STAGE WEST
  • Home
  • About David
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Theatre Reviews
  • New Page

Theater reviews

Stage West

"Life After" at the Old Globe Theatre

4/10/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Sophie Hearn in "Life After."                                                                 Photo courtesy of Old Globe Theatre
            Alice Carter’s father is dead, just hours after their last conversation – a bitter, angry one. In the 16-year-old girl’s shock and torment, she blames herself. In Britta Johnson’s promising new musical Life After, however, the teenager’s search for answers to the unanswerable lead her in directions she never imagined.
            The entirety of Life After is told through the prism of Alice’s anxieties, self-recriminations and grief. When Alice (Sophie Hearn) isn’t expressing these feeling herself in words or in song, they are manifested through her perceptions of her older sister (Charlotte Maltby), her mother (Mamie Parris), her friend Hannah (Livvy Marcus) or through three omnipresent singers (dubbed by the playwright The Furies) who sound out Alice’s conscience and suspicions. Because Life After reflects the attitudes and emotional instability of a teenager, it’s able to venture over the top at times and even rely on humor in an otherwise dark context.
            Under the direction of Barry Edelstein, the Old Globe is presenting the U.S. premiere of the Canadian Johnson’s play, which opened in and received acclaim in Toronto. The plaudits are justified. Johnson wrote not only the book but the music and lyrics for Life After, and while only one of its numbers, the show-closing “Poetry,” stands out, the remainder do advance and add layering to the story. The theme of forgiveness of self and of others, especially loved ones, resides in the heart of Life After’s songs.
            Though Alice seems eloquent and wise beyond a girl of 16, she is a sympathetic and searching protagonist, and the expressive Hearn is well cast in the role. Bradley Dean inhabits with verve the larger-than-life part of Alice’s father, Frank, whose self-help books have made him a media star while taking him away from his family. Shining in support are Maltby as blunt sister Kate and Marcus for providing comic relief opposite Alice’s sadness and doubts.
At a crisp 90 minutes and with an imaginative physical staging that has the both sparse set and its characters in perpetual motion, Life After never stops to wallow or, ironically, to contemplate what does come after death. Its focus is on the ones left behind to make peace with those gone and within themselves. (Review originally published in San Diego CityBeat on 4/10/19.)
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    David L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic.

    Archives

    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    August 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    January 2016
    January 2015
    December 2014
    January 2014
    January 2013
    January 2012
    January 2011

    Categories

    All
    Theatre Review

David Coddon

About 
David Coddon Fiction
Theatre Reviews

Support

Contact
FAQ
Terms of Use
© COPYRIGHT 2017. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About David
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Theatre Reviews
  • New Page