Alan Doyle plays Frank in maritime musical Tell Tale Harbour. Doyle is photographed in Cuckolds Cove, Quidi Vidi in Newfoundland on Sept. 8, 2025.Alex Stead/The Globe and Mail
For a musical about a series of increasingly high-stakes lies, Tell Tale Harbour holds a surprising amount of truth.
The show, a hit for the Charlottetown Festival on Prince Edward Island during its world premiere in 2022 and again this past summer, is set to transfer to Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre later this month. It paints a nuanced portrait of life on Canada’s easternmost edge, but with a vocabulary of familiar scenarios: The titular town is dilapidated and sparse, but the people who live there thrum with warmth. Freshly caught cod are just as important to the cozy dating scene as they are to the economy.
For the most part, though, the show eschews stereotypes of small-town Atlantic Canada. Sure, some of its characters are fishermen; yes, a young person or two in the story once dreamed of escaping to the big city only to return a few years later. So it goes in a musical, slice-of-life dramedy set in a tiny fishing town.
Based on the 2013 film The Grand Seduction, Tell Tale Harbour is a story likely to resonate with Canadians no matter their proximity to the ocean. On the surface, it’s a maritime musical armed with salient points about modern Canadian life – indeed, finding a family doctor can feel just as difficult in Toronto or Edmonton as it does farther east.
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But at Tell Tale Harbour‘s heart lies a funny, tender love letter to Atlantic Canada and the people who call it home.
When a small seaside town learns that their fish processing plant is doomed to shut down, Frank – the jaunty, semi-gruff rascal played by Great Big Sea’s Alan Doyle – sets a plan in motion to turn the factory into a frozen French fry production site.
But in order for that to happen, the village needs to prove it has a population large enough to sustain an adequate work force. As well, there’s no full-time doctor in the area, a condition of the factory setting up shop – Frank and his pals will have to figure that out, too.
Doyle began working on the show in the years leading up to the pandemic with collaborators including Bob Foster, who was musical director for Come From Away.Alex Stead/The Globe and Mail
“I jumped at the opportunity to do this,” said Doyle in an interview. “And as we were writing it, I fell in love with the idea of playing Frank, and I thought that was crazy at the time. But after a year of writing song after song, I got up the gumption to ask my collaborators if they thought it was a crazy idea, and they said, ‘We’ve been hoping you’d ask us that for a while.’”
Those collaborators, who together with Doyle began working on the show in the years leading up to the pandemic, know a thing or two about creating Canadian musical theatre. Bob Foster, a co-writer on the show along with Adam Brazier, Edward Riche and Doyle, was the musical director for Come From Away, regarded as Canada’s most successful theatrical export; he’s also had a hand in creating, refining and performing Canadian music (and musicals) for more than three decades.
Tell Tale Harbour unsurprisingly borrows from the genres its creators are famous for – and while the team has anticipated Come From Away and Great Big Sea comparisons, they’re also confident in the piece’s ability to stand on its own, particularly in terms of its music. Its anthems pulse with accordion and fiddle; its ballads lilt along to gentle piano and guitar.
“There’s East Coast influence, of course, but the musical world of the show bridges pop, musical theatre and Great Big Sea,” said Foster of the show’s soundscape. “There was an idea to make this a jukebox musical set to Great Big Sea’s music, but I’m really glad we didn’t do that. We loved writing these songs.”
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From day one, Doyle was on the same page: No jukebox musicals.
“It was a new experience for me, an incredible one,” he said of taking the leap to writing and performing musical theatre. “I’ve said this so many times over the years: When people ask me to do something, the reason I say yes is usually because I don’t already know how. I want to learn.”
For Doyle, the most surprising part of Tell Tale Harbour‘s creation process was the collaborative nature of creating live theatre – a far cry from the less structured, more flexible approach he’s been able to take as a gigging musician.
“The songs, the story and all the moving pieces not only have to bend and shift, but they have to support each other all the time,” said Doyle, reflecting on how Tell Tale Harbour has forced him to learn how to roll with the punches as an artist.
“There’s a character named Kathleen who we wanted to be singing in her shop – but no, oops, the set can’t move fast enough for that to happen, so she has to sing on the wharf, so all the lyrics we wrote about the cans on the shelf aren’t applicable any more,” he said, laughing. “As a songwriter, you can’t get depressed when that happens. You have to jump at those opportunities to change things. Otherwise, the whole thing just grinds to a halt.”
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Doyle and his partners are no strangers to writing and rewriting Tell Tale Harbour. Director Jillian Keiley’s production of the show premiered at the Charlottetown Festival in 2022 to wide acclaim, but it needed work before it could successfully transfer beyond the Confederation Centre of the Arts. Songs had to be tweaked; there was room for characters to be stretched and deepened. A new director, Brian Hill, was brought on for the show’s 2025 rework.
“The story we’re telling and the words people say are very similar to what we originally wrote,” said Doyle. “But everything else is different: The world these people walk around in, and the set, and the lighting. The costumes are different, the exits and entrances and choreography are different. Because of the pandemic, we had 100 ideas for the musical but only got to do about 55 of them. Now, I’d say we’re doing about 98 of them.”
Hill was a big part of making those ideas work in the updated version of the show. “I wanted to make sure the story was absolutely clear,” he said. “I wanted to make sure it was a big, bold, funny farce, and that the heart at its centre stayed really intact.”
That’s a tall order. But Hill, whose directing credits include early workshops of Come From Away as well as The Lion King in Toronto and on Broadway, knows what it takes to shepherd new musical theatre to its best possible self.
As the Toronto engagement of Tell Tale Harbour inches ever closer, the musical’s cast, creatives and crew are revelling in the journey that brought the show to life – and the energy it took to keep revising it, even when the work felt tedious or futile. The story, the music and the people fusing those components together were what kept the team coming back.
“I’m surrounded by completely learned people in the cast who are delighted to have someone like me there,” said Doyle. “But let’s make no mistakes here: I’m the new guy. I encouraged people to make suggestions, and they’ve been great about supporting me and showing me the ropes. You completely surrender yourself to the play, and that is terrifying for someone who plays in a band for a living – you have to trust the play you’ve created, and you have to present it with your full heart every night.”
