Composer Britta Johnson on the set of her musical Life After on the stage of Ed Mirvish theatre in Toronto, on April 8.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
In the nine years since Britta Johnson’s Life After made its audacious premiere at the Toronto Fringe Festival, the musical has picked up serious steam.
The show won the Paul O’Sullivan Prize for Musical Theatre when it debuted. It was then picked up for a more polished, Dora Award-winning run at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre a year later, and since then it’s enjoyed commercial productions at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2019 and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2022.
Critics and audiences alike have praised the show for its tenderness, as well as Johnson’s sophisticated, Stephen Sondheim-inspired score. The Globe and Mail’s J. Kelly Nestruck called Johnson “a notable talent” in 2017, saying Life After was “impressive in its complexity.”
This spring’s Toronto run at the Ed Mirvish Theatre, steered by the producers at the Tony and Olivier Award-winning production company Yonge Street Theatricals, marks the show’s biggest milestone yet – it may mark the last time Life After plays in Canada before making the jump to Broadway.
Linda Barnett and Natalie Bartello, co-leaders of Yonge Street Theatricals, are using the phrase “pre-Broadway” to describe the coming Ed Mirvish run – they’re hoping the show can make the jump to the Great White Way. But in order for that to happen, they say, this Toronto run needs to be a success.
“Canadians need to come out and support the show,” said Bartello. “Life After going to Broadway is equal parts us getting the right people interested and having a sold-out production here.”
The producers will neither confirm nor deny whether the show is already set to head to New York. But they say they’ve succeeded in bringing “the right people” – producers and investors, mainly – to Life After every time it’s been produced, and each time, the reaction has been “astounding,” said Barnett. “The show deserves to keep going as far as we can take it.”
But the show, of course, has to be in tip-top shape – and much of that relies on Johnson.
“I’m soaking it all in, and remembering where this all started,” she said in March.
Johnson, 33, was born and raised in Stratford, Ont., to two professional musicians. Her big break came in 2009, when the Stratford Festival staged a one-night-only presentation of the then-high schooler’s original musical Big Box Story. Her older sisters, too, are artists: Anika is a frequent collaborator on new musicals, and Eliza is an opera singer.
Johnson’s father passed away when she was a teen – and while Life After is not explicitly autobiographical, it certainly contains narrative parallels to Johnson’s own adolescence. The show follows 16-year-old Alice (played in the coming run by Colombian-American actor and singer Isabella Esler) as she comes to terms with the death of her dad, motivational speaker Frank (Degrassi‘s Jake Epstein).
Logically speaking, Alice couldn’t have killed her father. But grief, she learns, isn’t always a logical process.
Johnson has had more than a decade to parse Alice’s story, which with each production of Life After has become a little sharper. For most of her adult life, she’s been able to return to the show and make tiny updates to the book and score.
“It’s a miracle for a Canadian writer to get to return to a project so many times, especially a musical,” said Johnson. “And I love to work relentlessly.”
That much is clear. Johnson is responsible for Life After‘s book, lyrics and score, and as opening night inches closer, there’s not a lot of room for time off as she finesses lines, melodies and orchestrations. She’s leaning on her training – a music composition degree from the University of Toronto, as well as learning from her collaborators – and recalling her own teenage mindset as she dives back into Alice’s world.
“My craftsmanship is better now than it was when I first started writing the show,” she said. “As I go back and edit it, it’s not my job to judge what’s there, but instead to build a world that enriches it. I want to celebrate the original impulse of the work, the truest part of the story.”
Keeping Life After true to those roots while continuing to expand and refine it has been no small challenge. Much of what made the show such a hit in Canada and beyond is its earnestness; Alice feels like a real 16-year-old because she was imagined by Johnson, a musician who, when she first wrote the show, wasn’t much older than her.
Working with teammates such as orchestrator, arranger and music supervisor Lynne Shankel and director Annie Tippe has encouraged her to stay grounded in the work. “It’s a very active, very positive collaboration,” she said. “I’ve never been involved in such healthy collaboration before.”
In a way, she’s collaborating with some of her favourite musical artists, too. Though Sondheim is forever an inspiration, she’s recently been listening to artists that better capture Alice’s angst, legends such as Joni Mitchell and Radiohead. “The musical world she’s living in is kind of the world I was living in when I started to write this show, when I was closer to her age,” she said. “Alice’s soundscape is watery, lush, emotional, string-centric.”
Johnson is aware of the pressure on her for the show to succeed, but she’s keeping healthy boundaries, making time to see her friends’ theatre shows when she can and binging episodes of reality TV. She tries not to read reviews until after her shows have closed – “I hate that people might know something about me that I myself don’t know about yet,” she said – and during this run of Life After, she expects she’ll hide somewhat out of the spotlight, “lurking in the balcony like the Phantom of the Opera.”
“That said, all my friends and family are coming to this,” she said. “It’s as if I’m getting married to my art, or something.”
In the rehearsal hall, Johnson is anything but aloof. She makes time to laugh with director Tippe as she tweaks her script. She sends the occasional text to a pal or loved one (her most-used emojis include a melting smiley face, a witch and a red heart). She marvels at the actors bringing the humour within her show to life, including Broadway alumni such as Epstein and Chilina Kennedy.
“I love this show,” she said. “I’m braver now than I was when I first started writing it. I know what I’m doing; I have a music degree. I need less permission to try wacky things, and I’ve learned from everyone who’s touched this show. Life After has been a profound privilege.”