As they craft their new musical After the Rain, creators Rose Napoli and Suzy Wilde must ensure a fictional band hits all the right notes for audiences.
Co-produced by Tarragon Theatre and the Musical Stage Company (MSC), After the Rain is directed and dramaturged by Marie Farsi, with music and lyrics by Wilde and a book by Napoli. The musical pulls back the curtain on a band called Evans Stone, led by aging, married rockers Jean and Ashley. In 1995, their album Way Up Over the Mountain made Evans Stone Canadian-famous. When the show begins in 2015, the band is gearing up for a 20th-anniversary concert. Rehearsals spark debate: Should they cling to their old hits or to forge ahead with new material?
At the heart of After the Rain is Jean and Ashley’s daughter, Suzie, who balances managing the band’s day-to-day dysfunction with finding her own voice as a musician.
Wilde and Napoli first met through MSC’s Noteworthy program, which brings together playwrights, composers, and lyricists for masterclasses on musical theatre creation. Their first collaboration, The Carette Sisters — an adaptation of short stories by Mavis Gallant — premiered as part of MSC’s 2023 Retold, a triptych of works-in-development. In an interview, Rose and Napoli described how their collaboration has since assumed a reliable rhythm.
“We’ll beat out the story of the show,” said Napoli. “[We’ll then] talk through all of the characters and their lives, and [imagine] the show as though it were a play — and then decide where music should exist. Suzy takes text — or sometimes it’s [word] vomit — that I’ll send her from a character’s perspective, and then she interprets that musically.”
“Hundreds of pages of text have been cut,” Wilde added in the same conversation. “Many songs have been put on the back burner. That’s what writing a musical is: there’s a ton of editing that has to be done.”
Napoli said this openness and flexibility is what makes their partnership work. “We don’t have strict boundaries — I can comment on the evolution of the music, and Suzy can say, ‘I don’t really get why this [character] would do this.’ We’ve extended that [trust] to both Marie Farsi and Rachel O’Brien, our musical director. We’re all making sure that the show is the best it can be, and that means the best idea wins.”
Naturally, that also meant finding the right actor-musicians to play the members of Evans Stone. The cast includes Deborah Hay as Jean, Andrew Penner as Ashley, and Annika Tupper as Suzie. Joe (Jojo) Bowden and Brandon McGibbon play Evans Stone’s other band members, while Shaemus Swets plays the son of Suzie’s piano student Donna (also played by Hay) — a mysterious woman determined to learn a single piece of music: Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1.”
Wilde described these performers as “unicorns: people who can sing, and are amazing actors, and also incredible multi-instrumentalists. You should see what we make these people do!
“We’ve very much crafted the show around the people that we’re working with,” she added. “A lot of the characters are inspired by not only [the current] actors, but by people who have been part of the workshop process.”
Wilde and Napoli also drew on their own personal relationships to music-making. “I’ve been playing in bands for most of my life,” said Wilde. “And Rose is a huge music fan who’s read every musician biography.”
Both artists spoke about the thrill of crafting Evans Stone’s sound and style from scratch.
“There are two very distinct albums in the show,” Napoli explained: “[Evans Stone’s] big album that was written 20 years ago, and the album that the band is currently making. It was fun to ask… ‘which one of the characters wrote [each song]? How old were they [when they wrote it?] What was going on in their life that they wanted to express?’”
For the family’s next generation, “‘What does it mean to sing a song written by your mother 20 years ago, when you have a fraught relationship with her?’”
“It’s super fun as a composer to have to make [a song] sound like somebody 20 years younger than me wrote it,” said Wilde. “There have been moments when I’ve taken [a song] to Rose and she’s said, ‘we’ve got to make that a little less cerebral — or [in some cases] almost too cerebral, because [then it would sound like] really young writers are trying to prove something.’”
At the same time, Napoli added, “We still want good music in the show, but we have to make sure it always aligns with the story.”
Both creators acknowledged After the Rain as part of a swell of innovative musicals that have premiered in the past two decades. They cited Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, which made its Broadway debut in 2016, and Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, which premiered on Broadway in 2022. MSC has co-produced both musicals in Toronto: Great Comet with Crow’s Theatre in 2023, and A Strange Loop with Soulpepper in 2025. The latter production is currently running, while the former will transfer to Mirvish’s Royal Alexandra Theatre this summer.
Napoli and Wilde also noted Stereophonic, a play-with-music by David Adjmi which garnered 13 Tony nominations in 2024, as having similarities with After the Rain (it’s also about a fictional band).
“Folks are challenging the conventions [of musical theatre],” said Wilde. “It’s a really exciting moment.”
“We’re mindful [that] people who are devoted to musical theatre want virtuosity,” added Napoli. “They want to be blown away by amazing voices and beautiful harmonies, the story, the characters. We want to deliver on all those fronts.”
After the Rain runs in the Tarragon Mainspace from May 27 to June 22. Tickets are available here. (In February 2026, the production will transfer to Ottawa’s National Arts Centre.)
Tarragon Theatre is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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