Award-winning Canadian musical ‘Life After’ heads to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre

Britta Johnson, the composer, lyricist and author behind “Life After,” which is heading to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in June.

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There may be extra life for the award-winning Canadian musical “Life After” south of the border.

“Life After,” by composer, lyricist and author Britta Johnson, is scheduled for a five-week engagement in Chicago this summer time at Goodman Theatre, the town’s largest not-for-profit theatre firm.

That is the present’s third main manufacturing in 5 years, following its U.S. premiere at San Diego’s Previous Globe Theatre in 2019 and a run at Toronto’s Canadian Stage in 2017.

“It appears like a dream come true to carry ‘Life After’ to Chicago,” mentioned Johnson, who was raised in Stratford. “After the wild trip the previous couple of years has been — particularly what this explicit challenge has been by way of — it’s a thrill to see it on the horizon once more.”

The chamber musical follows Alice, a 16-year-old who's pressured to reckon with the sudden dying of her well-known — and infrequently absent — father. Whereas the remainder of her household strikes on, the teenager is left to select up the items and are available to phrases together with her advanced relationship together with her father.

Although the musical is fictional, Johnson attracts upon her expertise with grief, significantly following the dying of her father when she was a baby. She started writing the musical when she was 18 whereas a playwright-in-residence on the Paprika Competition, a mentorship program for rising theatre artists. For over a decade on and off, Johnson continued to work on “Life After.”

“The inspiration, its core questions, and even quite a lot of its central songs and themes have remained untouched,” mentioned Johnson, reflecting on the present’s improvement. “However the colors with which I’ve colored within the partitions of the buildings have gotten loads richer and much more nuanced.”

Robert Falls, creative director of Goodman Theatre, first heard of “Life After” by way of his buddies in Toronto, who had seen the 2017 manufacturing. “I bear in mind how they felt it was one of the shifting and exquisite productions they'd ever seen,” he mentioned.

When “The Outsiders,” a musical based mostly on the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film, was postponed, leaving a gap within the season, a possibility introduced itself to carry Johnson’s musical to Chicago. The items began to fall into place final yr, after Falls listened to the rating and browse the script.

“It has a beautiful rating and I don’t use that phrase fairly often round scores,” Falls mentioned. “God is aware of we’re residing in an period of jukebox musicals. So to have a totally authentic story and authentic musical — one thing heartfelt and chic and sophisticated — was like having a present dropped in our lap … I simply fell in love with the present.”

In 2016, the musical was successful on the Toronto Fringe Competition, receiving the Paul O’Sullivan Prize for Musical Theatre. An expanded manufacturing at Canadian Stage the next yr was met with related acclaim and garnered six Dora Awards, together with Excellent New Musical. (The Star’s Carly Maga gave the present three-and-a-half stars, calling it “an intense, layered whirlwind of humour, grief and humanity.”)

Mitchell Marcus, founder and CEO of the Musical Stage Firm, the place Johnson was a composer-in-residence in its three-year Crescendo Sequence program, says working with an artist of her magnitude is exceedingly uncommon. “I bear in mind so usually turning to Robert (McQueen, director of the 2017 manufacturing) and saying, ‘That is what it will have felt wish to be within the room with Stephen Sondheim in 1968, simply earlier than he broke by way of.’”

Seeing “Life After” succeed internationally additionally offers Marcus hope for the way forward for Canadian musical theatre.

“If Canadian musical theatre was going to work we can not find yourself within the lure that, sadly, Canadian performs fairly often fall into, which is that they get one manufacturing and you then by no means hear about it once more,” he mentioned. “(This information) permits me to dream once more and imagine that it’s potential for artists to succeed internationally.”

The pandemic has difficult the journey of “Life After.” Shortly after the present concluded its San Diego run in April 2019, Washington, D.C.’s Enviornment Stage introduced a manufacturing slated for 2021, which was postponed after which finally cancelled because of the pandemic.

This Chicago manufacturing might be led by New York-based director Annie Tippe, who was to helm the Enviornment Stage manufacturing. It's to run June 11 to July 17 at Goodman’s 856-seat Albert Theatre.