Former CMU student made leap to Broadway’s ‘Evan Hansen’
To the girl in the sequined pants, sitting in the front row and weeping toward the end of “Dear Evan Hansen”: Ben Levi Ross doesn’t remember what city he was in, but he remembers you.
The title star of the national tour has seen and heard a lot of “very sweet and special” reactions to the Tony Award-winning musical, but the girl who was “sobbing uncontrollably,” with light sparking off her sequins, stands out.
Even while performing, he was thinking, “Someone’s got to help this girl. I have to sing the rest of this show, and I can’t go down there.”
Take her reaction as a warning, and bring your tissues. The teen drama “Dear Evan Hansen” can have that effect on people.
For Ben Levi Ross, it was unexpected and life-changing.
The giant leap from Carnegie Mellon University to Broadway came after his freshman year. He went home to California to visit his parents for two weeks, then headed east for “nothing big,” but
he would audition for a play called “The Low Road,” directed by Michael Greif at New York’s Public Theater. He didn’t get that role, but Greif — the director of “Dear Evan Hansen” — told the rising sophomore that he would be “great” as an understudy in the musical’s Broadway company.
It wasn’t a show Ross knew a lot about at the time, immersed as he was in his CMU training.
But suddenly he was on Broadway, and he made his debut in the role of Jared, a family friend who becomes Evan’s cohort of a sort.
“When I left home in the summer, I couldn’t have imagined that the next time I was going to be in California was to open the national tour of ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ at the Ahmanson,” the 2,000-seat theater in Downtown L.A.
That was in November of last year, after Ross had spent 10 months understudying three roles — including Evan — in New York.
On Tuesday, he returns to Pittsburgh and brings the Tony Award-winning best musical to Heinz Hall, Downtown.
It’s a hot ticket. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust lists the eight performances, Tuesday through next Sunday, as “no availability,” although there is a digital lottery with limited tickets for each show.
Ross was in Buffalo last week, speaking from the noisy lobby of a hotel. He “lives like a monk” on the road, he says, but he is hopeful to fit in a few of his favorite things about Pittsburgh while he’s here. One of them is the ever-popular Prantl’s Burnt Almond Torte.
“It’s my favorite freakin’ cake in the world,” he relates. “And I’m hoping to say hello to some of my professors at Carnegie Mellon and visit Shadyside, because it was my home for a year and a half, and I love that place.”
Heinz Hall, though, will be a whole new experience, while singing Grammy-winning songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“The Greatest Showman”).
“Dear Evan Hansen” is among the shows leading the charge of teen musicals that
today are all the rage on Broadway — others are “Be More Chill” and Tony nominees “The Prom” and “Mean Girls.” You could also throw “Wicked” into that mix, as it deals with a teen outcast and her popular counterpart.
“Dear Evan Hansen,” though, is more in the category of fellow Tony winner “Spring Awakening.” Ross spoke of both shows as “groundbreaking theater for their times,” dealing with societal pressures placed not just on teens but also on their parents.
In “Dear Evan Hansen,” Evan’s single mother (Broadway veteran Jessica Phillips) is trying to make ends meet, while in another family, a
mother played by 1990 CMU graduate Christiane Noll is trying to cope with a parental nightmare.
Hitting the road as the star of such an emotionally charged show, with songs that often require vocal gymnastics, has been an education for Ross, who is on the stage for almost all of the show’s 2½ hours.
Director Greif gave him advice early on, to “do less, and let the audience come to you.”
“A lot of what I have learned is about self-preservation,” Ross says. “It’s so easy to go on that stage and blow yourself out and not have a voice halfway into the week. So I learned how to get through eight shows a week safely.”
Among the “trade secrets” that have become his rituals, “I am a relentless steamer … and I travel with a juicer,” with which he makes a helpful concoction with “straight ginger root, manuka honey and turmeric, and I drink that.”
He added that he meditates and has “decided to be more gentle with myself, for my own mental health,” which has meant positive thinking and taking it easy on self judgment.
Ross, 21, explains life on the road with no hint of regret. He has even learned to pack efficiently — steamer, juicer, etc.
Ask him to recount all the ways “Dear Evan Hansen” has been life-changing, and he begins, “My professional career has been launched, that’s a pretty big one. And I think the other one is just, confidence.”
Before this opportunity came along, he had the confidence to audition for topranked colleges such as Carnegie Mellon.
But now, having gone from college to a Broadway company to the lead in a national tour?
“There’s nothing like it.”