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
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.
The full interview with Britta Johnson is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Britta Johnson produced by Aajah Sauter.
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