This April, acclaimed Canadian composer, writer, and lyricist Britta Johnson’s Life After returns to the city where it began, in a new production at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre. I saw the first professional production back in 2017 at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre and remember being captivated by the fluidity of the staging, the deeply felt yet often funny writing, and the way the songs carried the audience into the heart of the characters’ emotions.
Life After is not your typical musical, focusing as it does on an inner journey – that of 16-year-old Alice, trying to come to terms with the sudden death of her father, famous self-help guru, Frank Carter. The show’s own journey, from first inspiration to its first fully commercial production, is also an absorbing one, so I took the opportunity to find out more, by talking to its creator and some of her collaborators.
Coming of age: “It started,” Johnson told me, “when I participated, at age 19, in the Paprika Festival in Toronto – a free program for writers under 21 – as one of their playwrights in residence. I had lost my dad when I was 13, and then, while I was 19, one of my best friends passed away.” In both cases, she told me, she found herself at visitations, feeling so clumsy, not knowing what to do or say. “But also finding the richness of comedy in the situation; so Life After started as a few songs sung from a single character’s point of view at one of these visitations. It wasn’t necessarily about me. I was just processing the complexity of how your reality is temporarily altered when you are actively grieving, and I thought music could help me explore that.”
Very quickly it became a show that wasn’t about her at all. “[It’s about] a family that is SO different from mine, and much more about the texture of coming of age through the experience of grief, and how we can use music to illustrate that specific experience in a way that feels honest and funny and warm, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I didn’t even know it would BE a musical when I started.”
First full Life: The first full musical version of Life After debuted at the Toronto Fringe Festival in the summer of 2016, and the show took off from there. As Johnson told me, “I remember at one of our fringe shows, I was onstage playing the piano and I could see everyone in the audience and there was this row that had Matthew Jocelyn from Canadian Stage, Mitchell Marcus from the Musical Stage Company and Natalie Bartello and Linda Barnett of Yonge Street Theatricals (YST) – and I remember looking out and thinking ‘oh, we better nail it tonight!’ I saw them all talking outside the theatre afterwards and very soon after that it all came together.”
It’s unusual to have commercial producers enter the picture so early in the development of a show. “It was an admirable thing,” Johnson says: “YST collaborated with both Canadian Stage and the Musical Stage Company to create the first production in 2017, then stayed and have been ushering it along in collaboration with various people ever since. It’s been such a game changer and it’s really exciting to be back in Toronto with them.”
Yonge Street Theatricals, based in Toronto, is a Tony, Olivier, and Dora Award-winning production company led by founders Barnett and Bartello. The duo have been quietly working together on creating new musicals at the grassroots level for 18 years with a focus on developing new Canadian talent. Their Broadway credits include: Maybe Happy Ending, A Strange Loop, and Come From Away, among others. They told me about their first meeting with Johnson when she was part of one of the first cohorts of their Noteworthy program (created with Musical Stage) where playwrights and composers are paired to create mini musicals.
“Britta was paired with Sara Farb and from the minute she put her fingers on the keys, Linda and I were astonished at her talent.” When they saw Life After at the Fringe their immediate reaction was “how can we get this up as quickly as possible with this amount of money.” They immediately joined forces with Musical Stage and Canadian Stage for the Berkeley Street production. Under YST production auspices, Life After’s journey took it next to the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in 2019, then to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2022 directed by Annie Tippe, who is also directing the upcoming Toronto production.
Enter the Furies: Workshops and rewriting have been a constant in Life’s journey, before each iteration of the show. But “the big pillars” of the show, as Johnson describes them, have stayed the same from the get-go. “The first songs that I wrote – Alice’s Poetry and Snow, and the mum’s Wallpaper - are the things that have been altered the least. I wrote them even before I knew I was going to be a writer and this is important as it feels like that is where the most honest versions of this teenage grief lives.”
One big change post-Fringe was the addition to the cast of an unexpected trio of shapeshifting figures called the Furies. “So much of what Alice goes through,” Johnson explains “is in her own head, but if she can be in conversation, if there is something leading her on, then there can be a kind of hero’s journey that she is going on. I think of the Furies as the funeral guests that never leave and then animate her world around her. They are also helpful to fill out the comedy of the story.”
Overall, the structure of the show has remained remarkably constant, Johnson says, “but I’ve had the chance to decorate the show with more and more detail [and] as I grow I get better at writing the adult characters. At the beginning I really had access to Alice but I didn’t know what her mum was really thinking about; now I’m closer to her mum’s age, and it gives me perspective on the many chapters of life and where that fits in with grief.”
That being said, there is one substantial change for the upcoming production – a new song near the beginning replacing a spoken scene between Alice and her dad, Frank. “We had been asking for the song very patiently for a while,” producers Bartello and Barnett told me. “We always felt that Frank needed another song. It’s a very fun number, a duet for Frank and Alice at a very happy time in their relationship. It’s really fleshed out the show.” The show’s director agrees: “A brand new song within the first 20 minutes of the show [was] something we had all craved, but had needed the benefit of the full process of the last production (in Chicago) to know that that scene needed to become a song.”
Annie Tippe: Tippe is the third director Johnson has worked with on Life After. “I have loved working with each of them and learned so much,” Johnson says. “What I really love about working with Annie is that she is close to my age, we share the loss of a dad, and she is deeply, deeply funny and very collaborative. … She really understands the teenage girl world, really shares that point of view with me; collaborating with her unlocks really exciting and theatrical things.”
Tippe echoes Johnson: “I was sent the script by my agent and the demos from the show, and I had a reaction that I have truly never had before. Not only did I instantly fall in love with the material but all of a sudden felt immediate excitement and anger at the possibility that I might not be given the chance to direct the show. I lost my father ten years ago now, and the thing that I received, even just reading the libretto right off the page, was the remarkable humour and the perfect capture of the absurdity of losing someone when you are young and having to process the world after they’re gone. I found myself laughing and crying as I read it and I just knew that I had to fight to have the chance to have this opportunity to direct it. We met and I remember us within 30 minutes of meeting crying together, and I thought ‘okay this is going to be a good partnership’.”
The cast: Another constant in the show’s evolution has been how to go about casting it. “Always,” says Johnson, “you first have to find an Alice as she is only 16 years old, and then build the rest of the cast around her. We needed to find someone with Olympic vocal chops as she carries the show, but also a true vulnerability so that our audience can access her.”
It’s a tough combination to find but, as Bartello and Barnett remarked, “We were really lucky [this time]. Isabella Esler walked into the room and her resume was like a blank sheet – with just one credit (two years playing Lydia on the U.S. national tour of Beetlejuice) – and yet very quickly we knew this was the person we needed.” “She is the youngest Alice we have ever had,” Johnson adds. “She’s truly astonishing. She has this huge emotional world, she’s so funny and has an amazing voice. I think her star has just begun to rise.”
And they have built a standout majority-Canadian cast around her: Jake Epstein as Frank, Chilina Kennedy as Ms Hopkins, Julia Pulo as Hannah, and Kaylee Harwood, Arinea Hermans and Zoë O’Connor as the furies. “We fought for that,” say Bartello and Barnett, “it’s been part of our life’s work educating our New York colleagues that there are excellent performers here.”
With this Toronto production, Life After comes full circle. “It feels incredible and the exact right next step to bring it home,” Johnson says. “This is the community that raised me. This is the community that raised this show, and to have so many Canadians in it that I have shared so much of my creative life with, it feels like the amalgamation of everything beautiful I have got to be part of in my career. A perfect homecoming. I am truly so proud to be a Canadian artist.”
Life After plays at the CAA Mirvish Theatre April 16 to May 10. https://www.mirvish.com/shows/life-after
MUSIC THEATRE ROUNDUP
April 8 - 26: MAHABHARATA
Part 1: Karma: The Life We Inherit (Apr 8 - Apr 26)
Part 2: Dharma: The Life
We Choose (Apr 11 - Apr 27)
Presented in two parts, Mahabharata is both a journey through the past and a compelling call to a desirable future. Based on an epic Sanskrit story that is more than 4000 years old and foundational to South Asian culture, this contemporary spectacle explores profound philosophical and spiritual ideas: “How can one end the spiral of revenge when everyone believes they are right and their opponents wrong?” “In times of division, how do we find wholeness?” “Are we destined to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors?” “Can we build a new world?”
Music and dance play a vital role. A six-piece band performs onstage in Part 1, while Part 2 features a digital soundscape and soprano Meher Pavri singing an adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita Opera. The musical team is John Gzowski, Suba Sankaran, Dylan Bell, Gurtej Singh Hunjan, Zaheer-Abbas Janmohamed and Hasheel Lodhia.
Created and written by Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes, using poetry from Carole Satyamurti’s Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling, originally commissioned and presented by the Shaw Festival, in association with Barbican, London.
A Why Not Theatre Production presented with Canadian Stage at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto.
April 22 - June 1: A STRANGE LOOP
Usher is a Black gay man…who’s also writing a musical about a Black gay man. He dreams of a full-time career as a successful playwright, while working front-of-house at Broadway’s The Lion King while grappling with his own artistic aspirations and personal identity. A “poignant, subversive, and unflinching exploration of identity, sexuality, self-expression, and the power of art to transcend barriers.”
Book, music, and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson. Directed by Ray Hogg. Featuring Malachi McCaskill.
A co-production between The Musical Stage Company, Soulpepper Theatre, Crows Theatre, and TO Live, at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, in Toronto.
May 22-24: IDENTITY: A SONG CYCLE
In June 2020, Toronto baritone Elliot Madore opened up on social media about his struggles with “unabashedly expressing [his] identity” as a biracial person. Joel Ivany and Madore in collaboration with composer Dinuk Wijeratne and acclaimed poet Shauntay Grant, have created a song cycle which sets new and original Canadian poetry to music that fuses classical music with an array of influences.
Composer - Dinuk Wijeratne; Poet - Shauntay Grant; directed by Joel Ivany. Featuring Elliot Madore.
Presented by Against The Grain Theatre, at Toronto’s El Mocambo
May 27 - Jun 22: AFTER THE RAIN
When she accepts a mature piano student obsessed with mastering only one song, Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, struggling songwriter Suzie’s life takes an unforeseen turn. A musical based on a true story about the healing power of music. With Joe (Jojo) Bowden, Deborah Hay, Andrew Penner, and Sheamus Swets.
Book by Rose Napoli, music & lyrics by Suzy Wilde, directed by Marie Farsi.
Presented by The Musical Stage Company & Tarragon Theatre, at Tarragon Theatre (main space) in Toronto.
BUT WAIT - THERE’S MORE!
For a sumptuous array of additional Music Theatre, Opera and Dance listings, please see page 49!
Jennifer Parr is a Toronto-based director, dramaturge, fight director and acting coach, brought up from a young age on a rich mix of musicals, Shakespeare and new Canadian plays.
