Songwriting duo’s ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ begins national tour

When they started “Dear Evan Hansen,” the Broadway musical about teenage angst and the aftermath of a suicide, songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul never guessed they would wind up with a hit.

“We thought, ‘OK, this will be a show that reflects who we are as artists,’ ” Paul says. “‘There may not be very many people in the world who want to see it, but that’s OK.’ ”

Instead, “Dear Evan Hansen,” which opens Thursday, Dec. 6, at San Francisco’s Curran theater in its first national tour, became a critical and popular megasuccess. It won six Tony Awards in May 2017, including best musical and best score, and after two years is still selling out each performance at the Music Box Theatre in New York.

“We never saw it as a commercial piece,” Paul says. “Just as something we wanted to put out into the world.”

Pasek and Paul, both 33, also won an Oscar in 2017 for writing the lyrics to “City of Stars,” the best song winner from “La La Land.” They created songs for the movies “Trolls” and “The Greatest Showman,” and in the upcoming live-

action musicals “Aladdin” and “Snow White,” their songs will combine with original tunes from the Disney animated classics.

The songwriters both live in New York, and spoke recently by phone from Los Angeles where they were promoting the newly published “Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel.”

Pasek, who is Jewish and gay and has a boyfriend of one year, writes most of the lyrics. Paul, a churchgoing Christian with a wife and two small children, is the principal composer. Their personalities are different, they say, with Paul describing himself as “more of a type A, very structured person” and Pasek describing himself, somewhat coyly, as “less type A. I will allow you to interpret it as you wish.”

Ambitious and disciplined, they met as freshmen at the University of Michigan where they created “Edges,” a song cycle about the vagaries of adolescence. Prior to “Dear Evan Hansen,” they wrote the stage musicals “James and the Giant Peach,” “Dogfight” and “A Christmas Story,” and contributed songs to the TV series “Smash.”

“Dear Evan Hansen” originated with

“It was a drug overdose, but no one knows if it was a suicide. Afterwards everybody wanted to be his best friend.”

Benj Pasek an event in Pasek’s teenage life. When he started his junior year of high school, he says, “There was a student who had passed away over the summer. It was a drug overdose, but no one knows if it was a suicide. Afterwards everybody wanted to be his best friend, and kind of claimed his death as a tragedy they wanted to own and be a part of.”

Later, when he met Paul at Michigan, Pasek says, “Justin also noticed that phenomenon to be true with how folks our age and older responded to 9/11. It was really prevalent to see people wanting to grieve very publicly, so that other people would notice them.”

In “Dear Evan Hansen,” the title character is a hypersensitive loner, desperate to connect. Following the suicide of another student, he invents a relationship with the boy in order to bond