Homegrown hits

Erin McGrath (centre), as fictional pop star Rose McKay, performs with Sarah Donald (left) and John Wright in Paul Ledoux's Still Desire You. (Alberta Theatre Projects)

The Broadway success last season of The Drowsy Chaperone, which has just wrapped a triumphant homecoming engagement in Toronto, once again raised the question: Where are all the great Canadian musicals? Certainly, if you measure success by a Tony Award-winning tenure on Broadway, the mecca of musical theatre, then Canada has generally fallen short. But the fact is, Canadians have seen their share of popular, award-winning homegrown musicals in this country, even if they haven’t (yet) landed on a New York stage.

Take, for example, Fire, Paul Ledoux and David Young’s rousing late-1980s hit about rock stars and televangelists, which was embraced by enthusiastic audiences across Canada and is getting a big revival this season in Toronto and Edmonton. Then there’s Love Is Strange, Ledoux and Young’s collaborative debut, which also played a string of Canadian theatres two decades ago; it’s currently back on the boards in a new and re-imagined version called Still Desire You, opening Oct. 19 in Calgary.

For Ledoux, a musical, no matter how successful, is never quite finished. “The wonderful thing about theatre is that you can always make changes,” says the genial, mustachioed playwright during a recent interview in Toronto. He expects to do some tinkering with Fire again before it opens at Toronto’s Canadian Stage in March — although it won’t be anything like the major overhaul he and Young have performed on Love Is Strange for Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects.

That show, first seen in 1984 under the title I Love You, Anne Murray, was based on the case of Robert Kieling, the delusional Saskatchewan farmer whose persistent harassment of the wholesome Canadian singer landed him in court. A hit in its day, the musical lost its appeal after Murray and her stalker faded from the headlines. However, its underlying themes of media-fueled fame, and the confusion between a star’s projected image and reality, remain topical.

“Cults of celebrity permeate our culture now,” says Ledoux, explaining why he decided to revisit the play. “When Paris Hilton going to jail for a few days can drive the war in Iraq off the front page, [the show] seemed more relevant than ever.” In its new incarnation as Still Desire You, the story has been set in the Maritimes, with a boat builder as the erotomanic fan and a fictional Canadian pop singer-songwriter named Rose McKay as the object of his obsession. McKay’s songs are supplied by a real Canadian pop singer-songwriter, Melanie Doane — like Ledoux, a native Haligonian, and a friend going back to the original Toronto production of Fire, in which she co-starred.

The show features twelve of Doane’s songs, from hits like Adam’s Rib and I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You to her versions of traditional Celtic and Maritimes tunes. The character of McKay isn’t based on the singer, however, and Doane doesn’t appear in the show herself. Married to actor-director Ted Dykstra (whom she also met in the original Fire — and who’ll be starring again in the Canadian Stage revival), Doane has her hands full these days with two children under the age of five. “Her involvement usually consisted of me going over [to her place] and having children crawl all over me while we talked through things,” Ledoux chuckles. “She’s been in the loop, and she might write some new material for the next production.”

Playwright and director Paul Ledoux. (Alberta Theatre Projects)

A musical structured around pre-existing songs — the so-called “jukebox musical” — is a form Ledoux and Young were employing long before shows like Mamma Mia and Jersey Boys made it commonplace. Love Is Strange used numbers associated with Anne Murray and Fire, loosely based on the lives of cousins Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart, borrowed some of the incendiary rock ‘n’ roll classics (Great Balls of Fire, Good Golly Miss Molly) that Lewis made famous. “It’s great,” Ledoux says, “in that you can have a pretty solid idea of how people will respond emotionally to a song.”

Ironically, the one Ledoux “jukebox” show that did transfer to New York happened to arrive there in the midst of a critical backlash against the format. Dream a Little Dream, created with the late Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas and packed with songs by that legendary '60s folk-rock group, did well in Toronto but got a tepid reception off-Broadway in 2003 from the make-or-break New York Times.

“The Times was just not going to give any show like that a decent review,” Ledoux recalls. “You could tell in the press in the weeks leading up to it. I think the critics really resent [those musicals] because, in a way, they’re critic-proof. People are going to see a show about the Mamas and the Papas because they love the music, regardless of what a critic says.”

Gambling on success in New York is a big financial risk, Ledoux adds. Dream a Little Dream was a small-cast show in a 350-seat theatre, but “it cost $600,000 just to get it open,” he says. “And it cost more than a $100,000 a week to run it. And nobody was making a whole bunch of money. You talk to people who are running shows on Broadway and they say a musical, in a fairly decent-sized house, has to do 75 per cent a week [in ticket sales] just to stay open — never mind recouping [the initial investment].”

Still, it’s a mystery that Fire, a meaty drama about two American icons, has never had a production in the Big Apple — or anywhere in the U.S., for that matter. It has come close — in the 1980s, it was on a shortlist at New York’s Public Theater, and other American companies have also expressed interest over the years, only to back away at the last minute. Ledoux puts it down to the show’s controversial look at the ties between Christian evangelism and U.S. politics. “I think there’s something unnerving for an American producer to take a play by Canadians that’s that critical of the American political system,” he says. “They get very uncomfortable with it. But once again, there are a couple of [U.S.] theatres interested in it, and they’ll be coming up to look at it at Canadian Stage.”

Whether Fire is picked up south of the border is not Ledoux’s main concern these days. He’s got yet another musical in development (with composer John Roby) entitled Paris Before the Crash. A big show about Canadian expatriates in 1920s Paris, it calls for a minimum cast of 20 and an eight-piece band, which Ledoux knows is sure to make budget-conscious theatres jittery. If you want to get a new musical produced in Canada, it’s generally understood that you have to keep it small.

“John and I have written those small, producible musicals and both of us said, ‘God, I’m tired of doing this! Let’s just write a big one,’” Ledoux says. “So we’re sending it out, saying ‘Now, if we can just talk anybody into doing this…’ But you get to the point where you think, I’ve made money for a lot of theatres in this country, and if they can afford to do Shakespeare, why can’t they afford to do a big Canadian musical?”

Still Desire You runs Oct. 16 to Nov. 3 at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary.

Fire runs March 20 to Apr. 19, 2008 at Canadian Stage in Toronto and Apr. 26 to May 18, 2008 at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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