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.