Alan Doyle will be in Calgary twice in the next six months, first for Wordfest on Nov. 19, and again on March 22, when he’ll take the stage at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, a venue he says spoils the audience.
“How cool is that building? My God,” Doyle laughs. “It’s such a thrill to get to play there all the time. Edmonton and Calgary Jubes are like the Massey Hall — there’s a half dozen of them in the country where you go… when you finally get to that stage, you go like, ‘I hope I always get to play here.’”
But on Nov. 19, he takes a much more intimate stage at the Patricia A. Whelan Theatre in the Central Library for a sold-out evening of conversation with bestselling author Nita Prose, who edited his first two books.
“That’s always fun because I never know what’s going to happen. Depending on what the questions are, it leads to a few stories and fun ideally. And then, you know, I might slide a song or two in there too, just to make a good night of it,” Doyle said.
Doyle’s career has always been about storytelling through song, to books, and now, on stage. His hit musical theatre show Tell Tale Harbour, which he co-wrote and starred in, just wrapped a six-week, sold-out run at Toronto’s historic Royal Alex Theatre.
“The first time we did it was in the summer of 2022,” he explains. “We debuted it at the Charlottetown Festival and had great success there, and then the Mirvish gang came to see it, they loved it. They partnered with the Confederation Centre for the Arts to remount it and it rolled until the 2nd of November. The Toronto run was unbelievably successful. We did six weeks and five of them were completely sold out, and the first week was like 95 percent and then got rolling. It was amazing.”
He’d happily do it again. “There’s talks of us bringing it back to Toronto late in ’26,” he says. “And Calgary is top on the list actually; we’d love to bring it to one of the theatres in Calgary and run it for a couple of weeks or whatever. It would be great fun. Just because I really feel like Alberta audiences would love it.”
He says despite his on stage experience, performing in a scripted musical was a steep learning curve. “To be honest with you, it’s way more different than I would have thought,” Doyle admits. “I’m glad I didn’t know in 2021 how different a skill set it is to be in a piece of musical theatre than it is to front a band … All the lessons I learned fronting a band for 30 years — not only are they not helpful, many of them are harmful.”
He puts it plainly: “Every night when I front a band, I can surrender to the audience. And every night you go out with Telltale Harbour, you have to surrender to the play every night. And if you front a band for a living, surrendering to the play and not to the audience is terrifying — absolutely terrifying — and it should be, and that’s what makes it good.”
In the musical, Doyle plays a small-town schemer named Frank. “We’re a lot alike until we’re not,” he says. “Frank loves being the center of attention. He loves home and is willing to do almost anything to protect and save home. And much like me, he also thinks that a song can cure almost anything. The big difference between Frank and Doyle is that Frank is absolutely terrified of anything that doesn’t live within his little town, and of course I’ve been fascinated by everything else outside of my little walls since I was 13.”
That curiosity carries into his new book.
Doyle’s latest work, The Smiling Land: All Around the Circle in My Newfoundland and Labrador, takes readers along on a 4,000-kilometre journey across his home province — a trip he made with his wife and son.
“Mostly it’s a journey with myself and my wife and our son, taking him around Newfoundland and Labrador really for the first time … and then parts of it we went to for the first time for me as well,” he says. “It was really about rediscovering or discovering what the new Newfoundland and Labrador is.”
“I talk about Newfoundland, growing up in a fishing town and all these little coastal communities that were dependent on the cod fishery,” he explains. “Then of course, in the early 1990s, the cod moratorium came and many of those smaller communities on the coast had to redefine themselves… So what are they doing?That was one of my favorite parts of it — learning what cool ways certain Newfoundland towns have paved the new way forward.”
He laughs remembering the scale of the trip. “I’m embarrassed to admit what a shock it was to me to drive from St. John’s over to Gros Morne, turn right and go up the Northern Peninsula and then take the ferry across Southern Labrador, that one trip knocked the arse off 4,000 kilometres by the time we did it.”
It was a family adventure in the appropriate ride, “We did it in our family minivan across the Mad Max highway of the Southern Labrador,” he says. “All the other vehicles you see are like motorcycles with survival pouches, and here we are pottering along in our Honda Odyssey.”
Their son Henry was seventeen at the time. “Part of the reason we did it was because we knew he’d be 19 soon and we’d never get him to come with us again,” he laughs. “I think he had a great time. It was an eye-opening thing for him to see how vast the place is and how few people there are in it.”
For Doyle, the book is as much about the journey as the joy of homecoming. And when he returns to Calgary this fall, he’ll bring that same spirit with him — the storytelling, the music, and the sense of belonging that has made his songs the soundtrack of so many Canadian gatherings.
“One of the cool things, if you stick around long enough, you meet people who are in the second or third generation of their family where you’re the soundtrack of their parties,” he says. “It really does make for a fuller concert experience when you know you’re part of people’s lives after you leave and you were before you got there. It’s amazing.”
While the Wordfest event for Nov. 19 is sold out, a waiting list is being taken here.
You can grab tickets to see Doyle at the Jubilee March 22 here.
And a hint to any artistic directors in town looking for shows to program: Doyle says he has Calgary on his bucket list for a stop for Tell Tale Harbour, if you want to reach out and make that happen, I have his contact information.