Class act... a star is born in tale of high school angst
REVIEW Dear Evan Hansen Noel Coward Theatre, London
FEW musicals come better recommended than this multi-award-winning American import. Its soft rock score is by La La Land lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Even better, Steven Levenson’s gripping story is unlike any of the many US high school shows you’ve ever seen.
Best of all is 21-year-old Sam Tutty, who in his West End debut is launched by Michael Greif’s slick production into the stratosphere of musical stardom.
In one of the performances of the year Tutty plays the painfully awkward loner Evan who starts the new term with a broken arm and instructions from his doctor to build self-confidence with positive letters to and by himself.
Soon this stuttering misfit is the boyfriend of Zoe (the also excellent Lucy Anderson), who he once couldn’t talk to without his palms clamming up in sweat, and a social media star speaking up for tormented teens lost in a sea of other people’s disinterest.
It all happens because of Evan’s white lie, intended to comfort the family of Connor, Zoe’s brother who killed himself, but which snowballs into a massive deception.
It’s a story brimful of dread as the plot moves closer to the moment of reckoning where Evan is exposed.
But although Pasek and Paul’s songs are a great listen – think Alanis Morissette when Evan’s mom Heidi (Rebecca McKinnis) conveys the pressures of single parenthood – nearly every number comes from a similar angst-filled emotion.
The exception is Sincerely, Me in which Evan, his sarky schoolmate Jared (Jack Loxton) and their imagined version of Connor (Doug Colling) compile fake emails to convince the world that Evan and Connor were best friends.
And suddenly the show has a rare psychological complexity as the dead Connor becomes Evan’s alter-ego.
Yet unlike the brilliant 2006 school musical Spring Awakening – every note of which reflects the soaring highs and plummeting depths of the suicidally young – here, not much changes musically. Still, in Tutty, a star is born.