Soulpepper’s Tiger Bride offers a ‘wildly transformative’ audience experience, says Hailey Gillis

Soulpepper’s latest theatrical concert is an ode to transformation. 

A world premiere song cycle, Tiger Bride adapts an Angela Carter short story that itself riffs on the tale of Beauty and the Beast, imagining what would happen if instead of the Beast becoming a man, the protagonist — here named Girl — grew wild. 

Hailey Gillis, who plays Girl, told me that Tiger Bride pairs this narrative transformation with an aesthetic one: the show evolves from a stylized gothic fable into a down-to-earth jamboree. “It starts out in a hyper-fairy-tale world, and then we slowly, by the end of it, move into a rock-n’-roll basement concert,” she shared in a phone call before rehearsals one morning. “We’re just left with guitars and sweaty bodies and loudspeakers.

“And lyrics, hopefully,” she quipped, self-deprecatingly gesturing toward the then-in-progress work of co-writing Tiger Bride alongside director Frank Cox-O’Connell and fellow actor-musician Andrew Penner. 

Gillis met Cox-O’Connell more than a decade ago, when both were participants in the Soulpepper Academy, a year-long paid training program. (Tiger Bride’s set and costume designer, Shannon Lea Doyle, was also part of their cohort.) Since then, the pair have collaborated on several music-based productions, including Soulpepper’s acclaimed Spoon River in 2014.

These projects have often involved Penner. In 2022, the trio were among the co-creators of The Shape of Home, a whiskey-soaked, folk-based tribute to the poetry of Al Purdy. The poet’s words anchored that literary adaptation, but in Tiger Bride, Carter’s language is just a starting point. “The songs that we’re writing are very much our own,” said Gillis. “We might take a theme that’s in the story and explode it into something, or maybe even just a sentence that we really loved in the book, and it’ll become an entire song.”

Gillis revealed that the score draws on punk and electro influences, but hesitated to describe the sonic palette in detail, because the team has been refining it over the course of rehearsals. She prefers to think of the music as a collision of the creators’ sensibilities. “Andrew Penner — I’ve always been so blown away by his particular musical quality. He can be so soft and beautiful: the way he sings and writes exposes [a real rawness]. And then he can just go wild, he can be a total animal on stage,” she reflected. “And I’ve been writing songs for a long time, but I come to it lately [having acted in] a lot of musical theatre… I come with this idea of how to share the thoughts of the music with the audience in a theatrical way — really let them into the story.

“And then Frank, he grew up in rock bands and playing drums, but he’s also directing the piece, and he’s directed all these concerts at Soulpepper, where you’re trying to meld music and knowledge and theatre, so we came together and mashed our styles together, and it’s created something really interesting,” she continued. “The big thing is we’re just trying to trust it. We’re like, ‘Oh, that’s Tiger Bride. That thing we just did, that’s really very specifically us. OK, keep going in that direction.’”

According to Gillis, this stylistic heterogeneity parallels the story’s own tendency to shirk neatness. “If we’re trying to find our own way through where music and theatre meet, that’s messy, and I think these big themes that Angela Carter’s going after, when you get into them, they’re messy,” said Gillis. “‘What happens when you really pull the sheet off of power and sex?’ ‘How do we talk about those two things?’ We can’t really just talk about them on the surface — we gotta get in there.”

Since the pandemic, Gillis has led the casts of some very high-profile Toronto theatre productions, playing Nora in A Doll’s House at the Bluma Appel Theatre and Natasha in the Canadian premiere of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Toward our conversation’s end, she reflected on how Girl’s journey echoes these past projects. 

“We’re trying to create a world in which she has to break out of the structure of the fairy tale of things happening to her and have her become a protagonist, and I feel like that’s what Nora was doing too,” Gillis said. “She finally became the protagonist in her own story, and took control. And I feel like when you take control of something, you actually have to leave other things behind, and that’s where it gets muddy, in a good way: ‘Who are you leaving behind? What values are you leaving behind?’

“In a lot of the other shows I’ve done, that’s been really present. Like in Natasha, Pierre, that was a transformative moment when she fell deeply and madly in love, and when that love was taken away from her, she transformed into a new being — it made her grow up,” continued Gillis. “I remember playing Juliet [at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach in 2016], and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I think unfortunately, this play, for a while, teaches Juliet how to lie.’ And my director [Kim Collier] said, ‘No, it tells her how to tell the truth.’ So that was our big debate… ‘What’s the transformation for Juliet?’ Unfortunately, she dies. For Nora, she leaves. And for this character? She transforms, maybe, into her truest self. 

“It’s one of those endings where I think you have to choose your own adventure as an audience. It could be a tragic end, but it could also be something wildly transformative — in the way only a fairy tale can do.”

Tiger Bride runs at Soulpepper Theatre until June 21. More information is available here.

Soulpepper Theatre is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Liam Donovan

Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto. His Substack newsletter is available at loamdonovan.substack.com.

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