Canadian musicals are having a moment in the spotlight — and making up the rules as they go along

"Since I've been out of university there's been a hunger for new Canadian musicals," says Britta Johnson. She hasn't been out very long — she's only 26 years old, but she may already be the brightest-shining composer/lyricist in the Canadian theatre, with the promise of three productions in as many years from Toronto's Musical Stage Company.

The company calls its development program Crescendo, and Johnson is the first Crescendo resident artist. Does she consider herself part of a Canadian musical renaissance? "Absolutely. I think there's a rebirth."

Maybe it's not so much a renaissance as — is there such a word? — a "naissance." Despite a few isolated successes over the decades (Anne of Green Gables, The Drowsy Chaperone) there has been no great tradition of Canadian musicals. Musical Stage Company began life by introducing its audience to offbeat shows that invariably hailed from the U.S. Now it's growing its own. In the words of Mitchell Marcus, the company's still-young founder and artistic director: "We had seven years of having nothing to do with Canadian musicals, and seven years of trying to grow them. And now it's all beginning to come together. And there's more than one company doing it. It definitely feels like there's something in the water."

The biggest waves in that water have been made by Come from Away, the musical that the husband-and-wife team of David Hein and Irene Sankoff created on an unlikely subject: the hospitality extended by the 9,000 residents of Gander, Nfld. to the 7,000 Americans stranded at the town's airport on September 11, 2001 — a heartwarming story, but one without a central character.

The Americans may be said to have returned Canada's compliment. Originally staged as part of the pioneering musical theatre program at Sheridan College in Oakville, the show was picked up by the La Jolla Theatre in California who took it to Broadway after a careful nurturing process involving touring stops in Seattle, Washington and, oh yes, Toronto. Audiences everywhere loved it, with one La Jolla patron calling it "the best musical I've never heard of I've ever seen." In New York it's been playing to packed houses for nearly a year — this despite a title that must have mystified Americans and even seems to baffle Canadians. (At Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre, where the show is booked for a return engagement in February, patrons are calling the box office, requesting tickets for "Go Away.")

'Come from Away' changed everything. It had people taking musicals seriously again — made them think bigger.-  Britta Johnson, theatre composer/lyricist 

Not every new Canadian musical can expect to have that kind of trajectory. But it's certainly an inspiration. For Johnson, "Come from Away changed everything. It had people taking musicals seriously again — made them think bigger." It was also an inspiration in terms of technique and construction. "It's not in traditional musical theatre form; it's not linear."

And neither are Johnson's own shows. Her initial Crescendo piece, Life After, staged earlier this year, jumps around in time and space to show a young woman trying to come to terms with the death of her father. (Johnson lost her own dad when she was 13.) Dr. Silver, her next one, is about a cult leader whose weapon is music; it's scheduled for production in 2018 as a site-specific show in Toronto's Yorkville. And a couple of years ago, she contributed to Brantwood — site-specific on the largest scale: a wildly ambitious show about the history of a school, with multiple storylines, past and present, unfolding simultaneously all over an actual disused school in Oakville.

With Brantwood, everything had to be synchronised. "You had to write an exact seven-minute song, with space for a ghost to come in" — like writing a film score, only with words. "It was like the writing Olympics." (Full disclosure: my son, Mitchell Cushman, was co-creator and co-director of Brantwood, and will also be directing Dr Silver.)

She had an Olympic partner on Brantwood: her sister Anika, four years older and also a composer/lyricist. They come from a musical family; both their parents were pit musicians. Growing up in Stratford, from an early age Britta was seeing classic musicals at the Stratford Festival. The one that really blew her mind — "a game-changer for me" — was Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods which she saw when she was fourteen exactly fourteen times. That same year, she wrote a one-act musical; already a pianist, she now found writing songs "the most exciting thing I'd ever done. I'd always liked to make people laugh; now I could also make them cry."

She can still do both. What inspires her about Sondheim is "the type of stories he's willing to treat, and how much can be captured in just one line. It doesn't take much and it says everything; every word and every note is there for a reason." She adds, "I love clever things."

We're making up the rules as we go along. We're defining the genre.- Britta Johnson, theatre composer/lyricist 

Her work at its best has those same qualities. Marcus says, "Our company's aesthetic is that music can be a window into the soul. There are several writers at that well. Britta does it really well."

When the Johnson sisters collaborate, they're as one. Or, as Britta puts it: "We share a brain. We write both music and lyrics together; they grow organically." And when a song's completed, they often can't remember who contributed what. There are individual differences; Anika is "more into contemporary sounds. I've had to be a type of chameleon. Life After is my first show that really sounds like me: a chamber musical with a very Sondheim influence. With Dr. Silver, which is immersive and set at a funeral, there are higher stakes. It's very strange and experimental. The music's in a new style for me — psychedelic, more electric stuff. Life After was more classical. " One thing the two shows have in common: they both revolve around people who are putatively dead.

Anika Johnson, unlike her sister, is also a stage performer. And, just to make things more complicated, she has another frequent collaborator named Barbara Johnston whom she met at theatre school. The three of them — the Johnsons and Johnston — are "merging on Dr Silver" with Johnston as choreographer and assistant director.

Other notable writers are in the musical pool as well. There are Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, whose Ride the Cyclone came from Victoria, B.C. and rode its own cyclone as far as New York. There's James Smith, a richly talented composer-actor-pianist, whose Chasse Galerie, seen at Toronto's intimate Storefront Theatre and at Soulpepper, was a spooky, raucous delight. And from a slightly older generation, there's the gifted and versatile Leslie Arden, whom Britta Johnson cites as a mentor, and who has never had the break she deserves. Maybe she too will catch this wave.

As Britta says, not having a canonical tradition behind you means that you don't have to stagger under its weight. "We're making up the rules as we go along. We're defining the genre."