It’s rare for a theatrical show to have a television debut before its finalized stage premiere, but in Canadian musical theatre the path to production is its own kind of beast.

When Barbara Johnston and Anika Johnson graduated from Ryerson Theatre School in 2009, their final performance was a workshop of a new musical they were writing together: Blood Ties was based on a true story about Johnston’s parents, who had to clean up the aftermath of a family member’s suicide. The collaborators turned it into a musical tragicomedy.

“As we were writing the show we talked to them a lot. . . . All these horrible details,” Johnston said. “I just thought it was this insane story that combined the kind of drama and bizarre comedy with sorrow underneath the surface that we thought would make something very exciting.”

From there it received another workshop in the 2012 SummerWorks Performance Festival and travelled to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival the following year. The darkly comedic story about a group of friends cleaning up the scene of a suicide the night before one of them gets married built up a cult following in the Toronto indie theatre scene.

But in 2014, Blood Ties got a major boost in exposure when it was picked up as part of a subplot in Season 2 of Orphan Black, the Tatiana Maslany-led sci-fi clone drama co-produced by BBC America and Bell Media. Maslany’s suburban mom clone, Alison Hendrix, plays the lead role in her community theatre musical (you can see Johnston as one of the chorus members).

This week, more than two years after its TV debut and almost eight years after its conception, Johnson and Johnston say the final version of Blood Ties will be staged for the 10th annual Next Stage Theatre Festival — the smaller, curated, wintertime edition of the Toronto Fringe Festival, which runs from Jan. 4 to 15 at Factory Theatre.

“They’re expensive, they’re a big risk and they take a long time to create,” Johnson says of musicals. “So Canadian theatres don’t usually take that risk. And the Fringe is one of the only ways to get a new musical in front of an audience.”

She has since written six more shows with Johnston, many of which have appeared in Fringe festivals, including two in collaboration with teenage artists from Wexford Performing Arts.

Theatres across Toronto have long-established commissioning programs and playwrights-in-residence to keep a steady stream of new plays coming. But the same infrastructure isn’t there for musicals. That’s beginning to change with Acting Up Stage Company’s Noteworthy program — which pairs composers and lyricists for two weeks of writing exercises — and Sheridan College’s Canadian Music Theatre Project, which incubated the Newfoundland-set Come From Away by Irene Sankoff and David Hein. That musical finishes its sold-out Toronto run this week before moving to Broadway in February.

Still, the festival circuit has long been a place to find great Canadian musicals, from the Tony Award-winning The Drowsy Chaperone to My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, the show that launched Sankoff and Hein’s careers.

“When you think of all the creators it needs, a composer and choreographer and what have you, the Fringe becomes one of the only ways you can produce one affordably,” said Kelly Straughan, executive director of the Toronto Fringe Festival and Next Stage. “In my years as an indie producer I never got to do a musical; it was just, financially, way out of reach … I can see why people just give up, that it can just be too much. You really have to want it badly.”

Last year, the Toronto Fringe established the Paul O’Sullivan Prize for Musical Theatre to support new projects. The inaugural winner of the $3,500 award was Life After starring Anika Johnson and written by her sister Britta, which was also the top earner of the 2016 festival and a huge critical hit. Continuing in the string of successful musicals picked up after festival performances, Johnson confirmed that Life After will get a professional production in 2017/2018.

But while picking up individual shows is a boost for the Canadian musical theatre industry, and a sign that theatre companies are taking bigger risks on the art form, Straughan says support for musical writers needs to become even further entrenched in development and funding programs.

“What I would like to see, that we’re not only picking up shows for production but we’re making sure these talents are getting developed at regional theatres across Ontario and Canada,” she said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

With a developing cultural appetite for new musicals (thanks to shows like Come From Away, Hamilton and Fun Home changing the conception of what a mainstream musical can be) and the approval of Orphan Black, Blood Ties seems to be striking out at the right moment to go from the small screen to a bigger stage.