‘Dear Evan Hansen’: a Top-Notch Musical at Arena Stage

There’s only a couple of weeks left to see “Dear Evan Hansen,” a highly original, up-to-the-moment world premiere musical now in the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage through August 23. My suggestion: go see it while you can, unless, as may be possible, this production achieves its Broadway aspirations.

“Hansen”—about a tongue-tied, lonely teen who pretends to be the best friend of a friendless teenager who’s committed suicide—is an amazingly audience-affecting show. The material seems to blitz emotionally across the generations during the course of a packed-house performance at which the audience often whistled and cheered or remained tellingly silent at emotional moments. This was an audience made up of millennials, teens, parental-type adults, and people older than that.

This meant that the show’s creative team of Steven Levenson (book), Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (music and lyrics) and director Michael Greif have managed to put on a show that is suited to the times where the subject of teen bullying, teen angst and teen suicide is high profile. But it never hectors or presses the point. It’s too busy creating a lived-in world set against a highly evocative and energetic stage framework of the digital world of e-mails, social networks, Facebook and texting, in which the characters live.

Evan Hansen is a teen so shy that when he encounters the girl of his dreams, his every other phrase is a version of “I’m sorry.” His mother works as a nurse and is taking night classes and while she’s loving, she barely notices Evan’s pain. By chance, Evan has an encounter with another loner, Connor Murphy, who steals Evan’s shrink-assigned note to himself. Later, Evan learns that Connor has committed suicide, and was found with the note.

Swiftly, Evan is welcomed into Connor’s grief-stricken family circle because they think he was Connor’s best (and only) friend. That circle includes Connor’s sister Zoe, the object of Evan’s unabashed love. Matters, as they say, get out of hand, as events and information—made-up e-mails, the note, a whole and false biography of a friendship and alternative Connor—make their way through the busy-body world of social media.

This could be sappy, overly sentimental material, but the music, the writing and especially the performers never descend to a level beyond honest sentiment. There’s a surprising amount of humor in the show, and songs that touch the emotions. What’s impressive is just how accurately Evan’s world and his friends, his mother, and Connors’ family is portrayed—it feels lived in, honest and authentic, a world that’s right out there in a neighborhood near you.

Ben Platt, a budding bona-fide movie star (“Pitch Perfect,” “Ricky and the Flash”) portrays Evan with just the right amount of bumbling, painful awkwardness, awed by finally finding his dreams of love and family coming true, stricken by the lie he is living. He has a strong partner in the appealing Laura Dreyfuss as Zoe. There are also quite sharp and funny bits by Alexis Molnar and Will Roland as Evans’ co-conspirators.

But the adults in this show—Jennifer Laura Thompson in the emotionally stirring part of Connors’ mother, Michael Park as an almost classically stoic, gruff and in-pain dad, and the remarkable Rachel Bay Jones as Evans’ mom—are a revelation.

Musically, “Dear Evan Hansen” is kin to “Rent” and “Next to Normal,” and the contemporary American musical’s attempt to move forward and find own voice and songs, side-stepping out-and-out rock and roll, creating new pop music that’s narrative-friendly and in service of the story. Songs like “For Forever,”“Words Fail” and others move character and narrative, but the presentation is still more in the mode of front-and-center top of the stage offering than a fluid event that flows out of the story at times.

It’s a small quibble. A larger one is the quiet resolution for Evan’s dilemma, which is a huge one where conscience has collided with need.

Still, “Dear Evan Hansen” is top-notch—in terms of originality and emotional power, not to mention an authentic affinity for the world it portrays. Let’s hope