‘Next to Normal’ brings mental illness near home
Musical sheds light on fight to endure
Early in Act II of “Next to Normal” —the Pulitzer-winning musical by Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics) — the bipolar Diana has an out-of-body experience during which she watches herself receiving electric shock treatment.
As staged by director Tim Backes in an All in Productions edition that opened over the weekend, Carrie Gray’s Diana looks down on the prostrate body below, wondering whether the “bolt of lightning” coursing through her head will fry her mind — delivering a cure by erasing her memories.
Right beneath Gray’s Diana, as she sings from the upper story of her house?
A comfy chair and reading nook surrounded by pictures of her long-neglected, 16-yearold daughter Natalie — played with rage, hurt and a hunger for love by Hailey Hentz. We clearly see what’s at stake in Diana’s treatment, which risks erasing a daughter to save a life.
Rather than repeating the abstract staging of both the Broadway and excellent Milwaukee Repertory Theater productions, Backes and set designer Mitch Weindorf take us inside a realistically presented middle-class home, with pictures and tables and chairs.
Those earlier productions offered visual metaphors for Diana’s fractured mind. This production highlights the consequences for her broken family.
The cast representing them and those around them — Gray and Hentz as well as Stephen Pfisterer as Diana’s beleaguered husband, Connor Dalzin as Natalie’s stoner boyfriend, Austin Dorman as Natalie’s older brother, and Adam Qutaishat as two of Diana’s doctors — can sing.
This ensemble would have been able to do still more if their obtrusive body mics hadn’t been cranked so high, in a space that needs no amplification at all. This isn’t American Idol but a portrait of a family in crisis; intimate scenes need to play that way.
As the set design suggests, Backes seems to understand this. When he can make his vision heard as well as seen, this “Normal” pays dividends – particularly in moments involving Diana and either of her two very different children.
Playing the older and colder Gabe, a slithering Dorman can be downright creepy as he haunts Diana’s mind, making demands she can never meet. Hentz’s Natalie – high-strung, vulnerable and lonely — couldn’t be more different, as a hot mess of a teen in crisis.
Gray registers both Diana’s crazed overinvestment in her son and the guilt involving her failure to better love her husband and daughter.
Most of all, Gray suggests someone who feels helpless and lost — combined with an angry and fierce determination to be more than a victim and a statistic. Nervy, aware, and bright, this Diana understands that she may never even be in the neighborhood of normal. All the more impressive that she struggles on, reaching for the light.