With a swathe of new musicals on just about everything in the past few years it would be easy to assume that a musical about social anxiety and a suicide should be treated with cynicism and critique. However, Dear Evan Hansen is just about the most heartfelt, emotion packed and inspiring musical you are ever likely to find.
We are introduced to high school student Evan Hansen about to start his first day in a new year at his high school, and the story continues through his eyes. His social anxiety is immediately apparent, it’s easy to both sympathise and empathise with his need for connection where he has no friends, and even a disconnect with his mother, despite both of them trying. He has a plaster cast on his arm, and tragically recounts how he broke it: more context to this comes out through the show. His single parent mother works long hours as a nurse and takes extra classes so is rarely home, and tries to help by sending Evan to a therapist with supported medication: his assignment is to write pep-talk letters to himself, hence the title, and it’s one of these letters and what happens with it, that fuels the story and propels a continuing spiralling out of control set of circumstances, which have an almost inevitable conclusion.
But it’s more than that. It’s a story of how despite having more ways to connect in the 21st Century than ever before, we all seem to feel even more disconnected from each other than ever. About how High School, or College here, is something that in your years of when you are trying to find out who you are and connect with others, so many experience it as something they have to just try and survive. It’s incredibly perceptive writing from Steven Levenson, and it’s incredibly unusual for a musical to be so grounded in reality, fresh and current. The song writing is sublime, from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul: fuelling the story in the same flavour. Also unusually, every single word is clear, important and poignant: they are each performed with such absolute attention to each scene’s emotional elements, often starting with a solo acoustic guitar.
The acting and singing is simply superb. Another unusual aspect of this production is how well rounded and real the characters are: we recognise them, we have met some of these people, and see parts of ourselves in them. That is partly great writing and directing, but of course the performance by the actors is what we connect to, even when they can’t connect to each other. Led by a phenomenal performance from Ryan Kopel in the titular role who embues the socially awkward Evan with every twitch, avoiding too much eye contact and his whole self, including his way of speaking: performing one song with tears streaming down his face in such an emotion packed rendition, and his voice is pitch perfect with an angelic falsetto. He doesn’t look like an actor, he transforms: he simply is Evan Hansen.
There is so much to love about this musical, and this production. Is it a commentary on the sad state of what happens when someone tries to do too much people pleasing? Perhaps it’s a commentary on our need for belonging and connection that people are sometimes drawn to a cause where they fall down a path of lying, in order to feel valued and important. Perhaps it’s about empowerment coming from the most unlikely and sometimes awful and tragic events. With songs such as ‘Requiem’, coming from three different harmonised perspectives of not wanting to sing a requiem; or mums Heidi and Cynthia from complete opposite sides of both town and life in ‘Anybody Have a Map?’ for how to be a parent, and the rousing and heartfelt company show stopper ‘You Will Be Found’, there is something here that resonates for everyone watching. The opaque shifting glass in the set is a brilliant metaphor for how they all want to see each other and be seen yet don’t: the mirrors around reflecting just themselves feeling isolated.
It starts and ends with Evan giving himself two very different pep talks, and you go on this journey not just with him but with all of them. It’s all too understandable what happens during it, but there are some very funny surprises along the way as well. With incredible singing and acting, story and the way it’s written, details in everything including the set, songs that you end up singing – there is nothing not to love about this musical. It’s entertaining, inspiring and thought-provoking. It just is quite simply, perfect.
Theatre Royal Brighton, 15 October 2024
Dear Evan Hansen runs until 19 October 2024
Photo Credit: Marc Brenner
