“A musical about mental illness?” mused the Uber driver. He’d asked what was playing at the Kennedy Center, and it seemed like the most succinct description for Next to Normal to offer during a 10-minute drive in Washington, D.C. “Is it about Trump?”
Of course, it’s not; thank goodness. But it’s only fitting that Next to Normal should come back—even if only for an eight-performance run—to D.C., where the Pulitzer Prize–winning musical was, essentially, formed; even though Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s show premiered at off-Broadway’s Second Stage in 2008, it didn’t really find its identity until later that year in a transformative production at Arena Stage.
Original Next to Normal director Michael Greif has returned for this Broadway Center Stage rendition, the Kennedy Center series that has produced brief but polished productions of musicals including The Who’s Tommy, In the Heights, and Chess, among others. (FYI: They’re billed as “semi-staged,” but no one in N2N was holding a script, and every performance was super-sharp.) So don’t expect a radical reinvention of this still wildly inventive musical—or even a new visual scheme. Mark Wendland’s compartmentalized, trilevel steel set has been adapted here by Paul Tate dePoo III.
Most important: Don’t expect carbon-copy performances. Rachel Bay Jones—a Tony winner for her turn as struggling, sympathetic single mom Heidi Hansen in the Greif-directed Dear Evan Hansen—brings a tender vulnerability to the bipolar Diana, whose disease, treatment, and recovery threatens to tear apart her tight-knit family. When she smiles, we immediately see what her endlessly patient husband, Dan (the phenomenal Brandon Victor Dixon) calls “the girl who was burning so brightly/ Like the light from Orion above.” (Yorkey’s lyrics are amazingly evocative. In the song “You Know,” Diana describes her paralyzing terror: “When the world that once had color fades to white and gray and black/ When tomorrow terrifies you, but you’ll die if you look back.” In “Just Another Day,” Dan confesses that he’s “living on a latte and a prayer.” And Yorkey’s ode to antidepressants, to the tune of The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things,” is truly inspired: “Zoloft and Paxil and Buspar and Xanax, Depakote, Klonopin, Ambien, Prozac/ Ativan calms me when I see the bills./ These are a few of my favorite pills.”)
You may never have dreamed of doing a pas-de-deux with your pill-dispensing doctor (the terrific Michael Park, another Dear Evan Hansen alum)—or hey, maybe you have!—but “My Psychopharmacologist and I” is just one of N2N’s many masterstrokes. Another is the gradual emotional implosion of Diana and Dan’s overachieving teenage daughter, Natalie (Maia Reficco), who dubs her brother, Gabe (Khamary Rose), “Superboy” and herself “the Invisible Girl.” The writers also give Natalie a nicest-guy-in-the-world love interest named Henry (Ben Levi Ross, fresh from the title role in the DEH national tour), clearly paralleling Diana and Dan’s bond.
And how prescient were Yorkey’s lyrics in “Perfect for You,” Henry’s “f**ked up seduction” to Natalie? “Our planet is poison, the oceans the air/ Around and beneath and above you,” he begins. And later: “The world is at war/ Filled with death and disease/ We dance on the edge of destruction/ The globe’s getting warmer by deadly degrees.” Those lines have always been there. But there is one minor dialogue change in this production. Natalie says she’s “one f**kup from disaster,” but Henry isn’t having it. “Your life is not a disaster,” he replies. The environment is a disaster. The Senate is a disaster.” Too on-the-nose for D.C.? Perhaps. But very in-character for 2020 Henry. And the original line—“Sprint is a disaster”—doesn’t really pack the same punch today, does it?
Next to Normal opened Jan. 30, 2020, and runs through Feb. 3 at the Kennedy Center. Tickets and information: kennedy-center.org
