Latest news with #CAAEdMirvishTheatre
Toronto Star
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
‘Peter Pan' musical at Mirvish still soars with its sprinkling of good, old-fashioned stage magic
Peter Pan 3 stars (out of 4) Music by Morris Charlap, with additional music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, with additional lyrics by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Amanda Green. Originally adapted by Jerome Robbins, with additional book by Larissa FastHorse, based on the play by J.M. Barrie. Directed by Lonny Price. Until June 1 at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St. or 1-800-461-3333 It's fitting that 'Peter Pan,' about a boy who doesn't want to grow up, has aged incredibly well over the past 120 years.
Toronto Star
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
The new Canadian musical ‘Life After' is a triumph at Mirvish. But is it ready for Broadway?
Life After 3.5 stars (out of 4) Music, lyrics and book by Britta Johnson, directed by Annie Tippe. Until May 10 at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St. or 1-800-461-3333 Toward the end of the Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine musical 'Into the Woods,' after the sheer amount of devastation becomes nearly too much to bear, its four surviving fairy-tale characters sing the moralizing number 'No One Is Alone.' 'Mother cannot guide you / Now you're on your own,' sings Cinderella to the now orphaned Little Red Riding Hood. 'Only me beside you / Still, you're not alone.' In a musical that otherwise so astutely navigates the messy expanse of grey between what's black and white, this one song has always struck me as being hollow, even trite. If only our experiences with grief were that simple. If only we always had a support system around us each time we dealt with the death of a loved one. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The astounding Canadian musical 'Life After,' however, penned by the stupendously talented Britta Johnson and which opened Tuesday at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, feels like it was written in response to — and in conversation with — that very idea in 'No One Is Alone.' Grief, Johnson argues, is agonizingly lonely. It's painful. It's overwhelming. It's also occasionally funny, in the absurdest ways possible. Alice (Isabella Esler), the show's 16-year-old protagonist, is dropped into the forest of her own grief after her father Frank (Jake Epstein), a famous self-help author, is killed in a car crash. Though her mother Beth (Mariand Torres) and sister Kate (Valeria Ceballos) are both grieving in their own ways as well, Alice knows that if she's to ever find her way out of the metaphorical woods she must do it on her own. There is no one there beside her. She is, indeed, alone. Mariand Torres as Beth, Valeria Ceballos as Kate and Isabella Esler as Alice in 'Life After.' Michael Cooper/Yonge Street Theatricals As part of this journey, Alice is forced to reckon with her complicated memories of her oft-absent father, particularly their final conversation on her 16th birthday. Her dad was supposed to be at a convention in Winnipeg to promote his new book. But, unexpectedly, he returned home for several hours to surprise Alice. Frank wants to have dinner with his daughter before his flight back out west. Alice, however, already has plans with her best friend, Hannah (Julia Pulo). Why should she bend over backwards, she reasons, to accommodate her father's schedule? An argument ensues. Alice ignores her father's phone calls. Then the crash. The teenager, crushed by an intense sense of guilt, is also haunted by the mystery surrounding her father's death. Frank's flight was to depart at 8 p.m. Yet his crash occurred at 8:22 p.m., in a suburb far from the airport. What was he doing there? Did Frank know that Alice and Hannah were planning to attend a party in that neighbourhood? Was he searching for his daughter in order to reconcile with her? ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Alice needs to find answers. But she also knows that the answers she's looking for will never quite give her the closure she needs. This paradox is at the heart of the show — and it's one that anyone who's had a complicated relationship with a loved one they've lost will instantly recognize. I think it's fair to call 'Life After' a spiritual successor to 'Into the Woods,' with both shows mining similar thematic territory. Johnson has shared that she found inspiration in Sondheim's work. After her own father died when she was a teenager, she saw the Stratford Festival's 2005 production of 'Into the Woods' 14 times as a way to process her own grief. (Though 'Life After' isn't autobiographical, Johnson does draw from her own experiences.) A scene from the musical 'Life After,' by Britta Johnson. Michael Cooper/Yonge Street Theatricals Sonically, Johnson's score is more akin to the works of Sondheim, and modernist composers like Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky, than the typical pop fare that's become so ubiquitous in musical theatre today. The music of 'Life After' is dense, layered and richly coloured. Johnson's use of leitmotifs, musical phrases that are associated with certain characters and evolve as the narrative develops, is especially striking and effective. Her lyrics, too, are Sondheimian in quality. Pithy, yet never cold. Deeply expressive, yet never sentimental. Poetically ambiguous, yet also razor sharp. Take, for instance, this lyric in the musical's final song: 'It feels like rain and yet the ground is dry.' As sung by Esler, in soaring vocal form, imbuing the character with a tragic touch of teenage vulnerability, that moment lands like a punch to the gut. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW 'Life After' isn't easy to stage. It's a delicate chamber piece, structured more like a memory play than a traditional musical. And some of it unfolds in Alice's mind, slipping in and out of reality and her unreliable recollections. Director Annie Tippe's production, however, is largely successful at keeping all the moving parts together. Compared to the musical's previous Toronto run in 2017, this iteration is far larger, with clear, if tacit, Broadway intentions. The sheer scale of this staging often works in the show's favour. Todd Rosenthal's imposing set, a two-storey house with revolving rooms, captures the whirlwind nature of Alice's grief. Her world is constantly shifting around her, never stopping for a moment to breathe. Isabella Esler as Alice and Jake Epstein as Frank in 'Life After.' Michael Cooper/Yonge Street Theatricals Tippe's slick production, moving between scenes with dreamlike ease, pays close attention to the smallest of details. Kai Harada and Haley Parcher's crisp sound designs deserve special praise for managing to tame, miraculously, the cavernous and unwieldy CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre. Thank goodness for that, because we get to hear Lynne Shankel's gorgeous orchestrations in all their glory. Esler, onstage for the entirety of Johnson's 90-minute musical, is superb. And she's surrounded by an ensemble cast that's equally strong. Epstein's Frank is a man of contradictions: a suave celebrity author who could dole out life advice to strangers on a whim, yet couldn't manage to solve the puzzle of his own life. As Alice's mother and sister, respectively, Torres and Ceballos demonstrate how grief manifests itself in so many different ways. For them, unlike Alice, the only way to heal is to forge ahead, leaving the past behind them. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Chilina Kennedy exudes maternal warmth as Alice's teacher, Ms. Hopkins. And Pulo steals every scene she's in as the awkward yet bubbly Hannah. If all these supporting characters come off as rather wispily drawn, that can be excused. We are, after all, in Alice's mind, as we're constantly reminded by a trio of pestering Furies (Kaylee Harwood, Arinea Hermans and Zoë O'Connor) who give voice to her deepest insecurities, and manifest themselves as everything from piggish mourners to overly solicitous neighbours. And grief, especially the kind that Alice experiences, distorts the way we see the world. Where this production falters, however, is in its final 15 minutes, as Alice finally finds some semblance of clarity amid the chaos. Critical emotional beats don't land with the force that they could. In particular, the elements of Tippe's production that made it so successful up until this point now work against it. Her frantic staging never settles enough to offer Alice, and the audience, a moment to reflect. Rosenthal's scenery and Japhy Weideman's lighting also become rather intrusive and distracting, nearly overshadowing the musical's quiet conclusion. And as Johnson's material grows increasingly abstract and metaphorical, Tippe's production seems stubbornly focused on a more literal interpretation. I'm not exactly sure how to resolve these issues. But I guess it's sort of fitting that 'Life After,' a meditation on grief, never quite concludes on a satisfying note. Losing a loved one is always messy and painful, filled with a grief that's unending. And as Johnson demonstrates in her final song, there's a complex beauty and poetry in that, too.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Life After' musical: Canada's 'outrageous' theatre talent wooed New Yorkers for Toronto production
Grief is a complex experience for everyone, but it's especially complicated when you're a teenager, trying to manage all the growing pains of transitioning from child to adult. But brilliantly, composer, lyricist and playwright Britta Johnson, from Stratford, Ont., channeled that into her play Life After. Life After follows Alice, played by Isabella Esler in this Toronto production, after the death of her father Frank (Degrassi: The Next Generation alum Jake Epstein). Frank's death comes after he found success and fame as a self-help author. "I'm a new dad, so it's funny, we were talking about playing parents for the first time and all of a sudden relating to the parents now, it's a whole new world," Jake Epstein told Yahoo Canada in Toronto. "Frank's story, he's this sort of newly famous self-help author ... who's really busy, and we've been talking a lot about balancing your career with your kid, and I think it's a really relatable struggle and really relatable conflict that my character gets into with his daughter." Johnson has a pattern of doing the seemingly impossible, with Life After making its debut at the 2016 Toronto Fringe Festival, and now returning to the city (April 16 - May 10 at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre) after bring produced in both San Diego and Chicago. That's basically unheard of, especially because original Canadian plays largely appear for a period of time, and then disappear into history. "It's been the biggest gift in my life, truly, to get to work on this project on so many different scales, to grow up with it," Johnson said. "To grow up as an artist with it has been really transformative." "I get to keep returning to this and fleshing it out, and finding more connections through it and finding more honest conversations about grief through it. It's a pretty remarkable thing, but I don't take it for granted, because most writers, especially in this country, ... it's really hard to put up a new work. It's risky. So the fact that I have this blessing to keep returning to it is one I don't take for granted." But that's not all. Life After also fills a significant gap in stories we see on stage, with a 16-year-old character, Alice, leading us through the piece. While we see works with young girls and older women, shows led by teen girls are few and far between. "Being a teenager is one of the most crazy times ever," Esler said. "When I was 16 I felt like I had so many thoughts in my brain, like all at once. There's just so much going on. And I think that's why I felt so attached to her, because I don't see a lot of teenage centred stories." View this post on Instagram A post shared by Life After Musical (@lifeaftermusical) What's so special about Life After is that no matter who is in the audience, everyone can connect with a particular character in the story, like Alice or Frank, or even Alice's mother Beth (Mariand Torres). Johnson tackles the experience of grief with a play that's still fun and joyful to watch. "It happens to deal with the universal themes of grief and loss, but it's also about a family and what happens over time as you grow up, and through Alice's eyes, what a 16-year-old sees growing up," producer Natalie Bartello said. "So when I think about the show, I think about Alice's coming-of-age and realizing that not everything will have an answer in life. ... Because Britta's so creative and she's very funny and very witty, you see her personality in this show, and that's what makes it a very appealing, enjoyable night at the theatre." Bartello's fellow producer, Linda Barnett, also shared that she had a particularly personal connection to first seeing Johnson's piece. "It's 2016 and I was supposed to go with Natalie to see the show. I couldn't go. My husband was effectively dying," Barnett said. "Natalie went and, of course, came to the hospital after and said, 'You've got to see this show, ... but I don't know how you're going to do it.'" "[I've always been very] hardcore and I said, 'Yeah, I'm going to go.' And I went with my eldest daughter. For her, it was even more difficult, but she's also hardcore and she wanted to go and see it. We were already grieving and so it really helped. It helped in a way a healing process that hadn't even begun yet. I was able to laugh, I was able to cry, and to be able to laugh the time like that was a very good thing. And to be able to cry, it was also a really good things." For Mariand Torres, playing Alice's mother really spoke to how she saw her own mother after her father's death. "I lost my father when I was young and I saw a lot of my mom in this character. I just feel like it's a cathartic thing and a way to honour my mom," Torres said. Pulling from her personal experience of grieving her father, Johnson's core goal with Life After has been to make everyone in the audience feel "safe" in their experience with grief. "When I was grieving my dad when I was 13, I went to see Into The Woods like 14 times," Johnson said. "I grew up in Stratford, ... my mom and dad were pit musicians, [and that was the] first show my mom played without my dad." "I hadn't ever been much of a music theatre kid, I was a piano kid, and then I saw this show that didn't try to talk down to me about this difficult thing. It made me feel safe in the complexity of it. And if I can provide an experience that feels like that to someone in the audience, we will have done our work." But among the different iterations of Life After, this Toronto production is a particularly special homecoming, which also showcases the greatness of Canadian talent. "We feel that the talent in Canada is outrageous. People don't understand," Bartello said. "And we brought our New York team here and we were like, you can cast a lot of these roles locally, please come and meet these actors. And they were just blown away." "As a Canadian, I'm really proud," Epstein added in a separate interview. "It's a really complicated time right now and I feel really proud to be part of Canadian pieces, Canadian stories, Canadian characters. And so I just want to represent it well." The continued success development of Life After can also be seen as a guiding light for playwrights in Canada. "It's really great for Canadian audiences to see what's possible with new work," Johnson said. "I think there's just more of a template for that in the States, ... and the fact that now we're discovering that language in Canada, and that investment from audiences, I think it's really exciting." "And hopefully it will feel very rewarding to audiences that like this, that have been with us since the fringe, to see like, hey this show is still very much this show. The heart of it is the same. But here's what can happen when this level of investment is given to a new project."
CBC
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Life After creator Britta Johnson turned her teenage grief into an acclaimed musical
In a Q interview, the Canadian composer and playwright discusses her award-winning musical Media Audio | Britta Johnson turned her teenage grief into an acclaimed musical Open Full Embed in New Tab Loading external pages may require significantly more data usage than loading CBC Lite story pages. Growing up in the theatre town of Stratford, Ont., Britta Johnson was under the impression that pretty much everyone worked in the performing arts. Both her parents were pit musicians, and her older sisters ended up pursuing music as well. To her, it seemed as normal a career path as any nine-to-five. Following in her family's footsteps, Johnson wrote her first full-length musical, Big Box, when she was just in high school. It was inspired by her distaste for the Walmart that was set to open in her town. "Walmart still ended up coming to town," she tells Garvia Bailey in an interview for Q."I didn't end up saving the day, but I did kind of begin my career, which I feel very lucky about." Today, Johnson is one of Canada's most acclaimed composers, lyricists and playwrights. Her award-winning musical Life After follows a 16-year-old girl grappling with the death of her father. It originally debuted at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2016, but later this month, it will return to Toronto at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre. The show is loosely inspired by Johnson's own experience of loss, but she says it's not autobiographical. "If it was a show about my grief, it would be a show about a girl growing her bangs out too long and getting kind of weird and quiet, which is far less theatrical," she says with a laugh. "But at least the texture of coming-of-age through loss, that first kind of transformative loss at this moment when you're just kind of trying to figure out what being a person is like — I certainly pulled from that experience in my life." [Grief is] so many colours at once.... I think music has the ability to hold all of that. - Britta Johnson When Johnson was 13, her father passed away. Then, near the end of her time in high school, one of her friends died and she found herself once again faced with grief. She recalls attending visitations, shoving finger sandwiches into her mouth to avoid the awkwardness of not knowing exactly what to do with herself. She couldn't quite put the things she was feeling into words, so she started writing music. "[Grief is] so many colours at once, and you exist in this altered state where the past and present are really mingling together," she says. "I think music has the ability to hold all of that, the comedy of it, the immense humour and warmth of it, as well as the things that are scary and devastating and hard." Life After also includes songs Johnson wrote as a teenager, many of which have remained untouched as the show has evolved. While writing the musical, she says she felt like she was collaborating with past versions of herself. The very first songs she wrote for this show are the only ones that haven't been rewritten. Even as she becomes a more skilled composer and her music takes on more complex forms, she's always striving to capture exactly what she was thinking as a teenager navigating the process of mourning. "My highest priority always in working on it is trying to preserve that initial impulse," she says. "There's something very honest at the core of this show that I found very early." Life After premieres at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre on April 16. Interview with Britta Johnson produced by Aajah Sauter.
