To hear Alan Doyle tell it, he’s stumbled into all his creative pursuits since the success of his folk-rock group Great Big Sea.
The name and voice recognition he earned fronting that band got him opportunities: as an actor in Ridley Scott’s 2010 film adaptation of Robin Hood, as the composer for the CBC sitcom Son of a Critch, as an author with three memoirs published so far and a fourth on the way.
“I’m a guy in a band, that’s my main job,” he says. “All the other stuff has come to me. I never went looking for any of it.”
The latest thing to come to him? A starring role in a musical he co-wrote.
The stage reimagining of the 2013 Don McKellar film The Grand Seduction follows residents of a small town in Atlantic Canada — not explicitly Newfoundland — that’s about to lose its main employer, and must court a frozen-french-fry factory to open up in its stead.
He stars in the show as Frank, a charismatic swindler who leads the charge to lure the business, and has been involved in the project since the earliest stages of development.
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The show got its start when Charlottetown Festival creative director Adam Brazier thought to adapt the film into a stage production and asked Doyle to write the music.
“I said, ‘I don’t know how to do that, so I’ll give it a go,'” Doyle recalls.
That’s one of two reasons for all his disparate projects: he wants to try new things, dip his toe into every pool to see how he likes it. That ethos led him to produce the Juno-winning Splash’N Boots children’s record You, Me and the Sea.
But distinct from the desire to say “yes” is a wariness about saying “no.”
He’s hesitant to reject even the jobs he doesn’t always enjoy, like keynote speaking at corporate events.
“Maybe it comes from the working-class upbringing in the poor fishing town that I grew up in, but if you get offered good work that pays you well, you don’t say no just because you don’t like it.”
If he starts turning things down, part of him worries the offers will stop coming, he says during an in-person interview walking along a revitalized portion of Toronto’s harbourfront.
He’s been going for lots of long walks during his stay in Toronto, preferring to see the city up close and in real-time, not from the window of a moving vehicle.
As a result, the city gets to see Doyle back. A trio of women do a double take as they pass him on the street.
“It’s you!” one of them says to him. They’re visiting from the East Coast, and they have tickets to the show later that night.
Doyle boasts a distinctive brand that’s stayed the same over the years: long, centre-parted brown hair, Celtic knot jewelry, a dark graphic T-shirt (today’s is emblazoned with the name of his hometown, Petty Harbour, N.L.) and a loud lilting voice that highlights Newfoundland’s ties to Ireland.
Perhaps even more than his signature hairstyle, Doyle is loyal to his home.
Throughout his career, Doyle has steadfastly declined to participate in any jokes at the expense of Newfoundlanders.
Public perception was bad when he was a kid, he says, recalling joke books about “lazy dumb people from Newfoundland.” He remembers hard-working neighbours wondering, “Who is this about?”
Those in the industry expected Great Big Sea to play along with the jabs, most notably during a 1997 Canada Day performance in Ottawa when they were asked to simulate coming on stage in a boat while wearing rain hats. But the young bandmates were clear: if other provinces weren’t being teased, Newfoundland wouldn’t be either.
“For better or for worse we realized that we were going to be a lot of people’s first impression about Newfoundland,” Doyle says.
They took their roles as de facto ambassadors seriously, and helped usher in a sea change for how Canadians think about the easternmost province. Other notable Newfoundlanders joined the fold, such as Rick Mercer, Mark Critch and Tom Power. Come From Away made it to Broadway. People started being proud to say they were from Newfoundland, when before they were reluctant to do so, Doyle says.
“It’s literally completely reversed in my lifetime,” he says, clarifying: “In my adult lifetime.”
He celebrates his home in his forthcoming book The Smiling Land: All Around the Circle in My Newfoundland and Labrador, out in November.
Part travel log, part “observational journal,” the book chronicles a trip Doyle took through the province with his wife and their then-18-year-old son.
“The book and Tell Tale Harbour share a really common thread of the love of home,” he says.
“Also (it’s) a very practical sort of way for me and my wife to show our teenage kid the place that he’s from.”
Doyle, who’s 56 and lives in St. John’s, has travelled the globe over the years, of course, but he’s never moved away from Newfoundland.
But unlike much of his work, Tell Tale Harbour isn’t explicitly set on the Rock.
“The whole idea and the debate was, should it be totally specific in this one place, or should it be anywhere? And we decided to make it anywhere because we wanted people to feel like this could be the place up the shore from you in Maine. This could be in Eastern Scotland,” he says.
“Even though in my mind, there’s only one place that this is: Petty Harbour,” he says. “Tell Tale Harbour is Petty Harbour in my mind. Maybe it’s somewhere else in someone else’s, and that’s fine too.”
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Though he’s coy about his ambitions for the show’s future — he’s very focused on the Mirvish production, he says — he’s always been ambitious about its potential reach.
Musical theatre’s fervent fan base is great, Doyle says, but he’s all about appealing to the masses.
“The trick, of course, especially in the outreaches of the theatre world … where you don’t have big populations, is how do we get other people to come?” he says.
If having his name attached to Tell Tale Harbour and his face printed on street banners advertising the show can convince a new audience to see “that musical that buddy from Great Big Sea is in,” he’s all for it.
“That was one of the things I joked about when we were developing Tell Tale Harbour for Charlottetown,” he recalls: “‘I think we might hit the home run here. We might get dudes to come out of the sheds and go see musical theatre for the first time in their lives. And they might not hate it.'”
Tell Tale Harbour runs until Nov. 2 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto.
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