Theatre producer Michael Rubinoff poses alongside Tim Hortons executive Hope Bagozzi at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, Tuesday, April 9, 2024.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
The Last Timbit, a new musical commissioned by Tim Hortons, is having its world premiere in Toronto this week at the Elgin Theatre – promising theatregoers the sight of triple threats singing about double doubles.
It’s tempting to roast this 70-minute show, devised by a Toronto-based marketing company as an 60th anniversary promotion for the doughnut-and-coffee chain, or to view it as a harbinger of doom for Canada’s struggling performing arts sector.
Certainly, many will consider it a cruel(ler) waste of the creative talents of Anika Johnson and Britta Johnson (Dr. Silver), who wrote the songs, and Nick Green (Casey and Diana), who wrote the book.
Why would any self-respecting musical-theatre creators waste their valuable time percolating lyrics for a company that has demonstrated a long-term disdain for perfect rhymes with its “Roll up the Rim to Win” campaign?
Well, let me sprinkle a little context on the (w)hole endeavour: The Last Timbit strikes me as a new spin on the long, illustrious tradition of corporately commissioned “industrial musicals” that were a regular source of income for composers and lyricists on the rise in the 20th century.
Steve Young and Sport Murphy pulled the curtain back on this little-known genre of musicals, mostly created for internal team-building events and trade shows, in their 2013 book called Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals – which was also the basis for a 2018 documentary called Bathtubs over Broadway.
You can listen to some of the songs from industrials made in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s for companies such as Ford, Coca-Cola and Exxon on the book’s website.
“It started as something to make fun of,” Young said of his obsession with these shows in an interview with The New York Times. “I thought, ‘How pathetic, an insurance musical.’ But then I wondered why, three days later, I was still singing these songs.”
One of the reasons why is that major American musical theatre talent was involved in the industrial musicals.
Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, the team behind Fiddler on the Roof and Fiorello!, once made a 1959 show for Ford about their tractor line called Ford-i-fy Your Future. Likewise, John Kander and Fred Ebb, the pair behind Cabaret and Chicago, composed one for General Electric in 1966 called Go Fly a Kite.
Great talent could be found on stage, performing these shows, too. If Bob Fosse and Chita Rivera weren’t above touring in a Oldsmobile musical in 1953, then Canadian Broadway vets such as Chilina Kennedy, Jake Epstein and Kimberly-Ann Truong certainly have no reason to feel ashamed about acting for Tim Hortons today.
The Last Timbit, just like the old-school industrial musicals, will be shown to a strictly internal audience first – with only restaurant owners and their guests allowed in to the two performances on Wednesday, June 26. It will then have a series of public performances for paying audiences from June 27 to 30.
What’s next after coffee musicals? Soap operas?
The Last Timbit also reminds me of when Governor General’s Award-winning Judith Thompson premiered a new play commissioned by Unilever in Toronto in 2008. James Bradshaw wrote about that for The Globe at the time – and Body & Soul, as it was called, was one of the early shows I reviewed as the paper’s theatre critic.
Three to see this week
- Of Monday night’s Dora Mavor Moore Award winners (congratulations to all), only one “show” is still around for audiences to check out for themselves. Benevolence Hall, an art installation created by Kevin Matthew Wong which won for “outstanding innovative experience”, invites visitors to “reflect on their own journeys and relationships to Canada, through the lens of the Hakka”. It includes a reading room, a short film and a video installation – and you can visit it in St Lawrence Market’s Market Gallery until Aug. 4.
- Nova Scotia’s Two Planks and a Passion, one of the loveliest outdoor theatre companies in Canada, opens its mainstage show this week: Mountain and the Valley, adapted from the classic novel by Ernest Buckler by Governor General’s Award winning playwright Catherine Banks. Director Guillermo Verdecchia’s production runs on the ground of Ross Creek Centre for the Arts until Aug. 17, with a cast of 13.
- Perchance Theatre, which sets up its stage behind a convent in Conception Harbour, N.L., kicks off its season on Friday. High Steel, Mary Walsh, Ron Hynes and Rick Boland’s 1984 show about the Newfoundlanders who helped build the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center in New York, is first to open – in a revival directed by Walsh herself.