Brighton Year-Round 2024
Dear Evan Hansen
ATG Productions and Gavin Kalin Productions present the Nottingham Playhouse Production
Genre: American Theater, Contemporary, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Musical Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Theatre Royal, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
The 2016 musical Dear Evan Hansen – book Steven Levenson, music and lyrics Benj Pasek and Justin Paul – arrives in a new production at Brighton’s Theatre Royal. Directed by Adam Penford it runs till October 19th, and tours till May 24th
In Ryan Kopel and Lauren Conroy two future stars are born within a first-rate cast led by the exquisitely moving Alice Fearns; and Kopel with such a range is someone whose next role will probably surprise even him. Two and half hours blaze by like a first date. Outstanding.
Till October 19th and touring till May 24th .
Review
“Dear Evan Hansen” starts Evan. He’s not aiming to have an imaginary friend but nearly everyone else thinks he has. So how does it all go right, then wrong, then enter a world of maybes? And is screechingly shy Evan to blame for it? The 2016 musical Dear Evan Hansen – book Steven Levenson music and lyrics Benj Pasek and Justin Paul – arrives in a new production at Brighton’s Theatre Royal. Directed by Adam Penford it runs till October 19th, and tours till May 24th.
This production is stunning: I can’t remember a musical at the Theatre Royal as fine as this. Cher two years ago was a knockout but this is necessarily more intelligent (indeed than any musical seen here), more moving and Morgan Large’s set design alone should be up for an award. Then the singing of Ryan Kopel in the lead. Several claim this might be the finest ever production: one who saw it on Broadway said values have moved on hugely in eight years.
The singing is uniformly superb, but diction is the clearest this stage has heard in a musical – huge credit to voice and dialect coach Marianne Samuels. It means Levenson’s slick, fast-moving storytelling also enjoys sparse, timeless moments where words drop into your mind and stay there.
Kopel embodies the truth of high school 17-year-old Evan, told to write letters to himself by his therapist to overcome such crippling shyness that when he meets jazz-playing Zoe Murphy he’s tongue-tied, as he starts from somewhere hesitant, in the invocatory “Anybody Have a Map?”: one of the great ‘I wish’ musical openers, particularly lyrics. The writers cite Next to Normal (about bi-polarity, the Donmar production recently closing in the West End) as giving them the courage to write this: though Sondheim lurks too.
Trouble is, when Evan prints his self-confiding letter on a school later-het, the boy who pushed him yesterday, Zoe’s bullying, unpleasant ‘troubled’ brother Connor (a magnificently hollowed-out, haunted, nasty but curiously vulnerable Killian Thomas Lefevre) snatches it. As Evan’s ‘family friend’ Jared Kleinman (Tom Dickerson, uber-savvy and sardonic, but lonely too) Evan is finished. ‘Waving Through a Window’ and ‘For Forever’ move Evan through self-absorption to outright social terror.
Kopel throughout shifts from speech through real tears and stammer to a blazing high lyric tenor voice that sears out of him: character and musical timber are one. The juddering falls away. An inner Evan, hugely-intelligent, sensitive and utterly confused, stands proud.
Evan would like to tell his single, financially struggling mother, Heidi (Alice Fearn, particularly moving latterly in ‘So Big/So Small’) a frantically in-demand nurse. She always promises an evening to help fill Evan’s scholarship applications, or just hang out. But work continually pulls her away.
Then Connor kills himself and the latter is taken by his parents as a love-letter to Evan. Evan can’t work up the courage to deny it and is adopted as a surrogate son, far more appealing than their dead one. So Connor becomes the friend in death he never was in life. Indeed to everyone. Only Jared knows the truth and reluctantly agrees to help craft fake emails and a thread of bromance. Zoe is suspicious, but her parents Cynthia (Helen Anker), desperate for a new fad to appease boredom every year, and gung-ho Larry (Richard Hurst hinting how Connor turned out, and whose great moments comes in the ’bro’ moment of ‘To break In a Glove’) ) latches to Evan. What can Evan do?
And there’s Zoe. ‘If I Could Tell Her’ is sung by a boy too deep in a brother’s debt to admit truth or dare tell his love. But… there’s Zoe. As Zoe. Lauren Conroy nails a defensive brittleness giving way to a lyric soprano soar of warmth, and matches Kopel in the shifts of cynicism, encouragement, tenderness, wrath and understanding.
And there’s Alana Beck (Vivian Panka) too Brought in early as the hyper-successful girl no-one wants she persuades herself easily she as a friend too and recruits Evan into a huge campaign in memory of Connor. She like Evan, Jared, and brother-bullied Zoe are all lonely. The message is that this occurs because so many want to reach out to each other, and Connor is the occasion feeding a desperate teen hunger in which Evan and Connor are just the lightning-rods.
It all gets out of anyone’s control by the time of the campaign a huge truth is built on the foundation of an accidental life in ‘You Will Be Found’ that wraps the whole musical twice in its hugging reprise.
It’s easy to say this again. Morgan Large’s set is outstanding. On a blue-turquoise floor with white diagonal stripes mirrored above the set gleams in stark silvers as sliding panels with verticals and horizontals – out of Renée Mackintosh on a spaceship – allow Ravi Deepres’ sparing video design to flourish its panic when things go viral. But the exquisite use of moving lettering, Matt Daw’s pinpoint lighting and gleam of backdrops are both busy and unobtrusive. The striking backdrop to an orchard, dusk from a luxurious kitchen window, dingy garages and murky schools and flat sewn with poverty flit past to point storytelling. Props from beds and chairs, tables and whole rooms slide like a projection of dreams and nightmares.
Musical Director Michael Bradley shows how fine he score is coloured by two guitars, underpinned by bass keyboards, a plangent cello viola or violin line, and the warm string trio. Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s choreography is particularly distinguished at how understated it is, how precise and undistracting.
The ensemble are uniformly excellent: Daniel Forrester, Lara Beth-Sas, Jessica Lim, Will Forgrave, and Elise Zavou; Sonny Monaghan is the alternate Evan.
How this unravels might surprise. Clearly there’s a crisis, but this is contemporary storytelling; messy but redemptive. In Kopel and Conroy two future stars are born within a first-rate cast led by the exquisitely moving Fearns; and Kopel with such a range is someone whose next role will probably surprise even him. Two and half hours blaze by like a first date. Outstanding.
Book Steven Levenson, Music & Lyrics Benj Pasek/Justin Paul Director Adam Penford, Set and Costume Morgan Large, Choreographer Carrie-Anne Ingrouille, Atkinson Lighting Matt Daw, Sound Designer Tom Marshall, Video Designer Ravi Deepres, Musical Supervisor Matt Spencer-Smith, Casting Director Natalie Gallacher CDG, Musical Director Michael Bradley.
Associate Director Michelle Payne, Associate Musical Director Bob Broad, Associate Musical Director Designer Matthew Cassar, Sound Designer Dan Evans, Associate Video Designer Luke Unsworth, Specialist Animation Nicemonster Tv, Voice & Dialect Coach Marianne Samuels, Props Supervisor Kate Margretts, Costumer Supervisor Emilie Carter, Production Designer Patrick Maloney, Associate Production Designer Chris Easton.
