On the heels of a limited stage run in Toronto, Bell Media and Tim Hortons have joined forces to transform the musical The Last Timbit into a 80-minute Crave special, which was filmed in front of a live studio audience at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.Crave
Canadians across the country will get a second chance to watch an unusual new musical designed to sell double-doubles later this summer.
The Last Timbit, which was produced by Tim Hortons to celebrate the coffee chain’s 60th anniversary in Toronto over Canada Day weekend, will air as an 80-minute special on Crave on Aug. 12, Bell Media and Tim Hortons announced on Friday.
The original Brian Hill-directed production was filmed in front of a live audience at the Elgin Theatre during its short week-long run on stage.
“It was such a thrill to see The Last Timbit come to life in front of delighted audiences in Toronto and it was always our wish that we could share this special production with Canadians from coast to coast to coast,” said Hope Bagozzi, chief marketing officer for Tim Hortons, in a press release.
The idea of creating a Tim Hortons musical was originally a marketing idea devised by a Toronto-based firm called Gut – but the involvement of Canadian stage producer Michael Rubinoff in the project lent it wider legitimacy as a piece of musical theatre.
Rubinoff, who was key to the development of the record-breaking Canadian Broadway show Come From Away from its conception, helped assemble a creative team that included Hill, a Canadian director and book writer whose own musicals with his collaborator Neil Bartram have been produced across North America and on Broadway.
The Last Timbit’s book was written by Nick Green, the playwright behind Casey and Diana, which won a Toronto Theatre Critics Award for best new play last month, while its music was written by the rising songwriters Anika and Britta Johnson.
Like the Sept.11-themed, Newfoundland-set Come From Away, this new musical is inspired by a true story of a group of people stranded in an unlikely location – in this case, however, it is a 2010 blizzard that snowed in a large group of Tim Hortons customers in a Sarnia, Ont., shop for 24 hours.
The Toronto production’s cast includes a who’s who of Canadian musical theatre stars – including Broadway vets Chilina Kennedy, Sara Farb, Kimberly-Ann Truong and Jake Epstein as well as Barbara Fulton, who was in the original Toronto company of Come From Away.
The Last Timbit received a wide array of responses from critics in its premiere. The Globe and Mail praised the “wit and warmth” of Green’s script and suggested it could enter the Canadian with a few tweaks and “20 per cent fewer subliminal messages to buy baked goods,” while the Toronto Star panned the show, describing it as nothing more than “a 75-minute commercial advertisement masquerading as a musical.”