January 19, 2023
The Frog Restaurant in Hoxton: One of London's Best Vegan Tasting Menusby Randi / August 12, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Tree, at the Young Vic until August 24.
In a post-theatre conversation this week, we established that the number of professional stage productions I’ve seen is in the thousands. I can say with all the certainty of someone who is pretty tired and should have taken her contacts out 5 hours ago and has a hard time remembering many of the 1000s of shows (as one would) that I have never been more frustrated by any show than I was with Tree, the creation of (as it says in all the program and marketing material, it was ‘created by’ them, not written by) Idris Elba (yes that one) and Kwame Kwei-Armah, the latter of whom also directed. It’s maddening beyond belief, because there’s so much potential in the story – if you can find the story underneath the noise. Tree shows glimpses of deep, provocative drama, but the creators obscure those little captivating buds with tons (and tons) (and tons) of bells and whistles that are beyond unnecessary, to the point where the entire experience is extraneous.
The most well-known of said bells and/or whistles is the immersive nature of the show. As we saw with the recent productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre and, in smaller part, with Barber Shop Chronicles at the Roundhouse (at least to start the show), immersive style theatre is this summer’s trend. I’m all for immersion if it works. It works like a dream at Midsummer (I didn’t mean to make that so corny but alas) because the story remains the focal point. Sure the crowd is ushered hither and thither but never in a way that distracts from the actors or the words. This is a lesson in restraint that Tree did not learn. I don’t think Tree even knows the word restraint. The immersion exists here simply for its own sake, simply to make audiences feel like it’s all about them – and it is.
Beginning with most of the crowd in the middle of the stage dancing with the cast to super loud (like too loud) club music (literally my nightmare), the show is ostensibly about a young Londoner who goes to South Africa for the first time to confront his family’s history and learn about the strife that led to his existence and is in his blood. Now that story could be great, and like I said there are moments of almost-greatness. But instead of letting those moments breathe and grow, the play continues to rely on tricks like these dance parties to convince the audience that this was fun. And most of the audience did have fun, because of course they did if it’s a huge dance party. Londoners love clubbing!
The first half hour drags, with little happening to propel a story but LOTS happening to distract you from it – more super loud dance breaks apropos of nothing, staff repeatedly handing out placards to hold up, staff moving you around to set up another effect, staff making you hold sticks (staff have never worked harder in a theatre; they did not stop for a second, which was distracting). There was an inane release of either glitter or dirt – I honestly couldn’t tell the difference, quite the metaphor – over most of the crowd, and lots of Alfred moving through the crowd unnecessarily. (This last one seems just to give everyone the rush of a famous actor walking right by you, because that’s what everyone wants – to feel like they’re a part of whatever is happening, regardless of whether it makes sense. Everyone wanting to be a part of things is already the downfall of theatre, with the rampant videos and snapchatting during it, but more on that at the end.) There was a character we met for less than a minute who performed handstand pushups for no reason other than to show off and have the crowd cheer. There were loud gunshots. There was a character introduction via hip hop performance. And sure she’s a good performer, but WHY? Every inch of this production had me asking why. Nothing was in service of the story, so everything felt exasperating.
As Alfred’s character Kaelo delves deeper into his family’s past, there is a good ten minute chunk that felt like a completely different, compelling play: when modern day demonstrations gave way to a memory play of the protests in 1985, when Kaelo’s parents got together. There were fewer distractions here, fewer dance parties, and it worked. Those ten minutes or so worked. I wish I could see the rest of that play.
But I couldn’t because it was then time for another dance partayyyyyyyy! Wooooooooot!
Without any real commitment to telling this story, the overly dramatic direction – so much melodramatic music, so much slow motion – felt unearned, since any drama took a backseat to the audience’s constant outward enjoyment. There’s a good story (potentially a great story) under all that noise somewhere, and that’s what makes it so infuriating. The issues brought up could be challenging in a novel way, but instead of developing them, they’re tossed in the air like beach balls that you throw out into a crowd, one crowd-loving trick I was shocked that they didn’t use. I couldn’t even watch the climax because the staff was having us set up yet another effect. All of the bells and whistles quickly grew wearisome, and it’s a shame that they took over to become the experience. I have never seen such reliance on spectacle at the expense of storytelling when there is such a good story desperately trying to be heard.
INFORMATION
Tree is at the Young Vic until August 24. You can get discounted tickets to some performances on the TodayTix app.
Beware – or enjoy, I guess, if you’re a monster – that they allow photography and filming of the entire show. People were filming the entire show right in the very front row, standing next to ushers, throughout the entire theatre. People were taking FLASH photography during big moments! People were taking live video and putting it on snapchat or whatever they do! The ENTIRE TIME. And it was fine with the staff, so if you are not a fan of that kind of thing, take a valium, and if you are, wtf is wrong with you.
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“Chess” on the West End: Great Music in a Weird AF Production
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “Chess” at London’s English National Opera, playing until June 2.
You know how Broadway keeps trying to make shows about basketball and they never really take off? Well at least basketball has some action to it. Imagine a show about the most boring game ever. “Chess”, the 1980s musical from ABBA menfolk Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus with lyrics from Tim Rice, really truly did that. The music still stands as some of the most famous and mainstream to come out of musical theatre (‘One Night in Bangkok’, anyone?), yet the book veers on ridonk. It’s one of the few shows I prefer to be done in a concert version. Still, I had high expectations for London’s new big production at the English National Opera’s Coliseum, but these expectations were not met. The score was well sung, but the production – both in terms of visuals, sound, and more – did more to hurt the show than help it.
“Chess” is a musical that went full-80s by centering on a chess championship between two stars of the game that happen to be from the major Cold War players – America and the Soviet Union. We have Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Sergievsky, and we have American grandmaster Freddie Trumper. I know – I was groaning too when I realized that was his name, because I assumed they stupidly made it special for this newest production. But that’s actually the original name. I wonder if Trump was a famous enough buffoon at the original time of writing to make the connection legit and I’m sure he was; it’s just extra weird to have it be in a show now. (A change wouldn’t be so bad.) But like his namesake before he acquired the power to destroy so many lives, Freddie is a loud, obnoxious, mean-spirited but fairly harmless jerk who is so cocky of his chess ability (I mean I can’t really accept in the first place that this guy would be playing chess or acting like this about chess) that it makes audiences root for the imposing Russian instead. Our Freddie is played by Tim Howar, who really did a great job being obnoxious and jerky and added to it being very yelly, so it made it really simple for me to root for Anatoly in every possible way. And that’s a huge accomplishment because Anatoly was played by London legend Michael Ball who, although he sings the role beautifully, is way too old and just wrong in every way for the part. Honestly, this mistake in the most principal casting is a huge reason why the show doesn’t work.
“Chess” is a musical that went full-80s by centering on a chess championship between two stars of the game that happen to be from the major Cold War players – America and the Soviet Union. We have Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Sergievsky, and we have American grandmaster Freddie Trumper. I know – I was groaning too when I realized that was his name, because I assumed they stupidly made it special for this newest production. But that’s actually the original name. I wonder if Trump was a famous enough buffoon at the original time of writing to make the connection legit and I’m sure he was; it’s just extra weird to have it be in a show now. (A change wouldn’t be so bad.) But like his namesake before he acquired the power to destroy so many lives, Freddie is a loud, obnoxious, mean-spirited but fairly harmless jerk who is so cocky of his chess ability (I mean I can’t really accept in the first place that this guy would be playing chess or acting like this about chess) that it makes audiences root for the imposing Russian instead. Our Freddie is played by Tim Howar, who really did a great job being obnoxious and jerky and added to it being very yelly, so it made it really simple for me to root for Anatoly in every possible way. And that’s a huge accomplishment because Anatoly was played by London legend Michael Ball who, although he sings the role beautifully, is way too old and just wrong in every way for the part. Honestly, this mistake in the most principal casting is a huge reason why the show doesn’t work.
The story begins with men singing about the history of chess, and projections of like Egyptian hieroglyphs line the walls and you’re like wat. Oh yes, so this production’s biggest faux pas is relying on digital projections instead of sets or ya know taste. Weird images that suggest that someone was having a bit too much fun with a new computer program make up most of the artwork projected onto the various block-shaped screens. The set up of the square screens is copied from the original concept album artwork, which is…a nice throwback, I guess, but not enough of a reason to design the entire staging that way. You can see the same idea of the squares in the picture at the top of the page – the set up is such that images projected onto the square screens were chopped up in places where the squares don’t meet, so there was a lot of distortion. I’m sure the set designers and production team will justify the distortion with some lofty statement about how reality is distorted when projected from screens too but that is also not enough of a reason to excuse such horrible visuals for nearly 3 hours.
After the unclear history lesson, things go haywire if you are familiar with the American stage version. The American and British books for ‘Chess’ are COMPLETELY different. Anatoly wins in one, Freddie the other. In one, the first match takes place in Italy, the second in Bangkok, but in the other, the whole show is just one match in Bangkok! The song orders are completely scrambled too. I don’t know HOW that happened. So the British version is what we are talking about here, obvs. Anatoly and Freddie arrive in Merano, Italy for their big world championship chess tournament, and the mayor and townspeople rejoice by singing the lamest song “Merano” that just does not fit the show. It’s a huge white chorus in laderhosen and braids because they are close to Switzerland I guess and they do dorky folk dances and it’s super awkward considering the modern pop taste of the rest of the score. After this seemingly photoshopped insert, Freddie and Anatoly are met with an enormous crowd of TV cameras and lots of shouting. Freddie responds with a song that I think was also about shouting (“Commie Newspapers”) as he fights with his assistant and yells at all the reporters. I would too though; most of them are awful. Here, the projections changed to be close-ups of the actors’ faces. I noticed two cameramen onstage who I believe were capturing the footage of the actors that was projected live, which like that’s cool that you figured that out to do it live but it is not attractive. Most of the projections – and remember, that is the entirety of the set and set design here – for the rest of the show were Tom Hooper-style close-ups of the actors’ faces. It was horrendous. Now this is the first full-fledged production of ‘Chess’ that I’ve seen, so this could be how the show is always supposed to be staged. It doesn’t mean it’s good. If the show was supposed to be on screen it would be on screen, and not in a live theatre. TV requires a completely different set of skills and tools, not just on the part of the actors, so to kind of force these performances to be both theatre and television at the same time made both a big mess. Remember during the Tony performance of ‘The Book of Mormon’ the camera focused on one ensemble member who was doing all his funny-face reaction shots for his track? You weren’t supposed to just be looking at him. Also, I did not want to stare at the giant projected faces of the characters the entire time; I wanted to watch the actual actors and maybe their interaction instead of counting their pores. That’s what theatre is for.
Using all my might to focus on the actors and not the atrocious projections, I followed the ridiculous story. Freddie yells at everyone, Anatoly kind of simmers with unpredictability – it could be either rage or boredom – and the world…watches? Their meeting in competition, broadcast all over the world, represents the larger conflict between the two countries they represent, so the entire world is on the edge of their seats watching. Not really though, because it’s chess. The first round of the match is about to begin and lights focus aaaaaand…then we have just two men sitting at a table playing chess quietly. It doesn’t exactly make for good theatre. Their playing sessions should have had them singing. Instead they just sat there and played and it was super boring. Then of course Freddie yells that Anatoly is cheating (because Freddie is losing) and he storms off like the brat he is and you’re like maybe the ‘action’ isn’t better than the boring chess match.
Freddie’s assistant and presumed lover, Florence Vassy (Cassidy Janson, who is pretty great), begs Freddie to have dinner with Anatoly to reconcile after the storming off, but Freddie gets sidetracked by Bangkok’s nightlife (“One Night in Bangkok”, which is more talk-sung that I remember and when you don’t have Adam Pascal’s incredible talk/scream-singing ability to make it pop it’s really just awkward) so Florence and Anatoly end up alone and they…fall in love? Dudes. Florence is a young attractive lady and Anatoly is MICHAEL BALL. Nothing against Mr. Ball (hehe ball) but he is like 60? And he’s not exactly a hot young guy of the sort that help Anatoly make any kind of narrative sense. Florence’s love for him comes out of nowhere and then is the emotional underpinning of the entire show and the trying-so-hard-to-be-dramatic-ending so if you aren’t invested in their love, or if you don’t believe even a bit of it, the whole piece fails and feels forced and empty.
Anatoly is married, by the way, and has a young son. We see him say goodbye to them in the weird Egyptian prologue. His wife Svetlana is played by Alexandra Burke, the one who won a season of The X Factor. She is NOT EVEN 30 YEARS OLD. She’s like a super hot young recording artist. She’s not married to Michael Ball ffs! And Cassidy is like 37 and beautiful and hot in Ireland (a ginger) and she is not falling in love at first sight with Michael Ball! This is NONSENSE. If you don’t buy right off the bat that all the young gorgeous women love them some Anatoly, then the show doesn’t work. After Anatoly affairs up with Florence, most of the drama has nothing to do with chess. It’s all about the two women dealing with their love for this troubled man. AIN’T BUYING IT.
Lots of nonsense happens after this, like Anatoly defects from the Soviet Union (in Soviet Union, they defect you) and seeks asylum with Florence in Britain; Svetlana teams up with a TV station to confront her husband Jerry Springer-style on live TV (??? AIN’T BUYING IT); and there’s more quiet games of chess in a freaking musical. The book is so strange, the set design is as I said the devil’s work, and yet the score is overall so great. You have Svetlana’s big soul-searching “Someone Else’s Story”, a lovely song that deserves to be about more than this hot woman’s old cheating Rusky husband. Alexandra does a nice job as Svetlana considering she isn’t an actress but a recording artist. Her acting leaves something to be desired but in this production it’s fine. You have Florence’s big angry “Nobody’s Side” which absolutely rocks out as a song but deserves to be about more than a fight she had with her asshole boss. (Florence’s songs seem tailor-made for Idina Menzel, who played the role in a concert version years back. They’re written in a way that lets Cassidy kind of sound like Idina sometimes too, which is cool but just makes you wish you were seeing Idina. (Josh Groban played Anatoly in that version, with Idina. Don’t get me started on how badly I wish I could have seen that version. That’s the goddamn great version.)) Then you have the big duet between the two women, “I Know Him So Well”, the highlight of the show but again, it deserves to be about something better than two women being sad about an inadequate man. I wish these songs had a better book to hold them up in the pantheon of musical theatre but alas.
I know I’m being quite mean to the men in this show, but it’s not their fault. Everyone behind the scenes is responsible for what doesn’t work here, not the actors. Michael Ball is like the greatest British musical theatre actor but he is not right for this part. He sings his songs beautifully but (sadly) this isn’t a concert version. Casting matters! I’ve railed enough about the set design but the sound design was bad too! And this is the freaking English National Opera building. It takes effort to destroy the acoustics. But often, with the fast-paced songs (a lot of them in this poppy score), the lyrics would come through the speakers just as sort of an indecipherable hum or growl. I honestly can’t believe they let that kind of issue stand.
Luckily, the music is so good and generally so well sung that “Chess” is still a decent time at the theatre. This production really should have been a concert version though. Or they should have cast men who better matched with the women they cast, or vice versa. Or they really should have just gotten Josh Groban to reprise his role. I wouldn’t even be writing this complainy complainerson review if that were the case; I’d still be there watching every single performance. Big mistake, men*. Big. Huge!
INFORMATION
Never, and I mean NEVER, sit anywhere at the ENO except for the stalls/orchestra. There’s only one staircase to the upper levels and the crowd is uniformly old so it takes literal hours to get out from upstairs. It’s an infuriating fire hazard for one thing and a real pain in my ass for another.
They do have water pitchers at the bar though.
STAGE DOOR
I saw it on my birthday so I didn’t stage door. I had cake to eat.
*I looked at the production and the creative team and except for the costume designer all the people are men.
Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen”: Why Dehydration from Crying is Possible but Worth It
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.
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.
