A TIME FOR SINGING
BRINGING DEAR EVAN HANSEN TO THE BIG SCREEN ‘FELT LIKE AN EVOLUTION,’ DIRECTOR SAYS
Movie musicals, like westerns, never completely disappear from popular culture, but they do ebb and flow.
And 2021 is a time of flow. Even as COVID-19 shut down Broadway, London’s West End and other live theatre districts, filmed versions of their stories were making their way to screens.
This year has already seen the release of the hit musical Hamilton on the Disney+ streaming service. Appletv+ brings Come From Away to viewers on Friday, just ahead of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that provide the play’s backdrop. And December will see Steven Spielberg’s big screen adaptation of West Side Story, 60 years after the first filmed version took home 11 Oscars, including for best picture.
Having its world première in the spotlight as the opening night film of the Toronto International Film Festival, Dear Evan Hansen adapts the 2015 stage musical, with Steven Levenson reworking his script for the screen, and Stephen Chbosky directing. It’s the story of a high school student who is mistakenly believed to be the only friend of classmate Connor who died by suicide. He finds himself lying to everyone to fulfil that role.
“Our hope from the beginning with this show was to reach as many people as possible,” says Levenson, ahead of the Toronto première. “This was a story that deserved to be told to a wider audience. With theatre you’re lucky if you get a thousand people seeing it a night, and with film that is just exponential.”
Chbosky’s last film was 2017’s Wonder, based on the novel by R.J. Palacio, and starring Jacob Tremblay as a boy with a facial deformity who is entering Grade 5 after years of being homeschooled by his parents. There’s a certain connection to the world of Dear Evan Hansen — school, anxiety, etc. — but the director says he felt this new film aligned more closely with his 2012 movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which he adapted from his own novel.
“I felt that they were sibling projects, in a way,” Chbosky says. “They both dealt with young people, mental health, certain traumas. They both dealt with suicide. It’s just Dear Evan Hansen did it with these marvellous songs and this great screenplay by Steven Levenson.”
He adds: “This is the first thing I’ve ever directed that I did not write. That was a new experience and, in many ways, liberating. I had no preconceived notions, and every day was a new discovery. It felt like an evolution.”
Levenson says he and Chbosky worked closely on making the adaptation work for the screen.
“I needed to be guided by him a lot,” he says. “When you write something for the stage, you really are abstracting. A bedroom is literally a bed on stage that gets wheeled in and out. And Stephen would ask me: What are the posters in Connor’s bedroom? Who are the other students in the school? What is the world that Evan inhabits? So it did get to get bigger and richer and more textured.”
But, “paradoxically, it also did get smaller and more intimate. We never wanted people to sort of break out into song the way that they do in certain musicals. That just wouldn’t have worked with this story. Even more so on film, we had to figure out how do we naturally slide into song? And obviously Stephen had a lot to do with figuring out how to make that work tonally.”
To that end, several songs were removed for the screen adaptation, and several new numbers added. Chief among these was The Anonymous Ones, co-written and performed by Amandla Stenberg, who plays another student.
“It’s one of the more thrilling songs in the film,” says Levenson. “I just love it. And I think it allows us a window into this character that we didn’t otherwise get.”
Ben Platt reprises the title role he originated on Broadway, but the rest of the cast includes such new faces as Julianne Moore as Evan’s mother, Amy Adams and Danny Pino as Connor’s parents, and Kaitlyn Dever as Zoe, Connor’s sister and the object of Evan’s shy affections.
The 24-year-old Dever recalls seeing the live show several years ago with her mom. “I have a photo of us holding our Dear Even Hansen cups in the theatre. And looking at that photo now is mind-blowing because Kaitlyn then had no idea!”
She says she saw the London performance, pre-pandemic and just before auditioning for the role in the film. “I become a sponge and I soak it all in and I internalize it all and then I try to balance that with my own elements that I want to bring to Zoe,” she says.
“It’s a very daunting task and a very nerve-racking role to take on,” she says. “Just knowing how amazing Zoe is as a character, that in and of itself is daunting, but also knowing that there are so many Zoe Murphys before me and knowing that there are some very big shoes to fill and knowing that I wanted to do them justice, is definitely a whirlwind.
“And also just being completely inspired by her because I think she’s an incredible person. Getting to play her was a dream come true.”
Dear Evan Hansen opens in cinemas Sept. 24.