By Doug Sturdivant
09 Feb 2009

They evolved their story trying to miss the milestones. "It's the small moments that end up being the really big ones throughout your life," he insists, "so rather than it being 'Graduation! Marriage! Children!' — those things that you'd think are the big life-changing moments — we touch on seemingly insignificant moments that pay off."

Bartram translated these chapters of life into word-driven story songs. "The main character is a writer, so we imagined he stores away his memories as stories," the composer reasons. "We thought the audience would make their metaphoric leap with us. All the elements of the story, whether they're a scene or a scene that turns into a song, have their inherent beginning, middle and end so they're self-contained units unto themselves — but, when strung together, create a bigger picture. 'Mrs. Remington,' with its own little story arc, is self-contained, but it's relevant to the whole piece because there are tentacles of that which lead to other story elements. The whole piece is an amalgamation of stories, the stories of their lives together."

Bartram and Hill — both from small towns outside Toronto — met on stage, performing the Canadian premiere of Forever Plaid. Two years later this perfect blendship spread to words-and-music teamwork and drifted below the border to NYC, where they tinkered The Story of My Life back to life and got it on the road to Broadway with versions in Toronto and at Goodspeed Musicals in Connecticut.

If their labors (directed by Richard Maltby Jr.) work, you'll leave The Story of My Life wondering what was the name of your first-grade schoolteacher or how you can get a hold of old pals lost in the mist of the past.

Their Life lasts an hour and a half. "It's a one-act play," Hill says, "and we often say Act II is actually the drive home, with people talking about what they saw."