Theatre 2025: Octet @ Crow's Theatre

Almost right from the start when listening to the songs in the musical Octet, it is quite apparent that Dave Malloy, the composer/lyrist of this musical, was also behind the 2016 Broadway hit Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, as well as the 2015 Off-Broadway musical Ghost Quartet.  All three shows share Malloy’s distinctive compositional style and have a similar sound to them.  His songs are often written in the minor key with dissonant notes and chord progressions, off-beat timings, complex harmonies and haunting melodies that have an operatic or chamber music feel, as well as wide vocal ranges that have strong emotional and narrative arcs.

Although the three musicals have vastly different plots and themes, they each have an air of mysticism and spirituality to them, since this seems to be a fascination of Malloy’s. In the song cycle Ghost Quartet, this was obvious both from the title and the eerie tales that each of four storytellers spin about life, death, magic, reincarnation, revenge and more.  In Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, which is based on a small section of the novel War and Peace, the mysticism comes from the eponymous comet.  Usually seen as a cosmic omen of untold horrors including war or the end of the world, Pierre saw it as a spiritual awakening and sign of hope for a new beginning. 

Octet is Dave Malloy’s most recent musical which opened off-Broadway in May 2019.  Compared to the other two, this is his most contemporary work in terms of timeframe, setting and theme.  It deals with eight technology-obsessed people who have convened at a self-help group meeting for Internet addicts.  In Octet’s original staging in New York, Malloy linked each song and character to one of the cards in a Major Arcana tarot deck, using the symbolism of the cards to reflect each person’s addiction and struggles.  By adding an element of the occult, he wanted to contrast “the coldness of technology with a hope for spiritual awakening and human connection”.  To that end, the off-Broadway production used the tarot card of “The Fool” modified to hold a mobile phone on the front of its programme cover and listed the pairings of cards to characters in an insert.  There were also explicit references within the dialogue.

The Toronto production at Crow's Theatre made an artistic decision to downplay the tarot card connection, choosing to concentrate more on the emotional themes rather than spiritual elements.  While references in the songs and dialog to tarot cards remained either explicitly (“I am the Magician”, “You are the Hanged Man”, “The Tower Tea Ceremony”) or through imagery and symbolism (The Moon, The Lovers, The Devil, The World), the programme and set design do not directly reinforce these connections.  Instead, to pay tribute to Malloy’s intentions without layering them into the production, prior to several Tuesday performances free Tarot Card Readings are offered in the lobby two hours before the start of the show.  A few minutes prior to the start of the show, Paula, the leader of the group, sat at a table dealing out tarot cards but these were put away once the musical began.  Electronic screens lined the walls of the theatre and their images changed with each scene, not quite displaying the images of tarot cards but pixelated representations of elements like the Sun, Moon or Hearts (love).  I wholeheartedly agree with this choice, since the main subject matter about various Internet addictions and the lyrics describing them were complex enough on their own without having to deal with understanding the tarot references as well!

Octet is an acapella chamber choir musical where all the songs are sung without instrumental accompaniment.  The self-help group uses the singing of hymns and personal confessionals as part of their “step-program” to confront and deal with their obsessions.  In the group songs where the cast all sing together, their voices blend beautifully with all the vocal ranges represented from soprano to bass.  For the solo numbers, the various voices of the other cast members set the tempo and provide harmonic accompaniment for each lead singer.  Each song begins with the playing of a pitch pipe, which provides a clear, precise starting note to allow the singers to tune their voices for that song.

The meeting starts with a soothing group hymn titled “The Forest” which describes a metaphorical safe space where they can digitally detox and try to escape from “the Monster”, which is the Internet.  The song ends with “I have screensaver-ed the forest, to remind me there are places that the Monster doesn’t go.” Then Paula asks for volunteers to give testimonials about their addiction and how it is impacting their lives and each of them begin with the typical statement “I am an addict”.  The songs start by addressing more common addictions that are easily relatable but eventually get weirder and weirder.

Jessica has a viral video online of herself acting horribly and has been publicly shamed and “canceled”.  Yet she cannot resist obsessively googling herself or as she terms it “ego-surfing” almost as a punishment for her bad behaviour.  Her song is called “Refresh” which has a double meaning as she sings of going to the Forest with no reception so as to refresh, but the chanting chorus singing “Refresh” also refers to her continued search for posts about herself.

Henry is addicted to playing online games including “candy-themed games” in a veiled reference to the popular 3-D puzzle video game “Candy Crush”.  He plays so often that he isolates himself and gets so obsessed that he stops taking care of personal hygiene and stops taking his medication.  Using “Candy” as a metaphor for his gaming obsession, he talks about tooth decay and rotting his teeth as a symbol or the rotting of his brain.  It is interesting that “candy” is a slang for drugs such as cocaine since Henry sings with such fervour that it feels like a drug addiction.  For the choreography of his song, the electronic floor on the stage lights up and becomes a gaming video screen.

Paula sings "Glow" about her husband’s obsession with nighttime scrolling on his cellphone in bed with the “lighting up the sheets with … the sallow blue glow of a screen” and I abashedly thought “guilty”!  Karly and Ed are each lonely souls addicted to dating apps and porn apps. Ironically titled "Solo" but sung as a duet, they alternately provide counterpoint to each other’s experiences as they each crave physical interaction IRL.  Toby has gone down the rabbit hole of doomscrolling and conspiracy theories. Marvin is a scientist who is obsessed with scientific forums and needs to make rational sense of all occurrences.  He describes a surreal experience with a “Little God” who performs inexplicable miracles, highlighting the cost of excessive intellectualization.  I found this song the most difficult to understand and relate to.  Singing last, Velma who is new to the group sings “Beautiful” the only song that reminds us there are positive aspects of the Internet including allowing isolated, alienated people to make online connections.  Suffering from self-loathing and poor self-image, Velma learns to accept and like herself after meeting another girl across the sea who is just like her.  Sung in the middle of the show with a tribal beat, the song that best sums up the musical’s theme for me is “Monster” where the group metaphorically sings about the Internet monster - “As you watch the monster, it digs deeper in your brain. Transforming neural pathways with its toxic refrain”.

Octet is an innovative, challenging and intellectually stimulating show with an important message and warning.  It felt like we were immersed in an episode of Black Mirror.  The choice of singing all the songs acapella was unique and memorable, but also fit into the theme of the show, using the purity of human voices to contrast against the disease of addiction to technology and the internet.

In the talkback session after the show, a question was asked about whether new technological advancements have been added to the show since its 2019 inception.  The answer was that some changes were proposed but they mostly referred to isolation felt during COVID lockdowns and how the Internet was sometimes the only available source of connection. The advance of AI has not been addressed but maybe would be something to consider for the future versions?  There was also much discussion about how difficult it was to sing without an orchestra or conductor and how the cast was responsible for keeping each other in tune and on beat, especially with the difficult, unsyncopated timings of some of the songs.

Theatre 2025: The Welkin @ Soulpepper Baillie Theatre

The Welkin is the fictionalized story by playwright Lucy Kirkwood which is based on historical legal precedence and practice.  In 18th Century England, if a woman was sentenced to be executed while pregnant, she could “plead the belly”.  A jury of 12 women who had personally experienced pregnancy (and thus considered “experts”) were assembled to determine the veracity of the claim.  If they deemed her claim to be true, the execution would be stayed and converted into a banishment to “the colonies”, thus sparing her life (as well as the baby’s).

In this play, Sally Poppy is a poor, crass and unlikeable young woman with a troubled upbringing who left her unhappy marriage to run off with her lover Thomas.  The pair have been convicted of brutally murdering and dismembering a wealthy young girl and both are sentenced to be executed.  In fact, Thomas has already been hanged for the crime.  Sally has declared that she is with child, although it is early days and she is not yet showing.  A group of twelve matrons have been assembled to determine if there is truth to her claim.  The women of this “jury” are to be sequestered in a cold, dark room without access to food, drink, fire (heat) or light, so as to compel them to come more quickly to a unanimous verdict.  There is documented evidence that this harsh practice was actually used on male juries during this period in history but whether these methods were applied to a female jury is less clear.  This may merely be included in the play for dramatic purposes.

Most of the women did not willingly agree to participate in the jury since the process would take them away from chores and duties at home.  The few women who voluntarily signed up to “see justice done” were wealthy and had the luxury of time.  It is clear that the women do not have the training or medical expertise to render a valid judgement based on fact.  Much of their discussions of how to determine if a woman is pregnant are based on unscientific anecdotes, superstitions and personal experiences.

The one woman who should have carried some credibility is the midwife Lizzy, who had delivered many of the children for the women in the jury.  She shows compassion for Sally and wants to give her the benefit of the doubt.  Others feeling less charitable are basing their judgement on classism against the poor, horror at the crime that Sally is complicit in, calling her evil and the devil’s spawn, or harbouring prejudice against her based on previous crimes that she is deemed to have committed including theft and potentially harming another boy.  Although their job is to determine if she is pregnant, it is difficult for the women not to judge her based on her crimes instead and assume that she is lying.  When the option arises to get the opinion of a male doctor, the women spurn Lizzie’s expertise in his favour, highlighting the misogyny and sexism of the times, even amongst women.

Being touted as “12 Angry Women”, the parallels to the 1954 play/Henry Fonda movie “12 Angry Men” are apparent.  This includes one woman trying to sway the opinion of the others, and the juror who just wants to get it over with so that she can leave and will vote whichever way is more expedient to set her free.  There are also elements of The Crucible with references to witchcraft, demons, superstitions and mob mentality while the ending gives a nod to Of Mice and Men.

One underlying theme throughout the play is the cyclical nature of oppression as well as class and gender inequality as symbolized by Halley’s Comet which was passing by during the timeframe of the play.  The comet represents spirituality and a sign from heaven, but its cyclical nature is also used to emphasize how not much has changed through the generations.  To further emphasize this point, Kirkwood includes intentionally jarring anachronisms throughout the play.  Within the dialog, she includes modern swear words and inexplicable references to modern technology such as “aeroplanes”.  In one scene, a song is sung in the cadence of a hymn but eventually it starts to sound familiar.  The song ends up being Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” whose lyrics involve a couple making a deal with God to be allowed to understand each other’s perspectives.

But the most out of the blue anachronism occurs in the middle of a heated debate between the women when suddenly a modern-day housekeeper comes out with a vacuum cleaner, pushing it around for a few minutes while listening to music from her headphones, and then departing without a word.  This headshaking event was incorporated to replace the ending scene of Kirkwood’s actual play where all twelve women of the jury appear on stage in current day dress and silently perform modern tasks such as using a dust buster, ironing while watching TV, defrosting a freezer, etc. when they look up and see the comet again.  This scene would have paralleled a scene at the beginning of the play when the twelve women are shown performing 18th century tasks.  That sequence would have driven home the point that Kirkwood was trying to make while the replacement snippet was just confusing.  I understand why they cut out this final scene since it would have diluted from the shocking event that happens just before it, so there are pros and cons for both artistic decisions.

This show was a co-production between Soulpepper and Crow’s Theatre.  As always, you can count on a Crow’s show to be thought-provoking if not always cheerful or heartwarming.  For that, we need to go to back Mirvish Theatres and re-watch Tell Tale Harbour.

Theatre 2025: Tell Tale Harbour @ Royal Alexandra Theatre

A new musical titled “Tell-Tale Harbour” is based on one of my favourite movies, the 2003 French Canadian comedy “La Grand Séduction” (translated into the English Title “Seducing Dr. Lewis").  My husband Rich and I first watched this film at the Toronto International Film Festival where the audience roared with laughter despite the story being filtered through subtitles.   That movie was set in the fictional tiny fishing village of St. Marie-La-Mauderne, presumably in Quebec.  In 2013, the movie was remade in English as The Grand Seduction with the locale moved to Newfoundland.  Although the movies differ in language, location, character names, tone and regional culture, in both cases as with the musical adaptation, the premise, plot and even much of the dialogue is the same.

A small, down-on-its-luck fishing village named Tell Tale Harbour has a chance to generate jobs and revive its economy if it can be selected as the location for a new manufacturing plant.  To have a chance of being picked, the residents must show that they have a large enough population to work at the plant (which they don’t) and they need a full-time doctor in residence.  Hijinks ensue as they try to woo/trick a visiting doctor into staying with harebrain schemes concocted by their wily, scheming ringleader (Germaine in the first movie, Murray in the second).  With the protagonist being out of work and unable to support them, his wife is compelled to take a factory job in the city.  This adds to his determination to land a permanent doctor, by hook or by crook.

In both movies, the doctor is coerced into providing a month’s medical services at the harbour after being caught with cocaine in his possession.  To try to convince him to stay beyond the month, the villagers feign affinity with the doctor’s passions including playing cricket (which being hockey-crazed Canadians, they know nothing about), listening to jazz and eating Indian food.  They plant “lost money” for him to find since everyone loves money and go to great and ridiculous lengths to make him think that he landed a huge fish.  They even tap his phone to eavesdrop with the hopes of gaining more intel on his likes and dislikes.  There is also a pretty but elusive young female villager who acts as a potential love interest for the doctor, but who refuses to partake in the subterfuge.  Add a brilliant scene where the villagers scramble from location to location to fool inspectors into believing the population is much greater than it is and the result is a hilarious and heart-warming comedy that I still remember fondly all these years later.

Like the second movie, the musical adaptation Tell Tale Harbour is set in a fictional village in Newfoundland.  The music and lyrics are written by Alan Doyle, lead singer of the Newfoundland folk rock group Great Big Sea, along with music director and composer Bob Foster.  Doyle also helped write the book for the musical and plays the ringleader, named Frank in this case.  The character of the doctor is changed quite a bit in the musical from the movie.  Here he is named Chris and is British, possibly to better explain the love of cricket but also to set up a series of jokes and sight gags as the villagers try to act British and serve him warm beer heated up with a lighter, a cup of tea and mushy peas.  Instead of being forced to come to the harbour, Dr.Chris came willingly as part of his Doctors Without Borders tour, which we learn later is a way to procrastinate from returning home to the big city to marry his finance whom he seems ambivalent about.

Many of the iconic scenes from the movies are cleverly represented in the musical, including references to cricket, a hilarious sequence where a scuba diver covertly attaches a frozen fish onto the doctor’s fishing hook, and a well choreographed sequence where the villagers sing “Bar to the Church” as they race from one location to the other while changing clothing to fool the plant owners who are assessing the population of the harbour. An additional scheme is added to the musical where a fake wedding has to suddenly turn into a fake funeral/wake when Frank learns that the doctor doesn’t like weddings.  This leads to more hilarity as the elder villager Yvon is reluctantly forced to play dead and then hide in silly disguises.

In addition to the character Yvon, whose sardonic quips and antics often steal the show, Tale Tale Harbour provides more depth and personality to many of its supporting cast than in the movies, especially its female characters.  Vera, the vamp who struts around dropping sexual innuendos, is in a loving relationship with Yvon and a wonderful story is told about their courtship.  Kathleen is Frank’s niece and the love interest for Dr. Chris but is also a university-trained botanist.  She has a significant backstory detailing how she and her boyfriend Roger left for the big city but she returned alone when her mother fell ill and now stays because it is home.  Frank’s wife Barbara heads for her city job but is given a big duet with Frank ("What Are We Now?") before she leaves and is shown in montages at work before returning when she hears about Yvon’s “death”.  Gina is a senior member of the community who bakes bread every morning and heads up the “population” ruse with the song “Bar to the Church”.   Getting to know more about the villagers lets the audience invest more in their endeavours.

The songs in Tell Tale Harbour include a wonderful mix of fast-paced East Coast shanty music featuring fiddles and drums (Pay Day, Pitter Patter) and beautiful lilting ballads (What Are We Now, My Family, Maybe It’s Moonshine).  It was an excellent choice of Alan Doyle’s to nix the idea of trying to force fit Great Big Sea songs into a jukebox musical, instead writing insightful tunes that convey and advance the plot. 

As the audience sat waiting for the show to start, we were presented with an innovative set featuring lit-up miniature houses and a church set against a blue floorboard to represent a view of the village and ocean seen from afar.  Wavy lights against the edges of the stage were used to represent the surrounding mountains.  Through great lighting effects, as time went by, we watched the sun set and the moon slowly become visible until a full moon appeared.  Then the lights of the houses dimmed one by one as the villagers “went to bed”.  When the show started, all the houses were a drab beige colour but during the song “Pitter Patter” where the villagers worked to beautify their village, by the end of the song the houses were spun around to reveal brightly painted façades.   At intermission, the moon was back but it was now a crescent moon to show the passage of time.

We thoroughly enjoyed this musical and thought it more than lived up to our beloved movie. It had the same heart and humour but added more depth and emotion.  And there was singing and dancing which in my mind always makes a show better!  This is just the type of feel-good entertainment that we need right now to help us forget about the woes of the world for a few hours.  That is the magic of live theatre. This show premiered in Charlottetown, PEI in 2022 before being expanded for its Mirvish run in Toronto.  I hope this show can travel beyond Canada and become the next big Newfoundland-based hit after Come From Away.

Theatre 2025: MJ the Musical

While I love musical theatre, I am less fond of juke box musicals that use well-known songs from other sources that are force-fit into a plot instead of new songs written specifically for an original story.  Even less to my taste are the subset of jukebox musicals that are biographical musicals, where the plot is the life story of a musician or band.  For me, this is just laziness since neither the music nor the plot is original and usually the songs are diegetic and the lyrics do not advance the storyline at all, as songs from a good book musical would.

Based on the life and oeuvre of Michael Jackson, dubbed “The King of Pop”, MJ the Musical is the latest biopic to come to Toronto.  Three actors play Jackson at various stages of his life including “Little Michael”, teenager/young adult “Michael” and Adult Michael who is always referred to as “MJ”.  The show opens with MJ and his company rehearsing for his 1992 Dangerous tour.  Always striving for potentially unattainable perfection, MJ pushes his crew relentlessly and constantly demands to add more and more special effects, causing expenses to get out of control to the despair of his tour manager Rob and accountant Dave. 

Added as a plot device to generate exposition, the characters of an MTV reporter Rachel and her cameraman Alejandro arrive to interview MJ. This leads him to reminisce about his childhood and rise to fame as part of his family’s singing group The Jackson Five as well as his demanding, abusive father Joseph and supportive mother Katherine.  While most of the songs during the rehearsal and the flashback performances are sung in diegetic fashion, other scenes used  Jackson’s songs to convey emotion and advance the plot.  When Little Michael complains about how hard his father is pushing the group, Joseph sings “It’s The Price of Fame, don’t you ever complain .. don’t be feeling no pain” quoting a song from Jackson’s Bad 25 Album.  Katherine comforts Little Michael and tells him “Just call my name and I’ll Be There”.   When Young Adult Michael feels despair of ever breaking through beyond R&B stations, music producer Quincy Jones encourages him with the song “Keep the Faith”.  MJ sings various songs to illustrate his loneliness, isolation and vulnerability including “Stranger in Moscow”, “She’s Out of My Life”, “Human Nature” and “Man in the Mirror”.  One of the most creative uses of Jackson’s songs to show Little Michael’s emotional pain and fear caused by his father’s oppression was a slowed version of “Thriller” where “something evil’s lurking in the dark” takes on a new meaning.  As part of the choreography, Joseph manipulates Michael like a puppet on a string.

Through Rachel’s interview questions, there are references to some of Jackson’s controversies at the time including his Neverland Ranch, Bozo the Chimp, oxygen chamber, and the whitening of his skin.  But because the plot takes place in 1992, the 1993 accusations of child abuse had not arisen yet so the show could legitimately avoid addressing them.  The actor Devin Bowles played both Rob the stage manager and Joseph Jackson.  It was impressive how seamlessly Bowles switched between the two roles, sometimes seemingly in mid sentence, making it obvious by body posture and Joseph's limp.

The actor Jordan Markus who played MJ was perfectly cast to resemble Michael Jackson at that stage of his life, with a frail and lanky but athletic body, stringy hair and an emancipated look.  He did a terrific job of emulating Michael Jackson’s speech pattern, movements and especially his dance moves.  He captured all of Jackson’s signature moves including the moonwalk, toe-stand, and all of his gestures, gyrations and crotch grabbing.  In fact, the dancing and choreography were probably the best parts of the musical.  The songs were entertaining for the most part but because of the poor sound quality at Ed Mirvish Theatre (which we complain about constantly), many of the lyrics were muffled.  In particular when singing Billie Jean, inexplicably MJ covered his hand over his mouth for some of the lyrics, which made the sound carry that much less.  There also seemed to be something wrong with the iconic single glove which did not seem to fit onto his hand and felt like he was waving a giant Mickey Mouse glove as he was dancing.

In the end, I am still not fond of biographical Jukebox musicals but at least I was very familiar with and actually like Michael Jackson’s music.