San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
“Dear Evan Hansen”:
Thursday, Dec. 6, through Dec. 30 (preview Wednesday, Dec. 5). The Curran, 445 Geary St., S.F. $99-$325. 415-358-1220. www.sfcurran. com with the boy’s grieving family. When a misconstrued suicide note explodes on social media, Evan seeks to escape the web of deception he initiated.
“We wanted to create a show that felt poetic, but also felt fresh and relevant,” Paul says. They worked on “Dear Evan Hansen” for six years, creating a gorgeous pop-rock score that includes the songs “Waving Through a Window” and “You Will Be Found,” and found a collaborator in playwright Steven Levenson (“Seven Minutes in Heaven”). Levenson, 34, had never written a musical, but the songwriters felt an affinity with his early work and persuaded him to write the show’s book.
“I was immediately struck by their passion, their dedication,” Levenson says. As personalities, “Benj is very fast and has a tremendous amount of energy, very rapid-fire with his ideas. Justin is a lot more deliberative. He takes his time getting to what he wants to say and what he imagines something should be. That mix between them works really well.”
After playing the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and the Second Stage Theater off-Broadway, “Dear Evan Hansen” opened on Broadway in December 2016, under the direction of Michael Greif (“Rent”). New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it a “gorgeous heartbreaker of a musical. Rarely — scratch that — never have I heard so many stifled sobs and sniffles in the theater.”
A major factor in the success of “Dear Evan Hansen” was the performance of Ben Platt, who at every performance shed real tears while brilliantly delivering Pasek and Paul’s songs. For the road tour, Ben Levi Ross plays Evan Hansen.
The songwriters never anticipated the juggernaut that “Dear Evan Hansen” would become. “I don’t think anyone goes into theater expecting to be successful,” Paul says. Like “Hamilton,” a hip-hop musical that riffs on the founding fathers, the show had an offbeat concept and wasn’t derived, like too many Broadway musicals, from a movie or a pop artist’s songbook.
“So many of the pieces we admire from other writers probably sounded like a terrible idea at first,” Paul says. “I’m sure when Lin-Manuel Miranda was pitching ‘Hamilton’ a lot of people were like, ‘Oh-kayy. That sounds cool to you, but I’m not sure anyone else wants to see it.’ ”
As kids, Pasek and Paul fell in love first with movie musicals. “We both credit the Disney renaissance of the late ’80s and early ’90s as one of the big reasons our generation is so primed to love musicals,” Pasek says. “‘The Little Mermaid’ came out when we were 4 years old. It was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater. Hearing characters break out into song and further the story through music was very natural to me.”
With “Evan Hansen,” Pasek and Paul join a long tradition of Broadway songwriting partners: Rodgers & Hammerstein (“The Sound of Music”), Lerner & Loewe (“My Fair Lady”), Kander & Ebb (“Chicago”) and Bock & Harnick (“Fiddler on the Roof ”). Earlier this year, they both read “Something Wonderful,” Todd S. Purdum’s superb biography of Rodgers & Hammerstein, and found commonalities with their own work patterns. Oscar Hammerstein II, for example, wrote lyrics at his farm in Pennsylvania and Richard Rodgers composed the songs at his Connecticut home.
“They were actually barely ever in the same room at the same time,” Paul says. “In their time, it was snail-mailing from Pennsylvania to Connecticut. But actually, we quite often do that. Sometimes we might write on the phone or FaceTime, or whatever works to get the job done.”
Unlike Stephen Sondheim (“Sweeney Todd”), Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked”) and Andrew Lloyd Webber (“Cats,” “Phantom of the Opera”), who write both music and lyrics, Pasek says he and Paul are “lucky to have someone in the trenches with us. If you have a writing partner, there’s someone who can buoy you when you’re feeling down, or give you really truthful criticism when you need to hear it. That’s a lovely thing to have.”
In the last two years, Pasek and Paul have each won a Tony, an Oscar and a Grammy — an impressive coup considering their age. If they win an Emmy, they’ll achieve EGOT status — joining the 15 others who’ve won the grand slam of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. An EGOT would be nice, Pasek says, “but we’re just trying to write songs. We’re also very fortunate in that Justin’s daughter Emerson goes by the nickname of Emmy. So we already have an Emmy in our clutches.”
Edward Guthmann is a Bay Area freelance writer.