Guest Post!! Cauliflower Soup with Cara W. in All Her Amazingnessby Randi / April 28, 2017
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.
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Tony Award Nominations are Out! Thoughts, Snubs, Surprises, Rudins
More surprises than usual – both good and not so – make the 2019 Tony Awards already more exciting than you’d expect, especially considering how disappointing most of the new musicals were this year. We do have one standout (Hadestown, obvs) but having mainly a slew of mediocrity fighting to fill out the ranks means no one could have guessed completely accurately. This season was much more impressive for plays, and then the surprises over in playtown are even more incredible, as in you really cannot believe it. Let’s get down to business.
Why not start off with the biggie! There’s really nothing controversial in here. We’re mostly happy that the sweet little musical that could, The Prom, squeaked its way in (although considering how many surprise noms it got, it’s not exactly ‘squeaking’ its way in here, is it) (by the way, discussion of award shows is the only situation where use of the word ‘noms’ is allowed). Beetlejuice got much more favorable reviews (I’m talking real ones and not the celebrity twitter rave reviews which have been oddly prevalent for this show…) than the average person actually seeing (well, hearing, as the visuals are wonderful but the score is naaaat) the show expected, which explains its inclusion here. And wow, Tony Voters really loved Ain’t Too Proud! Older white people do love them some Temptations. But the show to beat – the show with a whopping 14 noms today – is the unbelievable, fantastic Hadestown. It deserves to win most of the big ones, and as this year’s best musical it should absolutely be this year’s Best Musical. Fun fact: it was snubbed entirely from the Olivier Awards, because London just doesn’t get musical theatre like Broadway does. I have a whole TED Talk on the subject if you’re interested. Also the Oliviers are mostly garbage.
The nominations for Best New Play has everyone in theatre scratching their heads – except me. I get what you were doing Tony voters, at least what I hope you were doing, and I am HERE FOR IT. The conspicuous AF mess-up here is that the new Aaron Sorkin penned adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird is missing. TKAM is the biggest new show, the hottest ticket, and to many the greatest achievement, of the year. Its nominations in sooo many other categories show that the nominators thought extremely highly of it. FFS it even got a Best Score nomination! The love in every other category, plus the love it gets across the theatre spectrum as inarguably one of the greatest plays ever, in my book is a clear statement to producer Scott Rudin: You Suck. All season, Rudin has been destroying other productions of TKAM – not the Sorkin version, literally just all other stage productions of this famous, classic work – from the was-ready-to-go UK tour to forking school productions, so that he could have the only production, because he is a bully. Who shuts down school productions?? Someone who doesn’t actually love theatre, but loves power. That’s him, and that’s what I am choosing to believe the voters were trying to say by nominating TKAM for everything it could except the one award that goes to the producer. (It’s a shame the Tonys still haven’t sorted out how to reward the actual playwright as they do with musicals (with Score and Book rewarding authors separately from producers), because Sorkin shouldn’t have to take the fall with Rudin (unless he is also part of this shut-down of other productions.)) Anyway, this clears the path for the absolutely exquisite The Ferryman, which I was rooting for anyway.
If you follow this site, you know that in (completely unrelated) previous posts, I’ve railed about how Broadway couldn’t conjure up a ‘third revival’ this season. This is what I was talking about! There are only two musical revivals this year. It’s kind of embarrassing to look at this, especially since so many other categories had six nominees (also embarrassing, make your choices, you have one job). Oklahoma! is going to win and this is literally the least exciting category.
This is a race between my girl Rachel Chavkin and Daniel Fish. Chavkin’s show should be winning like WHOA on Tony Night, and her creative, magical direction is a huge part of what makes the show great. She was also robbed (ROBBED)(okay the winner was worthy as always but still) of a Best Director Tony for Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 a few years back. Her inventive, unique vision is one of the most exciting things happening in modern theatre. But Fish is her main competition, having created a shocking, super-dark, super-relevant version of the beloved classic people thought they knew. This is my most interesting race.
Six nominees? What is this, the Emmy Awards? I can’t be too mad about including a play in this bunch since I adore Adam Guettel’s music (but the other musical writers this season can be!). I could say a lot about the overrated Be More Chill music, the surprisingly pedestrian Tootsie score from one of the best working composers (?? what happened Dave), the average Beetlejuice score, the sweet but not ground-breaking Prom, but all I really have to say is, Hadestown, guys. Anais Mitchell (not to be confused with Anais Nin, as I did in the past) has written a SCORE, babies. A score that is beautiful, original, soul-shattering, chill-inducing, just marvelous. Give her and this show all the awards; they deserve them.
Despite how surprising the double whammy noms for The Prom are, I can’t be too mad, because it brings together O’Hara and Kinnunen as fellow nominees, years after playing mother and daughter in one of my all-time faves, The Bridges of Madison County (don’t knock it till you’ve seen in three times and cried the whole time and then seen the final performance sitting next to Keala Settle who is also sobbing but she’s also punching her fist in the air at every amazing moment, which is constant, because she’s hilarious and awesome anyway we’re besties). I’m so excited for both of them to be considered for #SteerOfTheYear (it’s a Bridges thing), but this is Block’s award, hundo p. She is the best thing about The Cher Show, along with the Bob Mackie costumes, which will also probably win. It’s a shame Eva (who is lovely but whose character is the least interesting in her show) is in while Rebecca Naomi Jones for Oklahoma! is out, but neither would win anyway. The real snub here is that of young Sophia Anne Caruso, the one Beetlejuice nom that should have been a lock.
SANTINO! This is Santino’s and I am HERE FOR IT! I’m going to pretend his Tony is also an Emmy for his work on Crazy Ex Girlfriend, in which he was impeccable, but yeah his work in Tootsie is deeeefinitely winning. Well unless all these surprise nominations for Beetlejuice result in an upset here but that would be bad, BAD. Santinoooooo!
So this is that shit I was referring to in the beginning, about what constitutes a bad surprise. Strangely missing from this category is forking GLENDA JACKSON as KING LEAR. GLENDA. JACKSON. KING. LEAR. This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime pairings of actor and role, and she isn’t nominated? What the FORK, guys? And there are SIX NOMINATIONS! Emmy-style again! This is like when the Emmys nominated seven supporting actresses in a comedy and none of them were the best ones! Don’t make me go back to those dark times. The only salve for this burn is that Elaine May was always going to win anyway – Glenda’s deserved nom would have been a ‘it’s a shame she can’t also win’ situation – but STILL! All the other five nominees are great of course but getting in over Glenda Jackson is FORKING WEIRD. I’d be embarrassed, as I hope the voters are. Shaaaame.
Okay, we always knew this would be difficult. Horrible, even. Best actor in a play was the most stacked category this season, which we should see as a gift, I guess. But it’s hard not to bemoan the lack of one of the greatest actors ever, Tracy Letts, in here. Or John Lithgow, who is always wonderful. Or Jonny Lee Miller, or freaking Nathan Lane – you can always BET on Nathan getting nominated! It’s just too stacked. The real one that hurts here is the snub of Michael Urie, whose performance in Torch Song was one of those special ones that aren’t just like Letts or Lane or Lithgow simply “always” being good. Darn. As is, this is super hard, because Paddy and Bryan both won Oliviers for these roles, but Daniels is considered the frontrunner, and he will probably thank Rudin in his speech, which I guess he has to do but it would be cool if he was like ‘Hey Scott thanks for making this production and letting me star but also you are a mean old bully and you don’t actually love theatre if you don’t support theatre, anyway thanks everyone.’ I should be a speech-writer.
I am SO excited for Ali Stroker and I am SO excited for Mary Testa and I am SO excited for Sarah Stiles and I am SO excited for Lilli Cooper (even though she shouldn’t have been nominated over Leslie Kritzer for Beetlejuice or, most of all, Stephanie Styles in Kiss Me, Kate, or really Michaela Diamond for The Cher Show, who should have been a frontrunner, so I guess I’m not actually SO excited for some of them…) but this better forking be Amber Gray’s. Her command of the stage, of the audience, of the atmosphere in Hadestown is pure magic, a masterclass in humanity and humor and that ineffable quality that makes a star shine brighter when in the perfect role for her.
I take it back, this is my hardest category. The two Hadestown guys, oh dear god, I wish they could tie. Page’s Hades should probably get the win, if only for his soul-shaking, earth-shattering performance during “Why We Build a Wall”, but I adore, ADORE, Andre De Shields’ wondrous performance that makes a narrator so much more. Congrats to the other nominees – and HELL YEAH Jeremy Pope getting two nominations this season! – but the absence of Corbin Bleu here (Kiss Me, Kate) is a damn shame that really taints the whole thing.
Thanks to the voters naming Nielson a featured role and not a lead (she’s the lead, right? come on) and thus likely having her split votes with her Gary costar Julie White, CKB will finally win a Tony, the Tony she was certain she was going to get a few years ago for The Glass Menagerie (okay she wasn’t certain but the rest of the world was). I love me some CKB and she is always perfection, so this is a happy occasion.
I LOVE ALL THESE MEN! I am most excited for Robin de Jesus (more fun if you don’t know to pronounce it in Spanish) to finally be a Tony nominee, but all these guys, man alive this is A WONDERFUL group. I have zero clue who will win and I am SO EXCITED to find out.
To quote Forrest, that’s all I have to say about that, at least at the moment. As for categories I didn’t picturize, Tootsie will likely win Best Book because it has a lot of funny jokes, and people think that’s what a book is (although, voters did prove that they know better last season when they awarded The Band’s Visit over Tina Fey’s jokes, so there could be a similar sitch of Hadestown also winning Book, which I wouldn’t be sad about nope wouldn’t be sad). The scenic elements and production design award are actually exciting this year, because you have the visually stunning Beetlejuice set against the beyond impressive King Kong puppetry, although with King Kong’s puppet team getting a special Tony, perhaps that changes things. I don’t know, all I know is this is a very interesting, strange year, and I am into it.
“Urinetown” in the West End: A Privilege to See
This is my nightmare, honestly. No exaggeration, do you know how much I pee? In the dystopian society of “Urinetown”, it is indeed ‘a privilege to pee’: You have to pay at a public utility each and every time you have to use the bathroom. Because of a 20-year drought, there are no more private bathrooms, and because it’s a dystopia, if you pee in the woods or in a bush or relieve yourself in any way (even accidents) without paying your fee, you get “sent to Urinetown”. It’s in quotes because it is indeed a euphemism for something horrible.
Who does all of that money go to? Why, obviously a private corporation! “Urinetown” was written by Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis before its first production in 2001, so these guys were Nostradamus levels of prescient. Okay maybe not Nostradamus because corporate takeover was happening then too but now it’s like crazy so this show seems even more appropriate and smart than it did back then. The superbly named Urine Good Company, run by evil mastermind Caldwell B. Cladwell (played wonderfully by British comedian Phill Jupitus), implements utility price hikes at its will, pays off all the weasely politicians to push terrible legislation through, and sends poor people who can’t pay for their morning pee off to Urinetown. He bad.
Or is he? One of the most interesting aspects of this show is how they blur all the lines distinguishing between the good guys and the bad guys. Cladwell may be a mean man responsible for lots of deaths, but his public bathroom system exists for a reason: There is extremely little water in the ground, and it has to be regulated. If toilet usage went up too much, the fragile water supply would be destroyed, hence his price hikes and strict rules for using the utilities. Now sure, people should still be able to pee in bushes without causing serious damage, but I didn’t see any shrubbery. Also, it would smell. Cladwell prides himself on keeping water in the ground and pee off the street.
Adding to the horror of this society is that no one actually knows what Urinetown is, except for apparently two policemen, who take victims there, and Cladwell, who invented it. The public assumes it’s a terrible sort of exile, a place even worse than the town we see, but it’s more than that. I feel I shouldn’t say.
One of the cops is also the narrator. He’s pretty funny and scary at the same time, but I got distracted by how strangely he pronounced some words in his attempt to turn his British accent into an American accent and then into a New York accent. People, there is no reason for this show to be American. The whole world is suffering and drying up in this show, so if they wanted it to be British they could have and then I wouldn’t have been distracted by accent issues. Of course, then it wouldn’t make sense when Cladwell talks about how much money he spent on his daughter’s college education; that’s an American thing.
His daughter is Hope Cladwell, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young girl who wants everyone to be happy!!! and who expects to take over her father’s company before her eyes are opened to the world of poverty and anguish that he is extorting. She falls in love with a young man, Bobby Strong, who works in one of the poorest public utilities, and Bobby shows her the real world and how awful it is. Together, along with a rag tag group of povers who look like zombies, they resolve to bring down Urine Good Company and let everybody pee for free! Yay! Peeing for free is the dream. I guess that’s another reason they didn’t set it in Britain – there are so many ‘public’ bathrooms that you actually have to pay for here*. Already. It’s starting.
*In fact, Greg Kotis got the idea for “Urinetown” when he was traveling through Europe and encountered all the pay toilets. How scary is that! It really is real.
Bobby is played by Matthew Seadon-Young, and he’s fantastic. He looks kind of like Superman but wearing his Clark Kent glasses. He sings really well and dances so furiously that an extended applause break was pretty much just to let him catch his breath. That extended applause came during the best number, “Run Freedom Run”, which kind of sounds like peeing yourself. It’s the most fun song in the show, done in a spiritual fashion, when the whole chorus gets to shine.
All the songs in this score, which won a Tony, have a clear purpose. I don’t remember thinking ‘they should have cut this’ at any point, meaning I wasn’t bored. The score is fun because all the songs are so different. You have the aforementioned high-pace spiritual. You have the lovely love song ‘Follow Your Heart’, with Bobby and Hope (a clear-voiced Rosanna Hyland) professing their love for each other, which made me think of the Love Theme from “The Hurt Locker: The Musical” (look it up). You have the dark and scary poor-chorus numbers ‘It’s a Privilege to Pee’ and ‘What is Urinetown’, the comic and ridiculous ‘Don’t be the Bunny’ by Cladwell, and more. None sounds like the other, or like anything else, and that is huge. The songs are much simpler than Sondheim, but it reminded me of his style because you don’t leave humming any easy melodies. There are no easy melodies here.
The book is structured as a look back on these sad times, with Officer Lockstock (not to be confused by his partner in fighting crime and committing crimes, Officer Barrel — GET IT?!) also acting as the narrator of this sad story. Little Sally, the most likable character in the show, is a poor spunky Annie-type girl who keeps asking Officer Lockstock why everything is so depressing and sad when this is a musical! And he responds that it’s not a happy musical. And Little Sally will say “But it’s still a musical!!” Karis Jack is fantastic here, in her West End debut. Lockstock is pretty good too but needs to work on the accent.
Obviously you root for the poor ‘good’ people against the evil corporation, and you are glad when the fighting is over and they come out on top. (Except for some of our main characters, who shockingly get sent to Urinetown. Not expected!) But more of this show’s twisted brilliance comes through in the epilogue. You had to pay for a reason, remember? There’s barely any water left. And without regulation, Hope’s new system of do what makes you happy!!! dries up everything pretty fast, resulting in a world that is, if possible, worse than what it was under corporate control. At least there was control there. That’s when they all realize that Urinetown, the horrible tortuous place they thought criminals (unpaying pee-ers) were exiled to, was actually where they lived now. They brought it upon themselves. (Also, Urinetown wasn’t that kind of exile, you learn in Act II. The truth is pretty grim.) It’s pretty freaking dark, right! Yet it’s so funny and enjoyable. This show is like a comedic “Sweeney Todd”. So much death, so much tragedy, and you laugh way too much. Definitely a must-see before it prematurely closes in a month. Anyway I have to go pee now. FOR FREE.
Adding to the horror of this society is that no one actually knows what Urinetown is, except for apparently two policemen, who take victims there, and Cladwell, who invented it. The public assumes it’s a terrible sort of exile, a place even worse than the town we see, but it’s more than that. I feel I shouldn’t say.
One of the cops is also the narrator. He’s pretty funny and scary at the same time, but I got distracted by how strangely he pronounced some words in his attempt to turn his British accent into an American accent and then into a New York accent. People, there is no reason for this show to be American. The whole world is suffering and drying up in this show, so if they wanted it to be British they could have and then I wouldn’t have been distracted by accent issues. Of course, then it wouldn’t make sense when Cladwell talks about how much money he spent on his daughter’s college education; that’s an American thing.
His daughter is Hope Cladwell, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young girl who wants everyone to be happy!!! and who expects to take over her father’s company before her eyes are opened to the world of poverty and anguish that he is extorting. She falls in love with a young man, Bobby Strong, who works in one of the poorest public utilities, and Bobby shows her the real world and how awful it is. Together, along with a rag tag group of povers who look like zombies, they resolve to bring down Urine Good Company and let everybody pee for free! Yay! Peeing for free is the dream. I guess that’s another reason they didn’t set it in Britain – there are so many ‘public’ bathrooms that you actually have to pay for here*. Already. It’s starting.
*In fact, Greg Kotis got the idea for “Urinetown” when he was traveling through Europe and encountered all the pay toilets. How scary is that! It really is real.
Bobby is played by Matthew Seadon-Young, and he’s fantastic. He looks kind of like Superman but wearing his Clark Kent glasses. He sings really well and dances so furiously that an extended applause break was pretty much just to let him catch his breath. That extended applause came during the best number, “Run Freedom Run”, which kind of sounds like peeing yourself. It’s the most fun song in the show, done in a spiritual fashion, when the whole chorus gets to shine.
All the songs in this score, which won a Tony, have a clear purpose. I don’t remember thinking ‘they should have cut this’ at any point, meaning I wasn’t bored. The score is fun because all the songs are so different. You have the aforementioned high-pace spiritual. You have the lovely love song ‘Follow Your Heart’, with Bobby and Hope (a clear-voiced Rosanna Hyland) professing their love for each other, which made me think of the Love Theme from “The Hurt Locker: The Musical” (look it up). You have the dark and scary poor-chorus numbers ‘It’s a Privilege to Pee’ and ‘What is Urinetown’, the comic and ridiculous ‘Don’t be the Bunny’ by Cladwell, and more. None sounds like the other, or like anything else, and that is huge. The songs are much simpler than Sondheim, but it reminded me of his style because you don’t leave humming any easy melodies. There are no easy melodies here.
The book is structured as a look back on these sad times, with Officer Lockstock (not to be confused by his partner in fighting crime and committing crimes, Officer Barrel — GET IT?!) also acting as the narrator of this sad story. Little Sally, the most likable character in the show, is a poor spunky Annie-type girl who keeps asking Officer Lockstock why everything is so depressing and sad when this is a musical! And he responds that it’s not a happy musical. And Little Sally will say “But it’s still a musical!!” Karis Jack is fantastic here, in her West End debut. Lockstock is pretty good too but needs to work on the accent.
Obviously you root for the poor ‘good’ people against the evil corporation, and you are glad when the fighting is over and they come out on top. (Except for some of our main characters, who shockingly get sent to Urinetown. Not expected!) But more of this show’s twisted brilliance comes through in the epilogue. You had to pay for a reason, remember? There’s barely any water left. And without regulation, Hope’s new system of do what makes you happy!!! dries up everything pretty fast, resulting in a world that is, if possible, worse than what it was under corporate control. At least there was control there. That’s when they all realize that Urinetown, the horrible tortuous place they thought criminals (unpaying pee-ers) were exiled to, was actually where they lived now. They brought it upon themselves. (Also, Urinetown wasn’t that kind of exile, you learn in Act II. The truth is pretty grim.) It’s pretty freaking dark, right! Yet it’s so funny and enjoyable. This show is like a comedic “Sweeney Todd”. So much death, so much tragedy, and you laugh way too much. Definitely a must-see before it prematurely closes in a month. Anyway I have to go pee now. FOR FREE.
