A Tale of Two Harbours 

Tell Tale Harbour
Review | by Sean McQuaid
Charlottetown Festival, Sobey Family Theatre, June 21, 2025

Some critics believe the iconic movie Casablanca (1942) gets much of its enduring allure from the sheer likeability of its characters. Apart from the Nazis almost everyone in that film is appealing, even the cads and crooks. 

Sheer likeability is also part of the secret sauce that makes Charlottetown Festival musical Tell Tale Harbour so delicious, and with no Nazis to dilute that flavour – heck, no villains at all, really. Just a bunch of nice folks trying to save a nice little town from a not-so-nice fate, singing some fun songs along the way. 

Launched in 2022 and remounted in revamped form this summer after workshopping & rewrites, Tell Tale Harbour has returned en route to bigger things: this year’s show is a collaboration with elite theatre company Mirvish Productions, who are bringing the musical to Toronto in September after its Charlottetown run closes. 

Co-created by festival Artistic Director Adam Brazier, East Coast music icon Alan Doyle, music director Bob Foster & Edward Riche, the musical is a cheerfully reimagined adaptation of The Grand Seduction, a 2013 film about a remote Newfoundland town manipulating a physician into moving there. 

The musical stars Doyle as irrepressible rascal Frank, who schemes to save his shrinking, titular hometown by attracting a frozen french fry factory; but the deal requires a local fulltime physician, so the town tries to trick visiting British doctor Chris (played by Kale Penny) into staying. Frank’s acerbic shopkeeper niece Kathleen (Melissa MacKenzie) scorns all this chicanery but falls for the sweetly awkward doctor despite herself. 

Born showman Doyle is still the perfect Frank, and other key returning cast members include the warmly engaging Alison Woolridge as Frank’s long-suffering wife Barbara, a crowd-pleasingly over-the-top Stephen Guy-McGrath as local goofball Gord and the always-entertaining Laurie Murdoch as soft-hearted curmudgeon Yvon. 

New romantic leads Penny and MacKenzie have charming chemistry and solid musical chops as Chris and Kathleen; Susan Henley has sharp comic timing as Yvon’s saucy soulmate Vera; Jacob Hemphill is hilarious and endearingly hapless in the nicely tweaked role of socially maladroit corporate killjoy Charles “Chip” Russet; and the rest of Tell Tale Harbour’s folksy eccentrics are capably played by new additions AP Bautista, Karen Burthwright, Joel Cumber, Gabrielle Jones and Daniel Williston, sustaining the air of joyful community pioneered by the original cast. 

A couple of new songs have been added and the script revised somewhat, but it’s largely the same charming story as before (including, alas, a silly faked-death subplot that still makes no sense and nudges the characters near implausible cartoon territory for a bit). As revised by the show’s creators and directed by Brian Hill, the 2025 show is sweeter, warmer, feistier and funnier than before. 

The 2025 production is also far more ambitious as spectacle. The 2022 stage was dominated by a big stack of crates, boxes and fishing traps that housed props and backdrops and doubled as several different settings – an ingenious and versatile design, albeit a bit static and drab. It’s been replaced by set/prop designer Michael Gianfrancesco’s ever-shifting array of independent flats, furniture, signs and bigger, fuller backdrops, plus a charming cluster of miniature houses that offer some colourful surprises with the deft aid of lighting designer Davida Tkach. 

The result is a show that looks and feels bigger and brighter, more vividly evokes its varied settings and gives its cast much more room to move, so there’s more dancing and physical motion in general courtesy of choreographer Robin Calvert and company. This more kinetic staging pairs well with the show’s often high-energy music, still mixing catchy Celtic party tunes like “Payday” and “You Never Looked So Good” with softer, sweeter songs like “My Family” and “Maybe it’s Moonshine.”

Growing up as I did in a tiny PEI village getting steadily tinier, much of Tell Tale Harbour hits close to home – so perhaps I’m an easy mark for its heartfelt tale of plucky smalltown underdogs; but no matter where you come from, this earnest ode to home and family wrapped in wacky farce and rollicking music should resonate with any audience.