Why has Sheridan College’s Canadian Music Theatre Project, the birthplace of Come From Away, called it quits?

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Come From Away finished its long and impressive Broadway run on Sunday afternoon. Its 25 previews and 1,669 performances are the most ever of a Canadian musical in New York’s famed commercial theatre district. (Second place: The Drowsy Chaperone with 32 previews and 674 performances.)

That record will be hard to break – and, unfortunately, Canadian musical theatre writers and composers inspired to make the attempt now have one less developmental tool at their disposal than Come From Away creators Irene Sankoff and David Hein did.

That’s because the Canadian Music Theatre Project (CMTP), a program for incubating new musicals at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont. – and which actually started with Come From Away in 2011 – came to an end earlier this fall with little fanfare.

Michael Rubinoff, the program’s founder and producing artistic director, was the one who suggested to Sankoff and Hein that there might be a musical in the story of what happened in Gander, N.L., when planes were diverted there on Sept. 11, 2001.

In its original form, CMTP paid composers, lyricists and book writers to develop musicals with fourth-year students in Sheridan’s music theatre performance program.

At the end of that month-long process, the pros got a public 45-minute “books and stands” reading of their show and a demo recording to help attract interest from producers. Sheridan students, meanwhile, got to experience what it was like to develop a brand new musical, and made industry connections.

CMTP, as I wrote back in 2015, played a crucial role in what has been a major musical-theatre boom in Canada. Workshopping new musicals is extremely expensive. Back in 2011 it wasn’t a priority for the limited resources at not-for-profits, and commercial producers who develop new work were nearly non-existent in this country.

An impressive number of the shows commissioned by or developed through CMTP over the years went on to have professional premieres. To name just a couple others: The Theory of Relativity, a show about the messy feelings of young adulthood that is now regularly one of the most-produced musicals in U.S. high schools, and Grow, a comedy about Amish sisters who get involved in the legalized marijuana industry, which recently had a main stage run at the Grand Theatre in London, Ont.

CMTP’s legacy continues this season, as at least two more shows that passed through it are having their professional world premieres. Almost a Full Moon, a family musical built around songs from Hawksley Workman’s holiday album of the same, will be at the Citadel Theatre in November. Kelly v Kelly, a period musical by Sara Farb and Life After composer/lyricist Britta Johnson inspired by a true court case, is being produced by Musical Stage Company and Canadian Stage in May. (Full disclosure: My wife is the writer on Almost a Full Moon.)

So why has the seemingly successful CMTP shut down? Back on April 22, 2021, Sheridan put out a press release announcing it was “on hold” after the resignation of Rubinoff and thanking him for 10 years of “extraordinary contributions” at the school.

The very next day, Sheridan sent out another release announcing that the college was appointing an independent, third-party panel to conduct a formal inquiry into the overall music theatre performance program – for which CMTP was created as a capstone project – after an equity assessment report that “highlighted specific concerns about the program including behaviours related to racism, misogyny, bullying, harmful industry standards, dismissed concerns and unhealthy power dynamics.”

The two announcements were completely unrelated, according to both Sheridan College and Rubinoff. Keiko Kataoka, communications and public relations manager for Sheridan, told The Globe and Mail in the an e-mail: “There is no connection between Michael’s departure and the panel of inquiry.”

“After a decade of service and with the end of the academic term at the time, it felt like the right opportunity to refocus my attention on producing new work and creating independently,” wrote Rubinoff in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail. (Among the projects Rubinoff has since been working on is Grow, for which he raised $450,000 to boost the budget of the Grand production.)

Sheridan’s panel of inquiry finished its work in fall 2021. Its report has not be made publicly available, though the school says it was shared with participants.

When I first inquired into the status of the “on hold” program last year, it remained uncertain as to whether it would return alongside or had been supplanted by a new Sheridan program called First Drafts, created in collaboration with the Musical Stage Company. That still-evolving initiative is now described as a “new works development initiative that spotlights historically under-represented voices” and involves the commissioning, workshopping, rehearsing and ultimate performance of short musicals as a “public audio presentation.” (The first outcomes were about 30 minutes long.)

This fall, however, a September press release from Sheridan confirmed that CMTP has been “retired in its original format,” the reason offered being that this was “to meet the industry’s changing needs.” The school says it still has a deep commitment to developing new work in other ways, such as through First Drafts and its season at Theatre Sheridan.

Tania Senewiratne, associate dean of visual and performance arts at Sheridan, declined an interview to talk about why the CMTP no longer met industry needs or how the new programs might be better for musical-theatre students or the industry they will graduate into.

The end of CMTP, however, is at least as noteworthy to Canadian musical theatre as the end of the Broadway run of Come from Away – a show that will now long outlast the program that birthed it as it continues in a touring version and productions around the world, including a 2024 reboot in Ontario.