as Brody, the police chief. Shaw’s son Ian co-wrote and is also cast as his father in the play.  The lengthy show with no intermission depicts the three actors bickering for 90 minutes while sitting in a bobbing boat, waiting for the mechanical shark (which is never shown) to be repaired.  I read that the best part of the show was the set design, which included a real boat that appears to be sitting on actual water, thanks to some brilliant video effects.

Sadly, the rest of the show did not fare as well, as we had heard negative reviews from various sources.  My brother-in-law returned from the performance and promptly messaged me with “Well that was 90 minutes that I will never get back again”. The headline of the review from Now Toronto was “The Shark is Broken, and so is this play”.  The Globe and Mail called it a “performance piece by the son of Quint” rather than a fleshed-out play.  Nevertheless, I wanted to watch this play and come to my own conclusions about it.  I also wanted to sit in and experience the view from our new seats!  Alas, the theatre gods were not with me since I caught COVID just before we were supposed to go to the show.  The only bright side of this is that if I had to miss a show from our subscription series, this is the one that I would least regret. Our friends who we gave our tickets  told me that we didn’t miss much.  The closest I got to the eponymous shark was when I posed in front of the giant plastic one positioned in front of the Royal Alexandra Theatre.  But given that no shark was ever seen in the play, I guess this is the closest that anyone else got as well.

I would have been much more disappointed if I had to miss Mean Girls the Musical, since I love musicals in general and have fond memories of watching the 2004 movie starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Tina Fey that this show is based upon. Luckily, I recovered in time to watch this Mean Girls the Musical and was delighted by the wonderful job that was done in adapting the movie into the musical.

Like the movie, the musical deals with the coming-of-age story of Cady, an intelligent but naïve teenager who goes to an American public school for the first time after growing up and being homeschooled in Africa.  Cady initially makes friends with outcasts Janis and Damian, who teach her about navigating high school politics, cliques and social hierarchy. Janis encourages Cady to infiltrate and try to bring down “the Plastics”, a trio of popular “mean girls” considered to be school royalty, led by Queen Bee Regina George along with her minions, Gretchen, who is desperate to be liked, and Karen, who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Cady is on board with the plan, especially after Regina cruelly and deliberately thwarts Cady’s attempts to connect with her love interest, Aaron, who is Regina’s ex-boyfriend.  But soon Cady loses her way and is seduced by the power and popularity of being one of the Plastics.

The initial song “A Cautionary Tale” sung by Janis and Damian, foreshadows the plot with the telling lines “How far would you go to be popular and hot”, and “Mean is easier than nice”. Regina is introduced with my favourite song on the musical, “Apex Predator” which compares her to a wild beast like the ones Cady would be familiar with in Africa.  Janis starts the song by conveying warnings such as “She’s the queen of beasts, she can smell your fear” while Cady realizes the advantages of being associated with Regina by singing “I’m in her pride, I have hitched a ride, with the apex predator”.

While the plot of the musical follows the movie quite closely, there have been some not-too-subtle changes which modernize a few scenarios and address current sensibilities and political-correctness touchpoints.  The most obvious change between the 2004 movie and the 2018 Broadway musical is the advancement of the Internet, social media and the use of cell phones where phone calls have evolved into texting. In the movie, to bully a rival, Regina (played by a young Rachel McAdams) uses her cell phone to call and speak to the girl’s mother.  This scene obviously did not make it into the musical.

Yet, one anachronistic element of the movie that is retained in the musical is the “burn book”, a pink-covered scrapbook of nasty slurs, rumours and disses that the Plastics use to disparage their enemies or those they consider beneath them. Having an actual physical book seems out of place in our online world.  But the book is so integral to the plot and so prominently visible to a live audience that I guess it was important to keep it.

The musical further pushes the movie’s themes of female empowerment and anti-bullying rather heavy-handedly by invoking references to #MeToo. At one point in the musical number “Stop”, Karen sings about being convinced by a boy she liked to send him nude photos which he then posted on the Internet.  Stopping the song (pun intended), she awkwardly throws in the comment that “Someone should teach boys to not do that in the first place”. This elicits the obligatory cheer from the audience but totally takes you out of the flow of the song.  The initial set design at the start of the show mimics pages from the Burn Book (or they could be interpreted as Instagram posts) with mean comments like “Saggy Boobs”, “Carol & Lucas Still Virgins”, “Masturbated with a Frozen Hot Dog”.  By the curtain call, after lessons were learned by all, the pages take on affirming messages like “Teen Female Power”, “Respect”, “Dignity”.

Mean Girls is a fun musical with great, upbeat songs that propel the plotline and good choreography. I found the sound to be too loud which muffled the lyrics being a sung and the words being spoken.  Good thing I listened to the soundtrack before watching the show, so I had an idea of what to listen for.

Our final Mirvish show to wrap up 2022 is another musical based on a movie, which in turn is based on a true story. Fisherman’s Friends is a folk music group hailing from Port Isaac, Cornwall, England, who sing traditional songs of the sea. The group is comprised mostly of fishermen, coast guards and lifeboat-men whose voices blend in beautiful harmony. Starting in 1995, ten friends sang together as an a cappella group, regularly performing on the Port Isaac Platt (harbour) with the waves of the Atlantic Ocean crashing behind them.  In 2010, they were discovered while singing on the Platt and were signed to a million-pound contract with Universal Music Group, a major record label.  Their first album debuted at #9 on the UK charts, going gold by selling over 500,0000 units. They have since released four more albums, sang for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 and toured both at home and abroad.  In the intervening years, band members have come and gone, and the number of members in the group has fluctuated. With the addition of new members who play guitar and accordion, the group has added instrumentation to their performances.

The earlier albums consisted mostly of famous old sea shanties. A sea shanty follows a pattern of call and response, where the shanty man or lead singer belts out the main lyrics of the song, to which the remaining members sing a repeated chorus in unison. The group seems to rotate the role of shanty man from song to song.  Some of the more popular shanties and the ones I like the best include Drunken Sailor, Nelson’s Blood, Wellerman, John Kanaka and Keep Hauling.  Most of these shanties are lively, foot-stomping jigs, sometimes with humorous lines such as all the suggestions about “What will we do with a drunken sailor?”.  The Cornish accent is also prominently heard in the songs, such as when they sing the word “early” and it is pronounced as “er-lie”.

Fisherman’s Friends also sing slower, soulful songs that describe hard times in Cornish history and the dangers of the sea. The folk song Cousin Jack, written by English folk-rock performer Steve Knightley, is based on an 1860 poem describing the 19th century Cornish miners who were known as “Cousin Jacks” who emigrated abroad looking for work.  Proportionately, Cornwall lost more of its population to this emigration than Scotland or Ireland. Wistful lyrics describing this loss include “Where there’s a mine or a hole in the ground, that’s where I’m headed, that’s where I’m bound ... I’ll leave my country behind, I’m not coming back”.

A beautiful, haunting song called Widow Woman was written by Fisherman’s Friend members Bill Hawkins, Jon Cleave. It describes the local legend of a tragedy that occurred in Port Quinn, a neighbouring cove near Port Isaac.  As the story goes, all the men of Port Quinn were out at sea herring fishing when a huge storm blew in, drowning the entire fleet and making widows of every woman in the village.  In some tellings there were 24 widows while in others, there were 32. The song Widow Woman starts with the lyrics “Why do you sit widow woman? Why do you stare out at me?” as if the sea itself is posing the question.

In 2019, a U.K. movie also called Fisherman’s Friends was released, loosely based on the group’s rise to fame.  To add drama and romance to the plot, the movie adds a slick, cynical London music executive named Danny who discovers the group and becomes their manager.  It then throws in a love interest for him in Alwyn, a feisty fisherman’s daughter and mother to her own a cute young daughter. The movie follows the traditional romantic comedy clichés of the “meet cute”, and the “boy meets girl, boy loses girl and boy gets girl back” trope. Amidst the romance were a few other fictional plotlines including the local bar being deep in debt, Danny’s struggles to get a record company to give the group a chance, and the death of one of the elder members of the band.

Throughout the movie, songs are sung by the Fisherman’s Friends, with the real members augmenting the singing of the actors. It depicts the group singing on their lobster trawlers, on the Platt, in the Port Isaac church while recording a demo and in various locations in London while trying to secure their big break.  The film was well received, and a sequel subtitled “One And All” has just been released in November, 2022.  The saying “One And All” (perhaps a riff on “All For One and One for All” from the Three Musketeers?) is a tenet that the group stands by and is the title of their second commercial album.

In 2021,a live musical of Fisherman’s Friends debuted in Truro, Cornwall before heading to Toronto to play at the Mirvish Theatre in 2022.  It is of note that the show has come to Toronto without first debuting on London’s West End. The musical closely follows the general plot and characters in the movie with a few differences. The role of Alwyn’s daughter has been dropped, since it did not make sense to have a child actor in the cast for eight shows a week when her character did not really contribute to the storyline.  The reason for Danny coming to Cornwall has been extremely simplified for the musical (arriving on vacation) compared to the movie (attending a stag party where he is pranked into trying to sign the Fisherman’s Friends to a record deal).  In both cases, Alwyn’s father Jim is initially against trying for a record deal, but the motivations are different.  In the movie, it is merely suspicion of outsiders and a desire for to maintain the status quo of their simple but content life, while the musical alludes to Alwyn’s wayward mother who deserted the family in search of fame and fortune as a singer in London.

The musical opens up with some creative staging using ropes and pulleys to simulate a fishing boat swaying through rough waters while the shanty "Keep Hauling" is sung.  It is interesting to note that along with The Shark is Broken, this is the second show of the 2022/23 Mirvish season that involves staging of a boat on water.  In Fisherman's Friend The Musical, the boats return for two more scenes including a thrilling sea search and rescue sequence that involved fog and search lights.

As with any adaptation from film to live musical, there are many more songs and sea shanties to fill out the show, and it is not just the Fisherman’s Friends members who are singing.  The main female characters including the bar owner’s pregnant wife, Alwyn’s grandmother, and especially Alwyn (who is now an accomplished guitar-strumming singer in her own right), get to perform a few numbers. Not quite the typical musical or even the typical jukebox musical, the lyrics of songs make no attempt to advance the plot, which usually is a must for me to enjoy a musical. But as a "bio-pic" musical, the shanties are integral to lives of the Fisherman's Friends and so joyful to listen to,  that it didn’t matter.

Given the feel-good origin story of the real group, it is not a surprise that both the movie and the musical are fun to watch and leave you with a warm, happy feeling while you exit the theatre humming or singing the words to catchy sea shanty tunes.