I saw Pretty Woman: The Musical So You Don’t Have To

​I have never put off writing about a show as long as I put this one off. Long-time readers know that I have the most fun writing about bad shows, or at least shows with elements of the ridiculous in them. It’s so much easier! And funnier! But shows that are good are harder. Shows that are great? Really hard. Shows that are so amazing that they rip your heart out and replace it with a new heart composed of their music and brilliance and all of the feels plus new feels? Rill hard guys. And that’s what “Dear Evan Hansen” is, and what it did to me, both off and on Broadway. Although we saw it on Broadway just a few months ago, I just realized I saw the Second Stage production on Mother’s Day weekend, so a full year ago. So this is overdue, sorries. 

 Not a day has gone by when I don’t think about this show (or listen to the cast album). If you don’t know me well enough personally to know my schej, know that I write about maybe 1/3 of the shows I actually see. So I see a lot. And “Dear Evan Hansen” is one of the best original shows I have seen. Just, period. At first I was going to say ‘of the past few years’ – which is pretty strong company already because that time frame includes “Hamilton”, which you are aware is beyond amazing – but that if you offered me free tickets to a show to go see a thousand more times, I would pick “Evan”, partly because I have dry eye syndrome and need to make my eyes water a lot so ya know job done but mostly because I’d wanna be in Hamilton so ya know technicalities &c. But upon further reflection I a) get stage fright so no but b) “Evan” really is one of the best, just period (or full stop), that I’ve ever seen. It’s moving and surprising, pulling off more and more insight and nuance when you think it’s done as much as it can in that regard. When I first saw it, I didn’t expect to sob uncontrollably at an off-Broadway show about a teenage boy. That’s pretty much all I knew about it going in, that it was about a teenage boy, which is hilarious but not recommended – you should know that it can be grave and that you gon cry. Apparently same went for the middle-aged men next to me who were dragged by their kids and wives to the theatre, and the 6-year-old girl behind me who needed a tranquilizer and for her idiot parents to remind her that it’s just make-believe as she had a panic attack. (Seriously, parents, do your research before bringing children to a movie or a show or anything. NOT EVERYTHING IS OKAY FOR THEM ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S ABOUT CHILDREN COMMITTING SUICIDE.)
 
Another thing readers will know is that I traffic in spoilers. Ah ‘ont kerr.  Shows, movies, I usually ‘review’ by explaining and commenting on the plot so caveat emptor. But an important part of the “Evan” experience is learning the story as it unfolds. Being spoiled and not getting to experience the story as it’s told and as secrets are revealed and as surprises unfurl would be such a shame. By this point, I’m sure it’s impossible to have avoided all information as I did (unwittingly) a year ago, before this show was super duper popular. So I’m going to try my best to talk about the show without doing my usual spoiling spree. I am going to assume that you probably know it’s about a teenager committing suicide and how it affects those in his life (and not in his life) in the aftermath, both because I think it’s common knowledge in the show’s advertising and because I kind of already mentioned that above. Despite how awkward I think some of this will read, it’s worth it if anyone reading this has the chance to see the show. It’s so so special to me and I want you to gasp at least once when you see it or at the very least not be the person responsible for you not gasping.
 
“Dear Evan Hansen” tells the story of a high school student who suffers with some serious anxiety and has no real friends. He likes trees? and worked at a national park or some such maybe over the summer? where he fell from a tree and broke his arm (hence the show’s logo). He’s an outcast who feels invisible, as he tells us in his big song, the best song in the show on most days, “Waving Through a Window”. This is Evan’s first big song in the show, and it’s a beautiful, glorious beast. Ben Platt, Tony-worthy if there ever was such a thing, has to sing this monster of a song as the very first musical thing he does in the show. Like, it opens, he has a few short book scenes, and then the first thing he sings is this confession about how he feels like his whole life is being lived from the outside looking in, and like he’ll never be able to do anything about it. His performance bursts at the seams. It’s raw and wrenching and unmatched in terms of pure unadulterated vulnerability yet vocal insanity. That is until of course his next big song and then the same goes for that and then the next one after that and so on. He can sang, is what I’m saying, and he gives everything he has to every word he sings that there’s really no medical explanation for how he regenerates. Ben’s physical commitment to this anxious, awkward character is so complete that you will forget that he’s acting. This full embodiment, with all the nervous tics and quirks and vocalisms, will convince some that Ben isn’t acting at all, that this has to be just how the actor is in real life, because it seems so natural and so impossible to fake, but he’s just an incredible actor, which you wouldn’t know if you just saw him do some cute magic in “Pitch Perfect” but you would know if you saw him in “The Book of Mormon”, playing Elder Cunningham even though he is skinny.
 
Evan lives with his mom Heidi, who works tirelessly as a nurse and goes to school at night and tries to take care of her son, so despite her meaning well, she isn’t aware of what’s going on with him. He also, like most teenagers, won’t be open and tell her. She tries to get Evan to take his anxiety meds and do what his therapist wants him to, but there’s only so much she can do when he won’t tell her that anything is wrong. Not that that excuses her lack of awareness, but it does explain it. As Heidi, Rachel Bay Jones is a force. She’s a favorite of mine because she took the usually nothing role of Catherine in “Pippin” and made it one of the funniest performances ever. She’s a brilliant comedian who should have won a Tony for that. Seriously my two biggest Tony Gripes™ are 1) Raul Esparza shattering the earth in “Company” but losing to David Hyde Pierce for I don’t know, Frasier? I mean I saw the show DHP won for and he was great as usual but come on, and 2) Andrea Martin winning for the same show when Rachel should have but wasn’t even nominated. Luckily, she is this year, for this powerhouse performance of a single mother trying to do her best. And it’s so impressive to see Rachel do a completely dramatic performance, without her ridiculous comedic skills to rely on. She breaks your heart reminding you that it’s not just kids who can feel invisible. I dare you not to do that awfully embarrassing hyperventilating crying when she sings her big wrenching song “So Big/So Small”. JFC. 
 
So, plot without spoilers, hmm. Very early in the school year, one of the characters commits suicide, and the show is about how the boy’s family and classmates, and others, deal with it. A tiny-seeming misunderstanding, one that could be cleared up with the simple phrase ‘oh that’s not actually what you think it is’, gives Evan a chance to at least pretend that his life has more meaning than it does, by fabricating a relationship with the boy in order to help the family grieve. His intention is debatable, because although he’s obviously going along with the lie in order to help the mourning family (‘oh look our outcast son had a friend, and he was a good friend back to him and not a total shit like we thought’), Evan continues the charade because it gives him purpose, and popularity, and the knowledge of what it’s like to be cared for. Which you can’t really blame him for! It’s an awful no good thing to lie about and ohhh how it growwws but this kid is feeling seen for the first time, and that’s hard to give up. The biggest problem people seem to have with this show is that they’re mad Evan gets away with so much, that he doesn’t get really punished for his lies, and that he’s doing a terrible thing, which makes him a terrible person. First of all, doing a dumb thing doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. And he does indeed suffer for it (have you SEEN Ben perform “Words Fail”? He literally is pouring snot out of his face), so I don’t know what other kind of punishment people want to see. Not letting him get into any college? What? He’s lying for the benefit of these people in mourning. What he does, when you consider how it affects them, is beautiful in the short-term. It’s confusing, because yes overall it’s terrible to be lying about it and that makes it hard to grapple with because the immediacy of how it soothes their aching souls is also beautiful. It’s a bit of comfort he’s providing when nothing else would do it. You see the stories and lies start taking shape slowly but deliberately, and it all happens so naturally that you’re kind of right there with Evan saying ‘oh just make something up to make them stop crying!’ And of course it gets out of hand, and it’s wrong from the beginning, but still it helped give them something to actually mourn for a little and you can’t fault him for that. The reasons for his lies get even more complicated when we learn how much Evan needed this too, because even just pretending that he mattered to someone brings him a lot of comfort. The criticism misses the point of what’s driving Evan to continue the fabrication, the reasons which are perfectly laid out in “For Forever”, the first time Evan starts lying to the grieving family about his friendship with the son. He tells them that their son was there when he broke his arm, saying “I’m on the ground/my arm goes numb/I look around/and I see him coming to get me/he’s coming to get me/and everything’s okay”. The truth is that Evan fell, all alone, and was on the ground for a while before anyone found him, alone with his misery (and the truth, we learn, surrounding his fall). The way Ben’s voice breaks when he says these lines, it’s obvious how badly he wishes it were true that a friend actually was there to find him when he was hurt. It’s heartbreaking and so clear at that point that Evan is doing this because he needs it just as much as the family does. And his game of pretend ends up giving his life and his relationships a lot more actual meaning than they otherwise would have had.
 
As the grieving mother, Jennifer Laura Thompson is a wreck most of her onstage time, and I don’t know how she does it. Crying the whole time is understandable, of course, that goes without saying, and Jennifer manages to bring you along with her the entire time as she sobs and then tries to smile and listens to stories and then sobs again. She doesn’t get much more to do than sob, but still she’s wonderful. She’s so perfect as a suburban white middle-class lady too, opening the show in the morning in her stretchy gym pants. We learn that, like all suburban white middle-class ladies worth their salt, she’s gone through periods of various trendy lifestyles to give her life some purpose or maybe just to be trendy, from being Buddhist last year (obvs) to one year ‘not eating anything that came from animals’. It’s too bad that one didn’t stick but honestly, this is the first vegan joke in recent pop culture that wasn’t very very lame, so bravo. As the father, Michael Park returns to Broadway (he originated the role) after John Dossett played the role off Broadway, and both were very good in a not very fleshed out role. (Honestly I didn’t know the actor had changed I’m sorry? Older white men I mean.) He’s a very stereotypical white man with money, talking about how stressed he is at work and how disappointed he always was in his no-good no-ambition son that was nothing like he was ‘supposed’ to be. His character does get more attention in the Act II opener when he teaches Evan how “To Break in a Glove” and gives Evan the baseball mitt that his son never touched. It’s heartwarming, but a little boring and slow – but you don’t even care that this is breaking my #1 show structure rule (you need a great rousing Act II opener to bring everyone back into the story after intermission) because you need a break from everything that came before. A 20 minute intermission is not long enough to get your heart rate back to normal and your head to stop whirling from all the painful crying before the break. So this song, although the weakest in the show, is fine but more importantly necessary because you need a little bit of an emotional break. And the fact that a scene of a father who lost his son teaching another boy whose father left him about baseball with the dead son’s glove is considered an emotional break (relatively) shows just how much you gon cry.
 
As Zoe, the cute girl that Evan has had a crush on forever, Laura Dreyfuss is wonderful. Her unique voice is really cool and a little gravelly despite her youth but shockingly strong at times, and she is completely believable in everything her character does. It adds another level to both the inappropriateness and the inexorableness of Evan’s lies that they bring him closer to his dream girl. I love her voice on “Requiem”, her refusal to mourn the brother she thought she hated. It’s such a glorious song, despite its melancholy, showing how the different family members react to the death, with the mother being optimistic that Evan’s stories (and fabricated emails) prove that she was right to always have faith in her son, and the father angry that the son disappointed him yet again. I also love the lyric Zoe sings “When the villains fall/the kingdom never weeps/no one lights a candle to remember” because this is soooo exactly “No One Mourns the Wicked” from “Wicked” (“No one mourns the wicked/no one cries they won’t return/no one lays a lily on their grave” &c) and I kind of crack up through the tears when I remember this.
 
As Connor, Mike Faist is sneakily good, so sneaky that his much-deserved Tony nomination was a huge but very welcome surprise to literally everyone, even the voters I bet. In his intense interactions with Evan after the suicide, Mike manages to maintain the true essence of Connor while still conveying that he’s being shaped by Evan, that he’s really a part of Evan’s imagination. His song “Disappear” is really moving when you look at it from both forms of his character, both the real Connor and the one that is a part of Evan. He’s also freaking hilarious in “Sincerely, Me”, the most fun song of the show and thank god an actual laugh-out-loud scene. This is in large part due to the comic relief Jared, played by Will Roland as every jewish boy who ever went to my overnight camp. When Evan tries to talk to him in school, Jared reminds him that they are just ‘family friends’, which is so suburban jewish I can’t stand it. His timing on his hilarious lines is the funniest part of the show, and so necessary because of the aforementioned floods of tears. He and Kristolyn Lloyd as Alana round out the cast as Evan’s main school friends, Alana being a very stereotypical overachiever who brags about all the various clubs she is president of. As a result, it is obvious that she would be ‘co-president’ with Evan when they form a suicide awareness group, and you accept it as just another thing she wants to put on her college applications. But of course, like everything in this show, it ends up meaning more, because of course, like everyone in this show, Alana too struggles with feeling invisible and like her life doesn’t matter, as does Jared, whose sarcastic and endless humor serves as his armor against the world. We don’t even consider that these two smaller characters would have the same problems and journey of self-reflection as our main character, but that’s the entire point of the show, that everyone has these same heartaches and worries and everyone feels unimportant at times. It’s the most universal, uniting show ever.
 
I know you’re probably like JFC this sounds like the saddest most miserable stuff you could sit through for 2 ½ hours. And it isssss but it’s also the most incredible and moving and important show in a while. I am still in awe in every way. The set, even. I loved the brilliant use of projections, usually and deservedly maligned for being a cheap and cheap-looking way to enhance scenery. But here, instead, it nails the modern age by using the projections almost exclusively to show social media and other internet usage. When Evan’s story begins to spread and then goes viral, the reactions of people on the internet across social media stream on the walls and pillars of the stage. That connection to how our lives really look today, I can’t get over how brilliant it is. Then, the book is so original, finally, a really truly original modern story for today, and the score is one of my favorites. That’s no surprise considering it’s from one of my favorite composing teams, Pasek & Paul, fresh off their Oscar-winning work on “La La Land”. It seems like “The Great Comet” is picking up Tony awards steam and so they might not win a Tony this year too, but they really should. This score will rip your heart out like I said before, but it will put it back together very carefully too. The story is inspired by Benj Pasek’s experience in high school, which adds more depth to the story’s real-life parallels and just ugh it’s so sad. It’s hard because everyone has lost or knows someone who lost someone in this way, and it seems crazy to sit in a dark theatre remembering your sadness. But the show tells us how important it is to learn from heartache and try to help even one person feel better in their skin. Yes, the big songs of the show, like “You Will Be Found”, will make you sob, but that’s because it’s mostly uplifting and comforting, not just sad. It’s such a great song. I really can’t get over how important this show is for kids, and adults, today, when everything seems so cruel and unfair and horrible. It’ll crush you and dehydrate you from crying, yes, but then it’s like a rainbow after the storm when it seems like everything is going to be okay. There’s a sense of relief that comes with all the sadness, especially with “You Will Be Found” and the Finale, oh god that finale. I wish I could tell you to go see it now, heck I wish I could go see it again this weekend, but it’s sold out for a while (yay!!). Buy tickets for when you can though; you’ll be glad you did. And start listening to the cast album. BSE.
 

It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about ‘Consent’ in London’s West End, playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 11. 

The last time I was in London’s Harold Pinter Theatre was for the sublimely disappointing ‘Oslo’, which featured just as much screaming as ‘Consent’. However, the key difference is that the screaming in ‘Consent’ feels earned, and completely necessary. (Hey while you’re here open that ‘Oslo’ review in a new tab because it’s remarkable.) Also making this an entirely different experience? ‘Consent’ was riveting. This well written, incisive new play by Nina Raine made me feel miserable the entire time, but in a great way that good plays are supposed to. It’s timely (I don’t want to be the 1000th reviewer to mention the #MeToo movement in a review for this play but look I just did), it’s well acted, and it will make you feel like everything is hopeless and everyone is a monster and it’s best to just sit in the dark alone quietly for most of your life. Like a good play should! 

‘Consent’ follows the lives of a group of barristers, probably in their late 30s, as they deal with their workload and their marriages and the fact that spoiler they are all terrible people. There are two married couples, one single barrister friend, and one outlier actress friend. The barristers joke about their cases – most are in crime – from the first person, i.e. “What have you been working on lately?” “Oh I’ve been killing pensioners, raping a few people” – things like that. Dark humor in people who work in dark fields is nothing new, a common coping mechanism. But to see it put so bluntly, so cavalierly, is an early shock into this play. And the joking doesn’t really seem to be a way for them to deal with all their feelings. They genuinely seem not to care about the awful crimes they’re arguing. And sure you can’t take everything in work personally or emotionally, but the complete lack of empathy is a vital look into their humanity, which informs how they try cases. Of course, the worst-seeming men at the start are the defense attorneys.
 
Now, it goes without saying that the accused need to have representation, and fair representation at that, to promote their best interests in court and to serve justice overall. Defense attorneys are important and necessary to our criminal justice system. (I’m conflating US and UK law in this area because it’s similar enough.) But defense attorneys for accused rapists are a special breed. I have witnessed a lot of rape trials, a lot a lot, and during an internship for a public prosecutor I was involved in a lot of those trials. So I think it’s fair to say I’m more of an expert than the average person on the legal aspects of this play. And Nina Raine has nailed the coldness, the sickening twisting of words, the unfair focus on negligible details that every defense attorney I’ve seen in a rape case will employ. It’s hard to think about, but most of them were pure evil. And I really mean those words. The worst of humanity I could ever imagine have been in those court rooms with me. I remember a case that was lost because the defense attorney got the jury to laugh at a gay witness, the roommate of the rape victim. He kept making gay jokes and ‘prancing’ about when he repeated parts of the witness’s testimony, and since the judge and jury were some of the many, many shitty people on this planet, they thought it was hilarious and ‘voted’ for the funny lawyer. It’s not an issue of putting up the best case for their client, which is their job. It’s that they seem to revel in the unnecessary, unsettling glee they find in demolishing already fragile witnesses (victims), in using their words and their trauma against them to prove a point – that it doesn’t matter if you were raped; all that matters is whether you are presentable, well spoken, and completely faultless in every aspect of your life. And it’s definitely not about getting at the truth, which is rarely the point of any trial.
 
And ‘Consent’ captured this ease of evil more than any other work I’ve seen try to. Quickly, the marriages are revealed to be on shaky ground, which is not surprising when dealing with people without the ability to empathize. Ed, our main man (Stephen Campbell Moore, terrific and terrifying), is alarming in his calculated, supremely logical look at the world, which works to win him cases but unsettles his wife Kitty (the excellent Claudie Blakley (and yes that’s spelled right I know the e and the l look like they should be swapped but alas I cannot change her name)). He’s the guy who uses logic to kill empathy and truth when it doesn’t make enough logical sense for him, and he values dispassionate logic over the truth when said truth is the kind that demands an emotional response. His absolute lack of empathy struck me right to my core, and watching him both at work and at home made me feel the same powerless yet overwhelming rage I would feel in court. I was glad when Kitty would yell at him the things I wanted to yell out (and from a front row seat, I really almost did), and I was glad that she seemed to have the right footing in such a difficult relationship. But the second act proves that she’s not the moral savior I wanted her to be, which is both disappointing and more realistic. No one is perfect, although it in this play it’s more like everyone is actually a shithead.
 
The other married barrister couple is Rachel (Sian Clifford) and Jake (Adam James, who my brain kept trying to make into Michael C. Hall). Jake is revealed early on to be cheating on his wife, but he’s not sorry for his actions, only sorry he got caught. He’s very clear on that and doesn’t understand why anyone would fault him for his stance. And he’s the kind of guy that would frame his argument in such a way that it would leave you without a response, almost thinking that maybe he was right – the kind of guy that’s a good barrister, and an asshole. Rachel is the one on the other side, a prosecutor, so I also put the unfair burden on her that I initially put on Kitty – that they’d be my female voices of reason against the men. Of course, people are more complicated than that, and she also let me down, with her second act opinions when it comes to the title of the play. White women, am I right!
 
The other friends are Zara (Clare Foster), the goofy (pitch perfect) actress friend, and Tim (Lee Ingleby), the awkward barrister who seems hapless but ‘nice’, but shows he sucks just as much. That everyone kind of sucks at times and you want to punch them all at times and you also just see them as normal sometimes all makes ‘Consent’ so convincing, and everyone so real. They’re all people you probably know in real life.
 
But the best part of the play is when it actually shows the rape trial, where Ed is defending and Tim is prosecuting. Heather Craney plays the victim, Gayle, and she is everything. I was crying through most of the exquisite first act because of how accurate it all was. Gayle meets Tim literally two minutes before the trial starts. She knows nothing about what’s going to happen or what she’s supposed to do because no one ever cared to inform her. It is the prosecution’s job to make sure the victim knows what to do and does it well, since she is the main part of the state’s case. But just because they should ensure that she is fully informed and ready to testify doesn’t mean it always happens. And Tim’s failure here is an example of that. Busy lawyers who think they have a handle on the facts, and who don’t see any value in devoting time and effort to such a case, might only meet the confused victim out in the hallway before the trial starts, where she might hear for the very first time that anything not in her initial statement to the police, made in the aftermath of debilitating trauma, is inadmissible. And yes that’s a bad lawyer who would do that, but it doesn’t stop it from happening – or being allowed to happen. Such is the case with Tim and Gayle. The short exchange they have says so much about the system: Gayle asks if Tim’s her lawyer, and he laughs that no silly, he’s the lawyer for the Crown. Gayle asks who her lawyer is, and Tim has to explain that she doesn’t have one, she’s just a witness against the accused. But he has a lawyer, right? Well of course he does. And his lawyer is ready to tear down everything the unprepared Gayle says, the silly woman who thought that the truth would be all that was required of her.
 
The genius of this play is that the failings of the judicial system reflect the personal failings in the people who work in the law. And this makes sense, after all, since society’s structures and systems will reflect the society that made them. This is the most depressing thought from the play, that the systems that are supposed to serve us really won’t improve if humanity doesn’t improve.
 
I wish that they kept up this theme in the second act, which is much weaker than the first as it mainly focuses on the relationships of the characters and puts the legal stuff aside. I’m obviously biased in my desire for more of the interplay between the two, but when the interpersonal relationships all blow up and there’s so much screaming and crying and so much emotion (so much), it becomes overwhelming. It would have been better, and easier to take in, if it were tempered with more glimpses into the law to provide small respites from all the heated arguments.
 
But as it is, ‘Consent’ is a really brilliant play. It’s not the GREATEST THING EVER, as I was left wondering at intermission whether it just might be, but it’s quite well done and so well written. The acting was so effective, I felt like all the trauma was my own. All these people are terrible, yet normal. Which scares me. Is everyone a monster? Does every person cheat? Like every single one? Because that’s what this play is telling me. I mean I know I’m mean on this blog sometimes (because it’s mine and I can do what I want with it) but I’m not a monster, I believe victims, and I don’t think I would find joy in emotionally torturing someone I love. But that’s just me I guess!
 
INFORMATION
The play is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 11. It runs about two and a half hours, with the first act almost 90 minutes and the second much shorter. There was an announcement at the start that one set piece was malfunctioning and so stagehands would be onstage more than usual to move sets, but it was all just loose furniture so I’m not sure how it would have been done without stagehands. Anyway go see it.
 
AUDIENCE
Typical English play audience, skewing older with lots of chatter among the older ladies. “Oh dear now he’s gone and done that.” “Oh dear he said it he finally said it.” SHUSHHHHHHHHHH. The very old man next to me asked if I was enjoying it at the interval and I said yes it’s quite good and he asked, “are you a lawyer?” and I said “yes?” and he said “I thought you might be!” and now every second of my life will be spent thinking, how…?