Roslyn Packer Theatre, October 18
6/10
Hamilton rightfully won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2016. A year later, they lowered the bar to Dear Evan Hansen, reminding us of the Tonys’ wild inconsistencies. In 1958 The Music Man beat West Side Story, in 1972 Two Gentlemen of Verona beat Follies, in 1988 The Phantom of the Opera beat Into the Woods and in 2017 Dear Evan Hansen beat Come from Away. What were they thinking?
It’s not that this show’s story-telling, characterisations, dialogue or lyrics are always dire: sometimes they’re merely ordinary; occasionally even convincing. But the music is profoundly flawed. Most accomplished musical theatre composers – think Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, John Kander or Lin-Manuel Miranda – use music to further define character. Not Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. No, everyone – male, female, nerd, suicidal hipster, parent or teenager – seems to be singing the same dreary song to such an extent that the few exceptions come as blessed relief.
Pasek and Paul achieve this homogeneity via the infuriating habit of pitching great swathes of melody in the upper reaches of a given singer’s range. This makes almost every song climactic – except they can’t all be that, so instead they simply become overblown, and, when the show does need a musically climactic moment, it struggles to emerge from the prevailing whiney stratosphere. If this was a conscious strategy, it was as misguided as Napoleon invading Russia or Baz Luhrmann invading The Great Gatsby. It also becomes startlingly hard on the ears, like two hours of cats rutting or fighting.
The show’s core conception was certainly worthy enough. Evan Hansen (Beau Woodbridge) is a friendless high school kid whose father bowed out of his life “temporarily” a decade earlier. His mostly absent mother (Verity Hunt-Ballard) works as a nurse and studies law, and Evan’s therapist has suggested he write letters to himself to help establish a positive mindset. When fellow loner Connor Murphy (Harry Targett) commits suicide, Evan doesn’t correct the belief that these letters were actually penned by Connor; that they were secret friends. Suddenly grieving for Connor becomes hip: kids who usually only communicate via devices find themselves rolling down a hill in an ever-growing snowball of shared grief and imagined connections, with Evan as the griever-in-chief.
All generations have their share of ostracised teens, but suffering that fate in the social-media era seems especially cruel, and Pask and Paul’s songs and Steven Levenson’s book partially tap into this. Had they dared to dig deeper, I’d be writing this moved almost beyond words. Instead, I’m left quietly fuming that such an important subject has been buried in mundanity, screeching and treacle; bewildered that we barely come to care about Evan, let alone anyone else.
The fault lies not with the performances: Dean Bryant’s production (for Sydney Theatre Company and Michael Cassel Group) is mostly expertly rendered. When given the chance to sing a genuinely affecting song like Words Fail, Woodbridge nails it, and there are other creditable performances, including from Natalie O’Donnell as Connor’s mother and Georgia Laga-aia as his sister. The fault lies with the confounded music not delineating the characters and not drawing us more deeply into the predicament than can be achieved by lame melodies, faux emotions and sung subtext. Even the orchestrations by the usually exceptional Alex Lacamoire merely compound the irritation.
Infinitely happier are the design elements, especially Jeremy Allen’s elastic set, so at least you’re engaged visually, as you wait forlornly to be engaged by the rest.
Until December 1.