TONY-WINNING HIT ARRIVES
TONY-WINNING HIT ‘DEAR EVAN HANSEN’ ARRIVES IN HOUSTON. |
“Dear Evan Hansen” has a story as compelling as any Arthur Miller or Edward Albee play. It’s a bestselling Broadway musical — whose national tour stops by the Hobby Center Nov. 12-24 — sure. But unlike most Broadway musicals, it doesn’t feel showy or expensive. Rather, it’s an intimate look at a high school-aged boy who, crippled with social anxiety and a need for acceptance, decides to tell a lie.
The story speaks to the modern era of smartphones and social media. Evan Hansen, the show’s protagonist, makes up a lie about a tragedy that occurs in school and ends up going viral for it. The lie brings him close to the family connected with the tragedy, and as the deceit continues, we begin to see how this one lie creates a devastating ripple effect — impacting Evan’s family and friends in unexpected ways.
“Dear Evan Hansen,” in other words, is more than a raw portrayal of a nervous boy who does something wrong for the approval of others. It’s also an indictment of the way we use social media to take advantage of real-life tragedies. Self-promotion, branding and online marketing governs nearly every highly visible incident today — and “Dear Evan Hansen” shows the costs of misusing social media to make ourselves part of the story.
But for book writer Stephen Levenson, “Dear Evan Hansen” wouldn’t have worked as well as a black-and-white tale about the dangers of social media. When Levenson first connected with music and lyrics writers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“La La Land,” “The Greatest Showman”), the team considered writing a satire that critiqued the way the current generation uses social media.
“At first, we were thinking of a scathing look at our generation and culture,” Levenson says in a recent phone interview. “But we felt that we knew exactly what that musical would be. It wrote itself, and therefore, it didn’t need us to write it.”
Desire to connect
Pasek, Paul and Levenson wanted more than a just social critique in musical form. Instead, they wanted to write a nuanced portrayal of a human being.
“What I don’t know, as a person, is what would compel someone to lie on social media?” Levenson
says. “What compels people to exaggerate the truth to feel closer to something terrible, a tragedy? That was a genuine question. The story came out of that. We wanted to get to the human impulse underneath, which is this desire and need to connect.”
In this way, “Dear Evan Hansen” shares qualities with the critically acclaimed television show “Fleabag,” another story showcasing a person who does morally questionable and unlikable things, but whose well-explored inner struggles help explain — but not excuse — those actions.
“What we found during the development process, which is true for ‘Fleabag,’ too, was that whenever we tried to pull our punches with Evan, or try to tiptoe around what he was doing, we liked him less,” Levenson says. “We liked him when he was making decisions and doing things that we understood. We had to accept that this is a character who’s going to make decisions, and we’re going to follow those decisions and see where it took him.”
Some of those decisions involve Evan lying and manipulating a grieving family for personal gain. But Levenson says the musical is about exploring why Evan is motivated to do those things — while never excusing or downplaying the consequences of those actions.
“We were always juggling Evan’s likability. That was a huge concern and question,” he says. “We wanted to understand why he was doing it, even if you don’t like him for doing it.”
Winning Tonys
Evan’s complicated journey makes “Dear Evan Hansen” perhaps the most heartbreaking musical to come out of Broadway in recent times. When the Broadway production premiered in 2016, the musical drew an intense fandom, driven mostly by younger viewers who posted constantly about the musical on Twitter. The musical swept the 2017 Tony Awards, winning best musical, best book of a musical, best score, best performance by a leading actor in a musical, best performance by an actress in a featured role in a musical and best orchestrations.
In other words, the story Levenson cooked up resonated. He says the key — during the multiple years he, Pasek and Paul spent writing and rewriting it — was to always stay focused on Evan’s journey. Lessons abound in “Dear Evan Hansen,” but Levenson says the musical was, at its core, an exploration of a relationship.
“It was about a boy who needed a family,” he says, “and a family who needed a boy.”