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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
“Life After” isn’t easy to stage. It’s a delicate chamber piece, structured more like a memory play than a traditional musical. And 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.
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.
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.
