Annika Tupper and Shaemus Swets in the second run of After the Rain at the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre.Curtis Perry/Supplied
Ten months ago, audiences trickled into the world premiere of After the Rain at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, a co-production with the Musical Stage Company. I was part of the crowd, and I was excited. I’d heard good things – friends whose opinions I trusted said it was a strong new musical with great tunes and a solid book – and I’d been looking forward to it for months.
The lights dimmed. Guitar-driven music crescendoed to a pleasant groove with light drums. The performers stepped onstage, energetically strumming guitars and plunking piano keys.
Not much time passed, however, before I realized that After the Rain wasn’t working for me. Rose Napoli’s book felt underwritten and patchy; director Marie Farsi’s production was overpadded with gimmicky moments of audience participation. Suzy Wilde’s music was nice, sorta, but her lyrics seemed gloopy and unspecific, peppered with obvious rhymes and clunky phrasings.
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I felt my musical-loving heart crack in real time. As a critic, I see plenty of disappointing theatre, but After the Rain stung in a new way. Even so, it could be salvageable, I thought: If Napoli added just a line or two more to bolster the central conflict, the book might feel a little less contrived, and if Farsi cut the audience participation, the show’s pacing might feel less leaden. But the version I saw in Toronto wasn’t a show I felt could survive long in a canon of Canadian musicals crowded with ho-hum shows.
It’s good news, then, that After the Rain went on to be revived in Ottawa by the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre, with significant overhauls to its book and score. The show now feels like something that could be resurrected again and again, and in a number of contexts.
Tupper returns in the role of Suzy.Curtis Perry/Supplied
I can imagine the piece being a great learning opportunity for young actor-musicians at Canadian theatre schools, and beyond that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the show turns up on the regional theatre circuit in the years to come, especially now that the piece’s dénouement has been de-cutesified. (The earlier version saw Wilde step onstage to perform the title song as a finale – a cloying choice, I thought, and one that all but ensured the musical could never exist outside its original creative team and cast.)
The story is much the same as it was a year ago: Suzy (a terrific Annika Tupper in both Toronto and Ottawa) is a young musician with a stupid boyfriend. She’s the daughter of famous parents. (“Well, Canada-famous,” she quips, in a line reading that’s just as funny now as it was last spring.) She doesn’t quite know what she wants to do with her life. Should she aspire to join her parents’ band? Go to music school? How should she put the talent she was born with to good use?
In its Toronto premiere, After the Rain’s “stupid boyfriend” subplot was a means to an end for audience participation – some poor gentleman in the front row was tasked with playing said boyfriend at the behest of the cast.
Thankfully, those exchanges with the audience have been cut in their entirety, and now the “stupid boyfriend” is just a few lines of dialogue that help bolster Suzy’s character. It’s a small change, but one that totally unlocks the first act and makes room for Suzy’s much more interesting conflict of whether she should join the band or, to her parents’ chagrin, go to school.
A year ago, the to-school-or-not-to-school problem felt like an afterthought, an instance of plot whiplash that made After the Rain’s second act teeter on the cutting edge of melodrama. Now, Napoli’s rewrites see Suzy grapple with university much sooner, and in a much more all-encompassing way.
In the new version of the show, we see Suzy’s self-esteem flutter every time something goes wrong: A piano lesson ends badly, so it must be her lack of education to blame, she concludes. It’s flawed thinking, sure, but in a way that suits a wayward musician in her early 20s. At once, Suzy feels more layered – a walking, breathing, conflicted person – and less like a chess piece in service of a larger story.
The production elements that were impressive in the show’s world premiere were still there in Ottawa. Farsi’s playful alleyway staging continued to make the show feel almost voyeuristic, as if the audience was spying on the family band through a peephole as they rehearsed, and on the performance side of things, Tupper and Andrew Penner remained excellent as Suzy and her rocker dad.
A few cast members changed between runs – most notably, Deborah Hay, who originated the role of Suzy’s mum, was replaced with Broadway alumna Chilina Kennedy for the NAC production. Hay and Kennedy found different sides to the aging musician, but both offered rousing performances of Mother’s Daughter, one of After the Rain’s stronger duets.
It’s not often that I see shows get revamped entirely between their world premiere and subsequent runs (and that’s on the rare occasion that Canadian plays and musicals even get second runs at all). After the Rain received more than a few line tweaks: Its writers clearly took the feedback they received from the show’s premiere in Toronto and listened to it. It’s sharper, tighter, while still operating in service of the story that Wilde and Napoli set out to tell in the first place. (The music and lyrics, too, are cleaner: The piece now feels ready for a cast recording.)
Ushering new musicals to their world premiere is expensive; so is re-workshopping them after they’ve opened. But I hope After the Rain provides proof that such investment in new work with room to grow is worth the money and time.
Without the revamps, I fear the show might have stayed in the proverbial desk drawer, waiting for a second life that might never have come. But watching Tupper wail at the NAC, harmonizing with Kennedy and joking around with Penner, I felt my heart start to heal from last year’s disappointment: I’m now confident we haven’t heard the last of Suzy.