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

There is more life for the award-winning Canadian musical “Life After” south of the border.

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

This is the show’s third major production in five years, following its U.S. premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2019 and a run at Toronto’s Canadian Stage in 2017.

“It feels like a dream come true to bring ‘Life After’ to Chicago,” said Johnson, who was raised in Stratford. “After the wild ride the past couple of years has been — specifically what this particular project has been through — it’s a thrill to see it on the horizon again.”

The chamber musical follows Alice, a 16-year-old who is forced to reckon with the sudden death of her famous — and often absent — father. While the rest of her family moves on, the teenager is left to pick up the pieces and come to terms with her complex relationship with her father.

Though the musical is fictional, Johnson draws upon her experience with grief, particularly following the death of her father when she was a child. She began writing the musical when she was 18 while a playwright-in-residence at the Paprika Festival, a mentorship program for emerging theatre artists. For over a decade off and on, Johnson continued to work on “Life After.”

“The foundation, its core questions, and even a lot of its central songs and themes have remained untouched,” said Johnson, reflecting on the show’s development. “But the colours with which I’ve coloured in the walls of the buildings have gotten a lot richer and a lot more nuanced.”

Robert Falls, artistic director of Goodman Theatre, first heard of “Life After” through his friends in Toronto, who had seen the 2017 production. “I remember how they felt it was one of the most moving and beautiful productions they had ever seen,” he said.

When “The Outsiders,” a musical based on the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola movie, was postponed, leaving an opening in the season, an opportunity presented itself to bring Johnson’s musical to Chicago. The pieces started to fall into place last year, after Falls listened to the score and read the script.

“It has a gorgeous score and I don’t use that word very often around scores,” Falls said. “God knows we’re living in an era of jukebox musicals. So to have a completely original story and original musical — something heartfelt and elegant and complicated — was like having a gift dropped in our lap … I just fell in love with the show.”

In 2016, the musical was a hit at the Toronto Fringe Festival, receiving the Paul O’Sullivan Prize for Musical Theatre. An expanded production at Canadian Stage the following year was met with similar acclaim and garnered six Dora Awards, including Outstanding New Musical. (The Star’s Carly Maga gave the show 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 Company, where Johnson was a composer-in-residence in its three-year Crescendo Series program, says working with an artist of her magnitude is exceedingly rare. “I remember so often turning to Robert (McQueen, director of the 2017 production) and saying, ‘This is what it would have felt like to be in the room with Stephen Sondheim in 1968, just before he broke through.’”

Seeing “Life After” succeed internationally also gives Marcus hope for the future of Canadian musical theatre.

“If Canadian musical theatre was going to work we cannot end up in the trap that, unfortunately, Canadian plays very often fall into, which is they get one production and then you never hear about it again,” he said. “(This news) allows me to dream again and believe that it’s possible for artists to succeed internationally.”

The pandemic has complicated the journey of “Life After.” Shortly after the show concluded its San Diego run in April 2019, Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage announced a production slated for 2021, which was postponed and then ultimately cancelled due to the pandemic.

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