Musical Anne and Gilbert to tour in 2008

Anne and Gilbert, the popular musical based on the stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery, is going on tour in 2008.

The musical sequel to Anne of Green Gables, a perennial fixture in Charlottetown theatre, has been playing in Summerside, P.E.I., for the last two summers.

Next year, on the 100th anniversary of the initial publication of Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, at least two productions of Anne and Gilbert are set to tour.

Its first off-Island production at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque, Ont., played to sold-out audiences this summer.

Next year, the show's producer Campbell Webster expects to produce the musical at the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto, he says.

Another theatre company plans to tour the show to more than a dozen venues in Ontario. There's also a production planned in Japan, where Anne of Green Gables is a great favourite, and another in Pontiac, Mich.

New York writer Jeff Hochhauser had the idea of creating a musical based on Montgomery's continuing story of Anne Shirley after seeing a production of the original musical in Charlottetown.

"She's sort of Canada's Tom Sawyer, and basically our job in writing the show was to be as true as we could to the original material, but also write it for a contemporary audience," he says.

He worked with songwriters Bob Johnston and Nancy White to create a script based on Anne's college years and her prickly romance with Gilbert Blythe.

"It is a love story, but it's a small town — it's hard not to recognize those characters, the whole world of everybody knowing everybody's business, and everybody at the same time really caring about everybody else. It's a beautiful story, and it's hard not to fall in love with it," he says.

Charlottetown's Confederation Centre, where Anne of Green Gables has played since 1964, did not want to take on the untried production.

Webster says the group raised the money and took on the risk of staging it themselves.

"It was kind of a really nutty idea to begin with, as a business idea, for our company to get behind this, because putting on musicals written by Canadians with Canadian source material — they either don't happen or get blown out of the water so fast that that's the end of them," he says.

Staging a successful new musical is a rarity, and Hochhauser says he's been heartened by the play's reception in Gananoque.

"The thing that was so gratifying about the success in Gananoque is that a lot of people said, 'Well, sure, it's a hit on Prince Edward Island, but everything Anne of Green Gables is going to go over on Prince Edward Island,'" he says.

A recording ofsongs from the play won an East Coast Music Award, and a Variety review predicted that Anne and Gilbert would become "a standard on the Canadian music scene."