Listening to Dear Evan Hansen eight years ago, around the time the musical took Broadway and the rest of the English-language theater world by storm, one wouldn’t have been able to ignore its commentary on the perils and pitfalls of social media. In fact, that was its most prominent theme, in a way capturing the zeitgeist of the mid-2010s, when Facebook and Twitter (now X) were arguably at their peak and the most explosive segments of the Cambridge Analytica scandal were just about to hit.
For the unfamiliar, the Tony and Olivier Award-winning musical is about a high school kid, Evan Hansen, who inadvertently becomes the poster boy for the grassroots movement surrounding the death of his classmate Connor. Interrogated by Connor’s grieving parents, Evan ends up fanning the flames of their assumption that he and Connor were besties, his small lie distending to proportions both hilarious and disturbing with the help of lots of fake, backdated emails. Soon, the self-proclaimed memorial project put up in Connor’s name swiftly goes viral—the “feathers to the wind” metaphor made manifest.
Suffice to say, social media is the axis upon which the ridiculous goings-on in Evan Hansen spin. Evan’s lies expand, morph, and take off because of social media, like pieces of gossip left to assume lives of their own in the virtual ecosystem, transforming the smallness of Connor’s death into something everyone in the story feeds off of. Viewed this way, Evan Hansen becomes the ultimate post-elder millennial cautionary tale of our hyperconnected times.
All that is still evident in the version of the musical now playing at The Theatre at Solaire—a terrific UK touring production brought to our shores by GMG Productions, marking the show’s professional premiere in the Philippines.
But, at the same time, a different theme seems to preoccupy this Evan Hansen beyond the notion of toxic virality. As much as this show is about the insanity that social media can engender, it is also, quite clearly, about mental health—and the kind of world built by society’s predisposition to neglect its importance.
That Evan has mental health problems is not simply a given here; the production has somehow managed to turn that fact into obvious kindling for the half-comedic, half-tragic unfolding of the story. Evan has social anxiety debilitating enough to turn him into a fumbling wreck in front of other people (the musical’s title stems from the letters he’s supposed to write to himself, as an assignment from his psychiatrist). By giving this aspect of the character the importance it warrants, this Evan Hansen allows for compassion to flood into its narrative: The viewer acquires a lucid understanding of Evan’s actions, and watching this story transpire becomes a not-difficult exercise in empathy.
It bears mentioning that that’s something the 2021 film adaptation (directed by Stephen Chbosky) mishandled. Somehow the movie almost turned Evan into a villain—a serial liar who struggled with mental health problems. There couldn’t have been a more unlikeable protagonist.
The chief virtue of GMG’s production is that now, Evan is unambiguously a person struggling with mental health problems who ends up spewing lies as a result of those unresolved problems. Moreover, it also shines a light on the larger structural inadequacies in Evan’s—and by equivalence, our—world that either prevent such problems from being resolved or indirectly provide fertile ground for their germination in the household. One sees the world quite plainly through Evan’s eyes: a world where single parents have to juggle multiple jobs to sustain their family while being unable to devote enough time to their children precisely—and paradoxically—because of that basic need to sustain them; a world where parents, far from perfect creatures themselves, end up inflicting their own traumas upon their children, slowly shaping their households into places where children are more prone to feeling isolated, misunderstood, unloved.
Directed by Adam Penford, this staging of Dear Evan Hansen finds the perfect avatar for explicating its themes in Ellis Kirk, whose portrayal of the titular character is a near-miraculous balance of sympathy and illogicality, just one hurt kid among this story’s many hurt people. Rebecca McKinnis, as Evan’s mom, and Rhys Hopkins, as Connor, supply two more standout performances that thrive in understatement; when either of them is with Kirk onstage, the musical is at its most potent.
Meanwhile, the production itself—a non-replica, or one that veers away from the original designs on Broadway or the West End, as opposed to most GMG imports—nonetheless makes intelligent, occasionally quite stunning use of theater technology to hyper-realize the musical’s story and thematic concerns. (Curiously, the sound of this production could get disturbingly thin—a rarity in the acoustics heaven of Solaire’s theater.)
All things considered, this Dear Evan Hansen is time—and money—worth spending at Solaire. It’s a production that completely understands the proverbial assignment and, more crucially, makes a more insightful experience out of the material.
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