Dan Buckley, James Gaddas, Robert Duncan, Jason Langley, Anton Stephans in Fisherman's Friends: The Musical.PAMELA RAITH/Mirvish
- Title: Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical
- Book by: Amanda Whittington
- Music as performed by: Fisherman’s Friends
- Based on a screenplay by: Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard, Piers Ashworth
- Director: James Grieve
- Actors: Jason Langley, Parisa Shahmir, James Gaddas
- Company: Mirvish Productions
- Venue: Royal Alexandra Theatre
- City: Toronto, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Jan. 15, 2023
The full company of Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical performs.PAMELA RAITH/Mirvish
Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical has sailed from the Cornish coast to the shores of Lake Ontario – and it’s no doubt a must-sea for fans of the working-class, shanty-singing group whose chart-topping success it embellishes into a big fish story.
For everybody else, the appeal of this musical will depend on how much appetite you still have for these warm-hearted but now decidedly warmed-over entertainments based on true stories about British small-towners doing something oh-so-unexpected and becoming media sensations.
Myself, I was fully sucked in by the Cornish charm and the beautiful harmonies of the first act, but found the flavour wore off in the second.
Fisherman’s Friends stage musical rides a weird wave of sea shanty popularity
The only Fisherman’s Friends I’d heard of before Mirvish announced the show were menthol lozenges. But the real-life ones at the centre of this musical are from Port Isaac, Cornwall, and started by singing traditional songs in a semi-circle a cappella on the platt (beach).
In 2010, these men signed a record deal with Universal, briefly charted and got to sing at the Glastonbury Festival.
That feel-good story has since been mythologized in a pair of movies – and now comes this folk-jukebox musical, which had its world premiere in Cornwall in 2021 and is currently on a U.K. and Ireland tour popping by Toronto.
In the stage script penned by Amanda Whittington, the strand of story that dominates is about a fish-out-of-water.
A washed-out A&R manager named Danny (Jason Langley) in from London stumbles drunkenly into a pub where the Fisherman’s Friends are singing for their own pleasure, while knocking back steins of Cornish ale ahead of another morning out fishing.
Though he’s kicked out, the next day Danny is back and attempting to sign the group, which is de facto led by hard-edged fisherman Jim (James Gaddas).
Jim and the gang tell him that singing isn’t about making money but community – and that they are simply temporary custodians of sometimes centuries-old tunes about hard work and drinking and women that contain their people’s history like a “family album.”
From the left, Anton Stephans, Dan Buckley, James Gaddas, Robert Duncan in a scene from Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical.PAMELA RAITH
Danny, who is lying about still being employed in the music business, is undeterred – and seems equally interested in winning over Alwyn (a magnetic Parisa Shahmir), a singer and B&B operator who is Jim’s daughter.
Alwyn’s mother ran out when she was a girl, choosing the lights of London over the more muted pleasures of Port Isaac – so Danny has a hard task ahead in gaining either her or her father’s trust.
Fisherman’s Friends are a musical group sold on that slippery quality known as authenticity – and director James Grieve and choreographer Matt Cole do a great job in the first act of making the show not too flashy and undercutting that.
It’s best in its simplest moments – as stoic or jocular men let a little feeling slip out through songs about A Village By the Sea or A Ship in Distress or some guy named John Kanaka; the sound design and orchestrations are top-notch and the accompaniment by onstage melodeon and mandolin players with decidedly nonactor vibes adds to the genuine feel.
The slice-of-Cornish-life scenes where Danny learns a thing or two about these people, their resurrected language or their feast day are lovely – with enough Cornish cast members to anchor them. There’s some fine romantic chemistry, too, between Langley, who wiggles around following the David Tennant school of British acting, and Shahmir, who has an ethereal voice that makes you wish she had more solos.
It’s only really in the second act that Fisherman’s Friends starts to spring a leak. The men head off to London – and the impending happy ending is delayed and delayed by contrived and sometimes confusing plot twists, so another dozen sea shanties can be sung.
A pandering scene in which the men wander into a gay bar is cringeworthy, while another that tries to focus on the women feels shoehorned in. A last-minute manipulative attempt to ramp up emotion is signposted so far in advance that it leads eyes to roll rather than tear up.
It’s only when the spell of the early part of the show lifts that you start to realize the titular characters are too hazily defined a clump to care about deeply. As for these Fisherman’s Friends being “The World’s Most Unlikely Buoy-Band,” the only thing that would be unlikely to an audience after a couple of decades of similar films and stage shows would be to see a show about small-town Brits who actually fish rather than top the charts, or become Chippendale dancers, or start a boutique line of shoes for drag queens.