Zoë O’Connor, Kaylee Harwood, Julia Pulo, Arinea Hermans and Isabella Esler in Life After.Michael Cooper/Mirvish
Title: Life After
Book, music and lyrics by: Britta Johnson
Director: Annie Tippe
Actors: Isabella Esler, Jake Epstein, Chilina Kennedy, Mariand Torres, Valeria Ceballos, Julia Pulo
Companies: Yonge Street Theatricals and Mirvish Productions
Venue: CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre
City: Toronto
Year: To Saturday, May 10, 2025
Perhaps the true test of a songwriter is whether they can write a song about wallpaper and turn it into an emotional tour de force. If that’s the case, then Britta Johnson passes with flying colours. Pink and coral, to be precise. Wallpaper, the cathartic number that comes at the climax of Johnson’s musical Life After, transforms the gaudy, floral-patterned decoration of its title into a symbol of a dysfunctional marriage and its obliteration with beige paint in a grieving widow’s attempt to move on with her life.
Britta Johnson’s musical Life After gears up for its biggest stage yet
As sung with gripping ferocity by Mariand Torres in Life After’s stunning new production at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, it’s a show-stopper. Something the late Stephen Sondheim himself might have penned. It’s followed brilliantly in director Annie Tippe’s staging by a silent-yet-eloquent scene in which the widow Beth’s two daughters, Alice (Isabella Esler) and Kate (Valeria Ceballos), slowly take up paint rollers and help her erase the wall’s gaudy pink-and-coral façade.
I only wish all of Johnson’s musical carried the same power and poignancy. Alas, eight years after I saw its first major production, at Canadian Stage, it still isn’t everything it could be. I may be in the minority, however. Since that time, it’s gathered many devoted fans, foremost among them Yonge Street Theatricals, who have helped Johnson steadily scale up her work from the chamber musical we saw at the Berkeley Street Theatre to the dazzling show now on display at the Ed Mirvish, where every shiny surface seems stamped with “Next stop: Broadway.”
Tippe has recreated the production she originally mounted at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2022 and packed it with talent, American and Canadian, including local favourites and Broadway alumni Jake Epstein and Chilina Kennedy (who are also among the co-producers) and Julia Pulo, a.k.a. the sparky Anne Boleyn in Mirvish’s Six. The elaborate design includes a revolving two-storey house by Todd Rosenthal, an eye-grabbing array of costumes by Sarafina Bush and richly expressive lighting by Japhy Weideman.
At heart, though, Life After is still an introspective family drama, in which a teenage girl struggles to come to terms with the untimely death of her father.
Alice last saw her dad, Frank (Epstein), a bestselling self-help author, on the morning of her 16th birthday, when they quarrelled over his refusal to stay for her party instead of flying off to a conference in Winnipeg. Compounding her distress over their argument is a mystery: Frank was supposed to catch an 8 p.m. flight, but instead died at 8:22 in a car crash far from the airport. Solving that mystery becomes Alice’s way of grappling with her grief, its solution possibly tied to a conciliatory voicemail that he later sent her.
At the same time, she’s caught up in the unreal aftermath of a death and all its attendant awkwardness and absurdity, from the vapid condolences to the steady stream of casseroles brought by well-meaning friends and neighbours — meat-based dishes that, in a running joke, drive her older sister Kate, a vegan activist, into a rage.
Despite the tragic subject, Johnson adopts an exuberant comic tone early on, in keeping with Alice’s memories of Frank, a man as cheerfully flashy as that contentious wallpaper in his home office. Played with twinkling charm by a scruffily handsome Epstein, he’s part guru, part song-and-dance man. (The show’s buoyant choreography is by Ann Yee.)
There’s more comedy in the shape of Alice’s loquacious BFF, Hannah, delightfully portrayed by Pulo with a Beanie Feldstein vibe. And then there are the Furies (Kaylee Harwood, Arinea Hermans and Zoë O’Connor), a zany Greek chorus who pursue Alice in various forms, from Frank’s gushing middle-aged fans, to a trio of mean girls, to the brassy waitresses of the Chicken Shack on Route 33, the road where Frank met his horrible end. Between the laughs, Johnson dips deeper, showing Kate’s very real anger over the fact that she never shared the same close relationship that Alice had with their father. Beth, meanwhile, faces the realization that she’s devoted her whole married life to her errant husband’s dreams.
Throughout, Alice is bombarded with platitudes from Frank’s pop philosophy, meant to help her deal with the tragedy. There’s lots of advice to “control what you can” and “grow.” Even her favourite English teacher, Ms. Hopkins (Kennedy), shocks her by repeating them — leading to an uncomfortable revelation. But as Alice slowly comes to terms with her adored father’s flaws, she begins to glean some wisdom from his words.
Johnson, a triple-threat composer, lyricist and playwright, continues to awe us with her facility on all fronts, even if there’s a sameness to her piano-and-strings score (creatively arranged and orchestrated by Lynne Shankel). And she’s well-served by a cast that eagerly pulls out all the stops — Kennedy’s Ms. Hopkins almost vies with Epstein’s Frank for goofy charisma, while Pulo’s Hannah steals every scene she appears in. As Alice, young Colombian-American actor Esler provides a compelling through line of churning emotions, and a sweetly satisfying release in the show’s lovely last two songs, Snow and Poetry.
And yet Life After never quite measures up to my own two favourites in this particular genre, Next to Normal and Fun Home. Now the father of a teenage daughter myself, I came in fully expecting to choke up at the end. Instead, I left the theatre disconcertingly dried-eyed. Either something in Johnson’s musical is still missing, or I have a heart of stone.
