Dear Evan Hansen tackles difficult issue of teen suicide in a musical
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 18:18:43 +0000
When: Feb. 25 to March 1, various times
Where: Queen Elizabeth Theatre
Tickets and info: ticketmaster.ca
Teenage social anxiety and suicide form the backdrop for Dear Evan Hansen. If that doesn’t sound like great subject matter for song and dance routines, think again.
With music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and book by Steven Levenson, the unlikely stage musical won six Tony Awards in 2017. Among those were best musical and best score.
Based on an incident that occurred in Pasek’s time at Friends’ Central School, the two act work introduces us to Evan Hansen. An awkward teen with a broken arm, his mother has seized on the spectacularly poor idea of him getting classmates to sign his cast to break the ice. Things do indeed get broken, just not as intended.
A tumultuous tour through the world of high-tech manipulation of the facts, hyperbolic misconstructions and major tragedy ensues.
By the end of the play, no one emerges unbruised. The audience is put in the position of having to decide what they think of the characters and their actions. One thing seems certain, the two mothers in the story really can’t seem to escape having mountains of psychological and emotional dung ladled on their heads.
You feel sorry for them.
“It’s not your typical music theatre piece, that is for sure,” said Jessica Sherman, who plays Evan’s mother Heidi Hansen. “The show isn’t really about the tragic event that happens, it’s more about how everybody else reacts to it and it seems to be a thing in our culture to latch onto other people’s grief. It is based in an event at Pasek and Paul’s high school where someone didn’t come back after the summer and they observed how the whole school suddenly became that person’s best friend.”
Awkward Evan is someone trying to figure his place in the world. When he gets put in the centre of the fallout from (spoiler alert) the suicide of fellow student Connor Murphy, he really screws things up trying to make everyone feel OK. Most of all, he really doesn’t do what is best for him.
“Evan’s actions inform some painful and difficult decisions that my character has to make in the second act, and they aren’t easy,” said Sherman. “It really makes me think of my own mother a lot. I remember us getting into huge screaming fights in high school and then I would run away to stay with one of my friends to get back at her, and I really think about how horrid that must have felt to her to know there was somewhere else I’d rather be.”
Claire Rankin plays Cynthia Murphy, the mother of deceased student Connor Murphy. From the write-ups about the show’s story, she seems to be the character who really gets the worst treatment of all.
Rankin says that is an interesting way of looking at things.
Claire Rankin plays Cynthia Murphy in Dear Evan Hansen.
“She’s the one trying to keep all the pieces together with a lot of blame being lobbied around, and the director has referred to her as the heart of the piece,” said Rankin. “She is the one constantly trying to connect — with her husband, with her kids, with others — and it keeps not working. There is no resolution to this either, which is one of the things that makes this show so different, as not everything gets tied up nicely in a ball with a pretty ribbon at the end.”
Rankin says that Dear Evan Hansen is a hard musical to explain to people.
Without the usual lovers get one another, everything resolves itself and the world is in balance standard resolution, the show certainly is more like real life. Curiously, the actual incidents taking place on stage aren’t that far from what is in the pages of the daily newspaper.
“It’s really interesting how many kids we see at the stage door who absolutely identify with all of the characters in the show and what’s happening to them,” she said. “And I’ve had a teacher come up and tell me that these are the exact same things that her students are saying to her. That’s great, because there is very little musical theatre out there that speaks for this generation of kids in any way that makes them feel seen or heard.”
Both actors say that the show is a rarity in how it opens a window for dialogue between parents and kids about what are very hard, and very real, topics for students today. As technology keeps growing and changing so quickly, it’s very easy to get behind what is happening with your kids.
Quite often, the way that adults discover incidents of depression, bullying, self-harming and more is via an errant email or a full-scale blow-up that can be completely negative. Sherman notes that the way Dear Evan Hansen blends in moments of theatrical realism that would be far more likely to appear in a stage play with show stopping songs is special.
“There is genius in the way that these tones are gelled together with a seriousness that is almost so heavy it could put alienate the audience, but then right in the middle are these moments of big comedy,” said Sherman. “There is so much joy in the music, which is pop-driven and not typical musical fare, that it brings another level to work as well.”
While it does feature content that could be upsetting to some (mostly parents, it appears), Dear Evan Hansen has been praised for not being just another song and dance spectacular. At a time when there is a glut of glitz on musical stages, it’s nice to see something with more substance.