OAKVILLE, ONT—On a darkened stage in the fall of 2017, Michael Rubinoff unfolds a historic document, the white of the paper glinting off a floodlight.

“How’s this for motivation?” he asks. The crowd roars.

That certificate bearing his name signifies that the show he produced, “Come From Away” is nominated for a Tony Award for Best Musical.

Inspired by the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, it is already a monster hit and would go on to become the longest running Canadian show on Broadway.

If Rubinoff appeared as a Moses-like figure, displaying a Tony Award-sanctified tablet while touting the promised land, it was intentional. Because he wants to do it again. And this is his second act.

Tonight the audience, mostly composed of friends and family from Sheridan College’s musical theatre program, are seeing for the first time a rough treatment of a work based on the life of celebrated Gravenhurst, Ont., doctor Norman Bethune. Like “Come From Away,” the idea for the musical was inspired by Rubinoff.

The multicultural student cast is gathered on the stage of the campus theatre located west of Toronto.

I see Lakes.

I see People.

I see Sky.

I see my House.

What Do You See.

I’m a man. A myth. A political agenda.

They read a poem written by Bethune, a meditation on the Spanish Civil War, translated into Chinese.

“How wild is it to see a poem inspired from so many years ago read by Canadian actors in Mandarin?” asks writer Brian Hill.

Bethune found fame when he joined the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s, performing battlefield medicine during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Virtually unknown in Canada at the time, he became a national hero in China, first eulogized by Chairman Mao Zedong in an essay that was required reading in Chinese schools.

His life has been dramatized in film, television, in plays and even an opera. But, by most accounts, never a musical. It was made, perhaps most notably, into a 1990 biopic starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, and written by Ted Allan. Like this musical, the movie would be the first Chinese-Canadian co-production of its kind.

Ironically, Sutherland clashed with writer Allan over the interpretation of Bethune’s legacy: was he devil or saint? It is an issue that will haunt the current production.

“What’s the lie you accept? What’s the truth you accept? How do you show the sides of such a complex character?” asks writer Hill. “That was always the challenge.”

The road to Broadway is never easy. The Star followed Rubinoff and the creative team for more than a year, interviewing writers, students and the authors for an early glimpse into the demands of producing what could be Canada’s next Broadway-bound musical.

But, unlike the first time around, they have a blueprint. “Come From Away” was the germ of an idea conceived by Rubinoff and pitched to husband and wife writing team David Hein and Irene Sankoff.

What happened next is virtually unheard of in the theatre world: an obscure, student-workshopped production that makes it to the big leagues in New York.

The show set Canadian box office records and is currently running in Toronto at the Royal Alexandra Theatre where it first played in 2016. It was nominated for seven Tony Awards, winning one for Best Direction for Christopher Ashley, but losing to “Dear Evan Hansen” for Best Musical.

Rubinoff, a lawyer, had recently taken over as the associate dean of visual and performing arts at Oakville’s Sheridan College when he first bet on “Come From Away.” “Bethune” is the next, more ambitious step.

It also has the advantage of a buzz in Canadian theatrical circles that is unprecedented. That started in the summer of 2016 when he signed an agreement with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre to create the musical.

Witnessing the event was Canada’s then foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland. Signed to the team are writer Hill, lyricist Neil Bartram and Chinese playwright Nick Rongjun Yu.

Bartram and Hill are a proven, veteran team. Perhaps more importantly they have already made it to Broadway with “The Story of My Life” in 2009.

Yu is considered China’s most prolific playwright. And significantly, he is also the deputy general manager of the influential and well-capitalized Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, wielding both artistic and administrative power.

In short, it is a dream matchup between the political, the artistic and the business sphere. The team starts on a high note. Relations between China and Canada are never better. But geopolitics, including the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump and a newly assertive China, will cast a long shadow. The hard work hasn’t yet begun.

“It’s strange,” says Yu. “Why don’t people here know about Bethune? Why don’t people love him or care about him?”

Yu is sitting in an empty studio in Oakville on a cold summer night in 2017. The playwright, whose works have been staged in China more than any other artist in the last decade, has travelled from China to spend a few weeks in a workshop with Bartram and Hill.

As much as he could be kind and compassionate, Bethune could also be rude and patronizing. He was also a notorious womanizer who cheated on his wife Frances. Bringing such a complex character to the stage is proving no easy task.

“He is a really interesting guy. A really talented guy. But in China, Bethune is a hero. In Canada he is nothing. Why?”

Yu is grappling with the legacy of a Canadian who has been propagandized to Chinese youth for decades. Trying to find truth in the portrayal will be the key to unlocking the story, he says.

“When I did the research I really came to love him more,” says Yu. “He is a three-dimensional character. He really believed in society. Yes, we want him to be a perfect person. But nobody is a perfect person.”

Bethune was far from perfect. In their exhaustive biography “Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune,” authors Roderick and Sharon Stewart paint a portrait of an arrogant, undisciplined man who alienated friends and family. He was also an alcoholic and spendthrift. But he came into his own with his sacrifice on the battlefields of China and is credited with saving thousands of lives.

The Stewarts unsparingly determine that Bethune’s fame is largely the result of one historical event: “The ultimate victory of the Chinese communists over the Kuomintang in the Chinese civil war. Had that not occurred, his life would be a footnote.”

But what a footnote.

Earlier that night, Yu sat in a circle with students from Sheridan, and with Hill and Bartram, discussing that legacy.

It is an unusual process, working with input from creators and students to create art. It’s something that Yu, who writes alone, is not used to.

He tells me that he once wrote an entire play on an airplane going from Peru to Paris to Shanghai, 70 hours total.

“It’s not normal to collaborate in your work with students, but it is great to have different opinions, it opens your eyes,” says Yu.

Gathered in a circle in a basement room at Sheridan, the small group of theatre students give their impressions of what they think the play means.

“My mind is turning. How did I go my whole life and not know who this person is?” says a female student. “I can’t get over the poetry of the Mandarin, the way it sounds compared to the English translation.”

“Instead of being told who this guy is, I think it’s important for the work to ask that question but let the audience decide,” says a male student.

When you think incubator, most people think of technology — the startups that dot downtown Toronto. But there are also arts incubators, which are vital to the lifeblood of Canadian culture. They develop and tell Canadian stories to the world and, just as importantly, to ourselves.

The Sheridan Canadian Music Theatre Project, founded in 2011, is both teaching lab and incubator for musicals. While filmmakers, for example, have the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto to workshop screenplays, there is no comparable outlet for musical theatre in Canada.

“It’s really special when the creator is immediately able to hear a song he’s just written being sung by a student,” says Rubinoff. “The feedback is invaluable and, at the same time, the student leaves an imprint on the work by their input.”

That’s the process that was used successfully by the team from “Come From Away” and why Oakville has become a powerhouse in musical theatre.

“There is never a bad time to tell a story about human kindness,” “Come From Away” creator Hein had told me in an earlier interview about his work. “Especially a story about the political climate right now, a story about welcoming strangers from other parts of the world and just being good to each other just makes sense.”

That sense of kindness — mythologized as part of the bedrock that defines Canadian character — is what also made Rubinoff interested in pursing Bethune. It was an idea he had kicking around in his head, he says, since 2015.

“I was looking at concepts that would resonate between China and Canada. And Norman Bethune was certainly a figure worth exploring,” says Rubinoff.

Like “Come From Away,” “Bethune” was hatched in a bar.

In this case, in Shanghai’s French quarter in the winter of 2015, where Rubinoff first told Yu of the idea. Five years earlier Rubinoff had met Hein and Sankoff over lunch in Toronto asking them to run with what seemed a crazy idea: a musical about the tragedy of 9/11.

“Come From Away,” whose Broadway run included Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seeing the show with U.S. first daughter Ivanka Trump, was perhaps the ultimate example of a play weaponized as cultural diplomacy. The show is about how the residents of Gander, N.L., treated displaced airline passengers — many of them American — in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The symbolism, of course, was rich. Canada’s stance on welcoming outsiders has been diametrically opposed to the Trump administration.

In that sense, “Bethune” is also theatre as diplomacy, but on a more ambitious scale. It is conceived as a major collaboration between China and Canada, and it follows the life of a Canadian who has made an outsized impact on another nation. It is Canada feeding the propaganda of Bethune back to the land that eulogized him in the first place, while celebrating its own.

“Look, nobody knew who Eva Peron was until Andrew Lloyd Webber came along,” says Rubinoff. “That’s how powerful theatre can be in culture creation.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

In this case, it would be Canadian and Chinese writers controlling their own narrative — not Webber. Still, could Rubinoff pull off a second act of such dramatic proportion?

From the time it was workshopped at Sheridan, “Come From Away” took five years to hit Broadway. That is light speed in the theatre world. The high profile musical “Anastasia,” based on the animated movie about the fall of the Romanov empire and currently playing at the Ed Mirvish Theatre, by comparison took almost 20 years to get to Broadway. And that’s not an outlier.

Theatre is an unusual collaborative art form with a myriad of moving parts, from financiers to artists to musicians. Add the music part — with lyrics, music and book (the storyline) — and you pretty much have a recipe for disaster if participants aren’t generally headed in the same direction.

The art form also has a profound failure rate. Only five Canadian-made shows have made it to Broadway. “Come From Away” was the fifth and most successful.

“As they say, great musicals aren’t written, they are rewritten. Over and over again,” laughs Rubinoff.

No one knows this better than theatre impresario David Mirvish, who owns a string of historic venues in Canada’s largest city.

“I think it’s tremendously exciting. Just the thought of having an audience of a billion people and without ever leaving two countries,” says Mirvish.

It is the summer of 2018 and Mirvish says he is closely monitoring the development of “Bethune.” “Come From Away” has already been a big hit for his theatre and he is anxious to see what the Sheridan project can come up with next.

“Bethune had a foot in politics, the art world, in medicine. If someone wanted to tell the story effectively it would be great. But you have to get it right. Until you actually see the product you really don’t know what your feelings are about it.”

Mirvish may be hedging his bets, because he knows how difficult it is to get to the final product. A musical is made in baby steps. Two steps forward. One backward.

And sometimes it’s absolutely out of your control.

In December 2018, Meng Wanzhou, the deputy chairwoman of Chinese technology giant Huawei, was detained in Vancouver at the behest of the United States.

That has caused massive pushback from China, including the unprecedented detention of two Canadians in what some see as retaliation.

When I next see Rubinoff, it is the summer of 2019, at Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church in downtown Toronto. The creative team has set up in a small rehearsal room to present the play to influencers, including other theatre executives, for feedback.

An 11-person contingent of students and guest artists present new music and lyrics. They chant:

“He was born in the backwoods of Canada.

Rough, untamed and raw.

He was an ace with an axe and saw.

He made the ladies swoon.

He was Norman Bethune.”

Missing on this day is playwright Yu. Over the last few months the creative team has decided to pursue the project separately, citing “creative differences.”

“I think partly it was a language and cultural divide,” says Rubinoff, choosing his words carefully. “I think it gives us room and freedom to explore more creatively on our side without trying to figure out how to integrate it into something else.”

The producer says there is a possibility the two sides could get together again.

I ask him if the deteriorating political relationship between China and Canada has anything to do with the decision.

“I’ve been back and forth to China in the middle of all this,” says Rubinoff. “And it’s a question that has definitely been raised by our partners and the people I’m speaking to. There are certainly challenges in the relationship. But we’re focused on creating a piece of art. We hope this is in the spirit of bringing people together.”

In China, of course, no business is done without some sort of government involvement. The Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre is also the city’s sole state-funded theatre, created after the merger of its two largest theatres. Politics and art are, by design, intertwined.

On the Canadian side, polls show that Canadians are taking a much more negative view of China as that country becomes much more authoritarian both at home and abroad.

Still, it’s not hard to argue that there likely were some creative differences. Chinese audiences would likely expect a different product than North American audiences. And working in two languages and two markets presents an entirely different set of problems.

Talks haven’t broken down completely. The two countries still have an agreement. And there is the possibility of other Chinese partners coming into the play. Anyone who has seen Mel Brooks’ black satire “The Producers” knows there are plenty of ups and downs before spewing out one showstopper — even if it ends up being “Springtime for Hitler.”

Indefatigable optimism is part of the job description.

But regardless, the musical does have at least one very important fan, so far.

“I really think my uncle would have thought, ‘Why this fuss about me? I’m just a doctor.’ He didn’t think he was making history at all. I think he would be embarrassed,” says Joan Lindley, the niece of Bethune. “But I also think it’s being very smartly done.”

Three years after conception, only a very few people have seen the raw musical and that includes Lindley, who attended a live performance. Bethune died when Lindley was 10 years old. She remembers him bringing a large bag of gifts for her after he travelled to Spain and Russia.

“I thought it was very thought-provoking that the myth is entirely different than the man I knew,” says Lindley. “I knew a lighter man with a sense of humour as a person. But historically, he was not presented that way. It’s interesting to see where they are taking it.”

It is a snowier than normal December 2019. Rubinoff has recently returned from Taipei, Taiwan, where he has been invited to take a look at the musical theatre industry on the island. It’s not an unusual request. The producer and educator is enjoying a much higher profile internationally, as a consultant, since “Come From Away.”

As for the Bethune project, Broadway is still years down the road. After political and creative speed bumps, “Bethune” still has an uncertain future. But there is hope.

The Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre is still not at the table. But there are talks with other prominent Chinese institutions.

The touring company of “Come From Away” is scheduled to perform in China in May, the production’s first non-English-speaking tour stop. This should at least open a door or two. If it all works, Rubinoff hopes to send Sheridan students next spring to do a workshop.

So the collaboration may still be on, but with different partners. One more potential step forward.

Rubinoff, a man who has proven that dubious ideas can lead to Broadway gold, is, as is his nature, still optimistic.

“It’s really astounding, we’ve been with this for a few years and you see the shape of what it could be,” says Rubinoff. “Bethune is part of our unknown history. How we share this story with the world will be interesting. I’m as intrigued as the next person. It’s a musical that asks what we think of Canadian values. What will this look like when it comes together and what does it say about who we are? That’s the question we hope to tackle on the big stage.”

Read more about: