World Premiere of TIGER BRIDE Will Come to Soulpepper Theatre
Hailey Gillis, Landon Doak, and Andrew Penner star in the Angela Carter-adapted punk-rock musical
Soulpepper Theatre Company will present the World Premiere of TIGER BRIDE, a bold genre-defying new musical work from veteran collaborators Frank Cox-O'Connell, Hailey Gillis, and Andrew Penner. On stage May 29th to June 14th, this rock-fuelled, punk-infused production, explodes the boundaries of theatre, fusing concert, cabaret, and gothic storytelling into one unforgettable theatrical event.
Based on the 1979 short story The Tiger's Bride by British author Angela Carter, this electrifying song cycle turns Beauty and the Beast inside out. Here, the Beast doesn't become a man—instead, the Girl becomes something wilder. Blurring the lines between girl and woman, human and animal, power and submission, TIGER BRIDE is a raw, gothic fever dream pulsing with sex, fury, and transformation. Featuring 16 original songs composed by Cox-O'Connell, Gillis, and Penner—and performed live, both vocally and instrumentally, by the three cast members—the production is a bewitching alchemy of music, performance, and storytelling.
Co-created by Cox-O'Connell, Gillis, and Penner and directed by Cox-O'Connell, Soulpepper's Slaight Family Director of Music, TIGER BRIDE will star Dora Award-winning performer Gillis stars as the titular character alongside Penner and Landon Doak. The project was sparked by Gillis, who was drawn to adapt Angela Carter's story—an evocative reimagining of the classic Beauty and the Beast.
“This story got me right away,” shares Gillis. “With it's gothic imagery and magnetic tone, it was sexy, scary, sad, wild, and fresh. When I read it I could immediately hear the sound of it – its ebbs and flows, big, fast, and weird, old wistful piano and electronic pulsing rhythm. Andrew and Frank make sounds like those that came to me reading Tiger Bride and I couldn't imagine making the show with anyone else. I am really proud of how our impulses and experiments have come together in this piece.”
Cox-O'Connell adds, “The Tiger's Bride examines the lines that divide girl and woman, woman and man, person and animal, human and machine. In spite of its fairy tale structure, there is nothing moralistic or ideological about the text. It is a messy study in power, sex and what makes us human. For artists who have worked to smudge the lines between rock concert, bargain-basement cabaret, and populist theatre, we find it thrilling.”
The multihyphenate talents behind TIGER BRIDE are longstanding Soulpepper Company members –Gillis and Cox-O'Connell both graduates of Soulpepper Academy who have performed in and created with for the company for well over a decade on productions including Soulpepper's wildly acclaimed production of Spoon River (2014) and 2017's The Secret Chord, which Penner also performed in. In 2022 the three artists were part of the company that created the award-winning theatrical song cycle The Shape of Home and in 2023 they came together again for the Soulpepper concert DETROIT which just enjoyed a remount at the theatre.
Carter's original short story The Tiger Bride was published in 1979 in a collection entitled The Bloody Chamber and other stories, with all the stories within the collection based on folk or fairytales. In Carter's take on the Beauty and the Beast, the beast is a mysterious masked figure who is revealed to be a tiger, and the heroin eventually transforms into a glorious tigress herself. The collection of gothic stories in the book is connected by the themes of feminism and metamorphosis, and the female characters are consistently given more agency than they have in the source material. Various stories from the book have been adapted for film, radio, and other forms with The Tiger's Bride having previously been adapted for the theatre.
Joining Cox-O'Connell on the creative team are Set and Costume Designer Shannon Lea-O'Doyle, Lighting Designer Frank Donato, Sound Designer Brian Kenny, and Dramaturg Joanna Falck.
TIGER BRIDE runs at SOULPEPPER THEATRE May 29th to June 14th (Media night: June 2nd ) with performances Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8:00pm and Saturdays and Sundays at 2:00pm.
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