My Fur Lady

In 1957, McGill’s Red and White Revue produced a musical comedy which became an overnight success across Canada. The Revue consisted of a new, student-produced play each year, whose general goal was to parody university life at McGill. In 1956, the task of writing the show fell to a group of law students, Donald MacSween, Timothy Porteous, and Erik Wang. They wrote a musical satire of Canadian culture and politics as seen by an outsider--an Inuit princess--and titled it My Fur Lady, a pun on the Broadway musical popular at the time.

The students mounted the play at Moyse Hall in February of 1957, and its original run sold out nearly instantly. They decided to put it on again in May of the same year, planning sixteen performances; but demand for the show was such that they ran for six weeks! The company was then invited to play at the fringe of the Stratford Theatre Festival, where their expected run was again doubled because of My Fur Lady’s huge popularity. The show then embarked on a tour throughout Eastern Canada, including performances at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre, Her Majesty’s Theatre in Montreal, and a special gala in Ottawa, attended by several of the government officials who were lampooned in the play!