Arts & Culture

What: Inside American Pie
Where: CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St.
When: Now, until Sun., March 30
Highlight: Brielle Ansems’s haunting vocals
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Bold new arrangements of classic rock staples paired with enthusiastic literary criticism

MIRVISH’S INSIDE AMERICAN PIE  is the best possible version of exactly what it’s trying to be: a lively, erudite and surprisingly touching stage adaptation of a Lyric Genius comment section. In other words, it’s a show I can’t recommend enough. If you’re trying to be conscientious about avoiding American goods amid the clamour of tariffs — and consequently inclined to wince at the sight of the stars and stripes backdrop that looms large in Lorenzo Savoini’s set design — fret not; this celebration of 20th-century Americana is a domestic import from Prince Edward Island’s Harmony House musical hall.

Co-created by Mike Ross and Sarah Wilson (well-known for their long musical tenures at Soulpepper, apexing with last year’s De Profundis), Inside American Pie is a pitch-perfect synthesis of a tribute concert, music history lesson and keynote lecture at a modern poetry conference. Marketed as a “docu-concert,” it’s scaffolded by a tightly scripted line-by-line breakdown of the lyrics to Don McLean’s American Pie, narrating the tale of the fateful 1959 plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, as well as the tumultuous decade that followed.

The piece is propelled by Ross’s curiosity-fuelled effort to decode the meanings behind the song’s thicket of references. He describes the densely intertextual hit as “the Dead Sea Scrolls of pop music,” though the resultant analysis feels somewhat less like the exegesis of a Talmudic rabbi and more like the slightly buzzed musings of an English professor at a pub. It’s the kind of show that knows how to make the audience go “oh” and “ah” with giddy recognition whenever names like Waylon Jennings or Robert Zimmerman enter the narrative. Interspersed between the orations unpacking McLean’s lyrics is a series of songs by the other artists who weave in and out of the story, musically capturing the crucible of influences behind the titular elegy.

This is a show that seems to have been tailor-made for my dad. Well, probably a lot of people’s dads, especially ones who share my father’s love of classic rock ’n’ roll and Dan Brown novels. It should come as no surprise that a piece of theatre about a song from the 1970s, which is itself about music and cultural touchstones from the ’50s and ’60s, would have nostalgic boomers as its target audience. The clearest evidence of this singular demographic focus might just be its prepositional title, which appears to have zero self-awareness for how being inside American Pie might give millennials such as myself uncomfortable flashbacks to a Jason Biggs movie we thought we’d all successfully repressed.

Despite that generational divide, I suppose I’m a chip off the old block because I adored this show! I already loved these songs and especially appreciated how Ross reinvigorates them with creative new arrangements. I’m also a sucker for literary close reading; there are few things that get me smiling quicker than hearing someone excitedly pore over a piece of art that means a lot to them.

Ross is the perfect MC, singing his heart out and hammering the keys. He narrates the lyrics’ meanings with an infectious enthusiasm that could only come from someone fully aware that he’s getting paid to do something he probably does for free whenever the song comes on the radio.

He’s accompanied by four exceptional PEI-based multi-instrumentalist bandmates who each add something special to the group. Greg Gale wows the audience with how long he’s able to hold a note, Alicia Toner brings down the house in a salute to Janis Joplin and percussionist Kirk White sustains the rhythm with a plethora of distinct sonic frequencies. But the breakout star might just be Brielle Ansems, whose hauntingly angelic voice repeatedly made me shiver (not unlike February). Simon Rossiter’s lighting design drapes them all in the high spectacle of a true rock-and-roll show but also knows when to exhibit restraint during the less bombastic folk ballads.

When I sat down to write this review, I decided to listen to McLean’s original recording on repeat. I thought it might be a source of inspiration, and I was curious to see if I would make any new discoveries illuminated by Ross’s analysis. However, after the 17 minutes it took to listen through it twice, I’d had my fill. The greatness of the song is not in question, but I don’t necessarily find that the show’s exhaustive overview taught me anything that actually enriches my experience of it — and not just because I’d already heard several parts of this story in the front seat of my dad’s car.

Maybe part of that is because I feel like I’ve now been given the “correct” answers to all of the song’s mysteries, presented by someone who clearly knows what he’s talking about. Ross’s thoroughness has left little room for countervailing opinions, at least not without undertaking one’s own equally robust research to uncover additional details that he somehow missed. Even in the parts of the song where he admits to not being fully confident about a particular reading’s correctness, he supplements that uncertainty with two equally compelling possibilities, like an explanatory Hydra. While I’m completely in agreement with Ross’s thesis that great art invites us to interpret it, the flipside is that great interpretation is capable of terminating further inquiry.

After those 17 minutes elapsed, I remembered that Ross had mentioned (during the curtain call) that some of the band members had released albums of their own original songs. As I continued writing, I decided to put McLean aside and listen to those instead. Ross asserts that the music didn’t really die in 1959 because McLean proved in 1971 that the music remained alive and well. The artists on stage in Inside American Pie themselves continue to prove that the same is true in 2025.