REVIEW | Drama musical is not simply a parable with an easy moral

Gazing up at the astonishing lighting and tech rig that loomed over an empty stage at the start of Dear Evan Hansen, its blue light suffusing the auditorium of the Artscape Opera House, I had the briefest sensation that I was underwater. It brought a feeling of quiet exhilaration — peaceful, free, like a moment floating in the sea shallows before bursting through the surface into the sun.

I admit perhaps I was overly primed for such analogies; this was, after all, opening night of a much-anticipated production, the kind of occasion that can send musical theatre fans into fits of lyricism. But the maritime metaphor proved appropriate, albeit in a different mood.

From the moment he introduces himself at the start of the show, young Evan Hansen is swimming in an ocean of anxiety. To put it more accurately (borrowing from the poet Stevie Smith), he has been treading water too far offshore for way too long, and he is “not waving but drowning”.

For audiences around the world, the character of Evan — played here by the talented Stuart Brown, who tenderly conveys that precarious teenage combination of insecurity, inwardness, desperation and, ultimately, great courage — is a representative of the postmillennial generations whose adolescence has been marred by smartphones and social media, a toxic (and sometimes deadly) combination. Loneliness and disconnection are paradoxically matched with constant surveillance: the need to see and be seen on-screen.

Yet Dear Evan Hansen is not simply a parable with an easy moral. The protagonist gets caught up in a lie that produces the illusion of popularity and affirmation. It is enabled and aggravated by smartphones and social media, but for all the superficiality they encourage — and the compounding of opportunism and deceit — they do, in this case, eventually facilitate positive outcomes.

Though it is a 21st century tale, Dear Evan Hansen is also an archetypal story about finding yourself or, as the show’s tagline has it, being found by others. This is what Germans call bildung: growing up, learning, discovering independence and community. He feels isolated and alienated, but Evan is an everyman figure. We all want to know we matter.

It’s not only teenagers, of course, who are stumbling directionless from one awkward encounter to another. This is a musical that speaks to the experiences of parents as much as it does to their children, and Evan’s relationship with his mother (played by the stellar Lucy Tops) constitutes its difficult, messy, vulnerable but resilient emotional core.

Then there are the severed relationships in the Murphy family, who are grieving the suicide of their son and brother, Connor, even as they find themselves, for different reasons, unable to sing his requiem. We learn that Evan, too, has faced the prospect of giving up.

Evan loves trees. But he is ashamed by a halfhearted attempt at ending his own life by jumping/falling out of a high tree. Connor, in the narrative Evan spins about their supposed friendship, loved an old apple orchard,— long since left to ruin. It is revived, ironically, by the campaign that grows out of Evan’s pretence. The tree motif extends into the heartbreaking mock-philosophical question: “When you’re falling in a forest and there’s nobody around, do you ever really crash, or even make a sound?”

With all these arboreal associations and images, the great round tower of the onstage rig starts to suggest a tree-like presence, as the show moves from darkness and oceanic anxiety (or is it the blue haze of phone and laptop screens?) towards sunshine and natural light. This is Evan’s trajectory, from the teenage angst that tells him to “step out of the sun” to the culminating vision of the finale, in which “some other kid” is climbing a tree: “Even when it feels hopeless, like everything is telling him to just let go... He’ll hold on. He’ll keep going until he sees the sun.”

These may sound cliché, but sung, they become profound. Go and see Dear Evan Hansen. You, too, will be found.

This review originally appeared in Business Day.