By BRUCE DENNILL
Dear Evan Hansen / Directed by Greg Karvellas / Teatro, Montecasino, Fourways, Johannesburg
Dear Evan Hansen is a compact, intimate story – a teenage boy struggles with loneliness and depression and gets caught up in events that seem to give him a way to feel more seen – given soaring scale by music by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the duo responsible for The Greatest Showman, La La Land and a number of other high-profile projects, and, in the case of this new production from Showtime Management South Africa and How Now Brown Cow Productions, a towering, high-tech set designed by Niall Griffin.
Thematically, it deals with subject matter that more or less every teenager on the planet has dealt with or will have to deal with – the aforementioned loneliness and depression, bullying, peer pressure, lying and the host of mental health issues that link all of these and sometimes go beyond them. As such, it’s an important piece of work in that it recognises these struggles and that part of the theatre audience that can most relate to them – an increasingly common contemporary phenomenon (think Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, Wicked and others), but still a part of the musical canon that could be developed further, as much for the development of enthusiasm in the next generation of ticket buyers as for the ways it potentially edifies those who most directly relate to the characters onstage.
Like some of the stories the average teenager tells their parents, however, there are some aspects to the script of Dear Evan Hansen that don’t resolve in a way that’s fully satisfying to many onlookers. Initially, Evan (Stuart Brown) finds himself at the centre of a complex emotional minefield as he tries to figure out how to relate to the family of a troubled schoolmate, Connor (Michael Stray), who has taken his own life. Fair play – in the face of unprocessed grief, almost nobody knows what the right thing to say is. But as events unfold, and Evan unexpectedly finds himself the recipient of warmth, comfort and connection he was unable to receive or achieve on his own, he begins to realise that he can keep those feelings going by manipulating the situation.
If audiences are honest, taking that sort of reaction is actually quite relatable, though recognising that kinship is a little uncomfortable. This creates a situation for both character and audience in which deciding between right and wrong requires some emotional tap dancing. And this further makes for an engagement that might otherwise be trickier to build with some of the lesser characters – Evan gets the bulk of the stage time – but it also leaves some niggling feelings of concern regarding what doesn’t happen (in the story and to the characters) when the lights go down at the end, in terms of either justice or redemption.
Patek and Paul’s songs – the show’s most powerful calling cards – widen the scope and colour of the piece as a whole, with Waving Through A Window performed just a few minutes in, thrilling those whose in the crowd whose knowledge of the story extends to the considerable pop appeal of that song and You Will Be Found, which comes later in the first act. With such a wave of musical power up front, it’s interesting that those compositions are not reprised in Act Two, although Lucy Tops’ sublime performance (as Heidi, Evan’s mother) of the more reflective So Big/So Small near the end certainly raises the empathy level.
Brown, in a massive role – he’s on stage almost all of the time and is the lead singer in three-quarters of the score – is phenomenal. He buries himself in the character, down to a range of twitchy hand gestures that speak to Evan’s OCD, and sings wonderfully. Frankly, he appears to be such a good fit for the role that, when this production ends its run, he could transfer without a hitch to any of the international productions.
He receives excellent support from all the actors in the parental roles – Tops as his mother and Sharon Spiegel-Wagner and Charlie Bouguenon as Connor’s folks – with the play’s first song, Anybody Having A Map seeing Spiegel-Wagner and Tops duetting, combining two of the finest voices in South African showbiz. All three of these actors do well to unpack the characters’ own struggles to connect and feel seen, even as they try, with greater or lesser levels of success, to bear the burdens their kids are labouring under. A moment when that burden is especially heavy for Bouguenon is arguably the whole show’s impassioned apex.
Keely Crocker as Zoe Murphy is also a strong vocalist, anchoring Requiem – another of the Act One highlights – with convincing assurance. And Justin Swartz gives Jared Kleinman, a ‘friend’ of Evan’s by virtue of their families knowing each other, an appealing cockiness, though the character, as an enabler of Evan’s developing deceit, inspires the same uncertainty as Evan himself in the audience’s moral landscape.
Griffin’s set heightens the tension during some of the more intense scenes with flickering light panels denoting the setting in of panic and endlessly overlapping social media and website posts underlining the impossibility of halting a message once it has gone viral online. And a live eight-piece band under the guidance of musical director Kurt Haupt adds consistent sonic energy to the lighting and performance.
Ultimately, Dear Evan Hansen may challenge audiences who relate less to the way the themes are explored (everyone understands loneliness, for instance, but some generations are less dependent on or interested in social media, and so may not connect as strongly with the mental health outcomes that space can feed or be responsible for) than the young protagonist and his peers. And it could also frustrate those hoping for more definition – or perhaps integrity – in some of the character arcs as written in the original book by Steven Levenson. But as a marker of quality, in terms of South African work judged against established versions of the same shows elsewhere, it is another persuasive argument for the strength of local theatre.
