Hailey Gillis has been quietly refining a potent blend of music, storytelling, and raw theatricality for years. With Tiger Bride, that potent theatrical cocktail may have finally reached its most intoxicating form yet.
Part gothic fairytale, part punk-rock concert, and part intimate theatrical experience, Tiger Bride arrives at Soulpepper Theatre on May 29 as one of the company’s boldest and most unconventional premieres in recent memory.
And it all started years ago, when Gillis, then a young theatre student, read the short story “The Tiger’s Bride” by Angela Carter. It is a radical feminist reimagining of Beauty and the Beast and when she read it, Gillis says she could already hear the music in her head.
“This story got me right away. The writing is very gothic, but it’s also very sexy and evocative of a certain kind of world. Angela Carter writes these beautiful, luxurious sentences about everything you can imagine. It felt very rich,” she says, during our interview at Soulpepper in the Distillery District.
“I just kept carrying that book with me, and I always knew it might have music involved in it. The words were so evocative — I could hear this soundscape immediately.”
The production transforms the haunting source material into an electrifying musical experience that fuses live performance, cabaret, and raw storytelling into something visceral and entirely its own.
Gillis grew up in the Hamilton area to musical parents — a fidgety kid who couldn’t stand still in a row long enough to make choir work. But she found theatre, and everything changed.
She moved to Toronto for theatre school, and arrived at the Soulpepper Academy where her world changed. Her mentors were generous and she blossomed into one of the city’s great stage performers whether musical or drama or anything in-between.
When Gillis was ready to tackle Carter’s powerful work, she enlisted her long-time collaborators Frank Cox-O’Connell and Andrew Penner. The trio have been crafting some seriously unique and spectacular theatre together since meeting up at the Soulpepper Academy so many years ago.
It is a group that draws attention, and has earned a reputation for crafting special works.
“When I heard them play and sing and write, I thought: ‘Oh, that’s what it sounded like.’ I bought them both a copy of the story and said, ‘Read this. We have to make this.’” Gillis says.
And, like true alchemists of creativity, they squirrelled themselves away in a room designed to foster creativity with a bushel of “weird instruments,” and got to work.
What happened was, well, unique. special.
“We came into the theatre with a bunch of instruments — weird instruments too — old beat machines, strange synths, retro keyboards. We didn’t really know what we were going to do. Then we just wrote for three days, and it poured out of us,” Gillis says.
“It was wild how much we wrote in those three days. We all somehow heard the same thing.”
It is a work — much like the works this particular group has crafted in the past years that might have begun back with Spoon River at Soulpepper and other projects like The Ghost Quartet and The Shape of Home: Songs in Search of Al Purdy — that resists easy categorization. It is moody and atmosphere, a stew where everything sight and sound plays a role alongside the actors and musicians on stage.
Built around 16 original songs performed live by the cast, Tiger Bride unfolds less like a traditional musical and more like a fever dream scored by distorted guitars, pulsing rhythms, and aching ballads. The production embraces contradiction. But at its centre is a woman pulled into a strange world of desire, power, fear, and transformation — one where the boundaries between girl and woman, human and animal, are constantly dissolving.
“We’re trying to find this interesting middle world that’s not musical theatre, not just theatre, and not just music. It’s more like a concept album put on its feet,” Gillis explains.
“Music has this amazing ability to give access to inner thoughts and desires in a way text alone sometimes can’t. There’s something about music that creeps behind the thinking brain for an audience. It’s that moment where you suddenly get shivers and don’t even know why.”
It could be the closest Gillis and company have come to finding their formula.
“We’ve been chipping away at this style together for years — trying to figure out what our unique storytelling language is,” she explains.
Unlike the familiar fairytale narrative in which the beast becomes civilized through love, Carter’s original story inverts the formula, allowing the heroine to move toward wildness rather than away from it. Tiger Bride leans fully into that reversal. The production explores themes of metamorphosis, sexuality, autonomy, and identity with a contemporary edge, channeling the rebellious spirit that has long defined Carter’s writing.
“The ending of Angela Carter’s story always struck us so deeply. The whole show is driving toward that final transformation,” Gillis says.
“We start in a real fairytale world, but by the end our goal is to become more like a punk-rock bargain-basement show. The form itself starts to fall apart.”
The show embraces a handmade theatricality that mirrors its themes of transformation and instability. Under Cox-O’Connell’s direction, Tiger Bride is less a conventional adaptation than an immersive emotional landscape.
“I want the show to feel raw and sexy and not super safe — but still deeply entertaining,” Gillis says. “I need the audience with me through the transformation of this character. They’re my partner in it.”
It is risky theatre. Bold, adventurous. And Gillis thinks Toronto audiences are ready to take the journey with her.
“I really trust Toronto audiences. They’re incredibly smart. There’s never a point where I think, ‘Will they get this?’ I think: they’re going to get it.”
Running from May 29 until June 21 at Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre, Tiger Bride promises an experience that is as untamed as the story that inspired it. Do not miss this show.
