Gizmo Guy: 'Dear Evan Hansen' is theater's take on social media
Reviewing a New York musical might seem outside my current job description. But Gizmo Guy just had to go see Dear Evan Hansen.
Reviewing a New York musical might seem outside my current job description. But Gizmo Guy just had to go see Dear Evan Hansen.
That's because it's the first truly "digital age" theatrical. The first to deal with the power of web-based social media to spark online connections, sway mass opinion, and radically change circumstances, in some ways for the good, though often turning lies into truths, losers into heroes.
And this breakthrough project has a big Philly backstory.
Played out on a modern, minimalist stage set with oversize smartphone and computer screens "re-tweeting" what characters say, sing, and post, this darkly amusing and touching musical tracks the transformation of bright but socially inept high schooler Evan Hansen into a semiconfident internet star.
All that kicks in after he's been wrongly characterized, by chance, as the sole friend of another outcast who's just committed suicide.
Adding to this "no harm" lie, Evan and a few friends post a heart-tugging fiction about his nonexistent relationship with the demon-plagued dead guy. (Hey, who hasn't spiffed up an online profile?)
The fake emails fool the bereaved family, including the sister Evan pines for.
Almighty YouTube enters the plotline, too. A video clip is posted of Evan breaking down in a school assembly. This unnerving moment goes viral, millions of slacktavists are suddenly feeling his pain, sharing the "awwwws." Just as they would for a ditzy dancing cat or a pathetic singer.
Or they might rally behind some media-savvy pol who punctuates every dogmatic tweet with an emphatic exclamation point.
But Philadelphia-spawned show cocomposer Benj Pasek, 30, wasn't thinking of political "truthiness" and web branding when he conceived the show.
At his City Avenue high school, Friends' Central, "there was a student who was sort of anonymous," Pasek recalled, "and over the summer, he passed away from a drug overdose. And when we all came back to school the next year, he became a sort of sensational figure. After his death, basically everyone claimed him to be his friend. And we were really interested in why psychologically people were doing that."
Another plot advancer: Pasek's own positive adventure blowing up on the web. As a fledgling theater major at the University of Michigan, he and collaborator Justin Paul tried to plug into the creation of an annual school show and were told by upperclassers to butt out.
As a retort, the duo created a song cycle themed on the pangs of growing up, captured this work, Edges, on video in its one-and-only concert performance, then saw the project explode internationally, with more than 200 productions worldwide, after they posted clips on YouTube.
With this most bankable of showbiz credentials - Internet Sensations! - Pasek and Paul jumped to the front of the "producible talent" line. They scored well-regarded stage adaptations of Dogfight and James and the Giant Peach, contributed numbers to the NBC series Smash, and put words and music to a stage adaptation of the folksy Jean Shepherd film memoir A Christmas Story that did gangbuster business in its holiday 2015 production at the Walnut Street Theatre.
Dear Evan Hansen is likewise blessed with a polished pop-Broadway score, an engaging book (Steven Levenson), lively staging (Michael Greif and Danny Mefford), and brilliant performances, starting with Ben Platt, best known for the Pitch Perfect films) as the hyper-anxious Hansen.
No surprise, the show has been winning exceptionally strong reviews - first last summer at Washington's Arena Stage and this month with a brief, buzz-building New York showcase at the slightly Off-Broadway Second Stage Theatre complex. That run sold out in a wink after New York Times critic Charles Isherwood dubbed it "sweet, sad and quite moving." Last week, the Obie Awards honored Platt's performance and dubbed the show the season's best musical.
While they're shutting down the computers at Second Stage's show for the last time today, another boot-up in a bigger Broadway house is coming, producer Stacey Mindich shared during her recent Newhouse School commencement address at Syracuse University.
And the show team is strategizing on ways to tap the young, tech-attuned audience that has clearly felt the vibes for the hip-hopped Hamilton (who hasn't?) but often don't care about Broadway shtick and may still be steaming from Jason Reitman's unpleasant "internet addiction" film Men, Women & Children.
For online promotion, Mindich filled the theater one night with social-media "influencers," reported Forbes, and now has a de facto "digital board of advisers" including Mashable COO Mike Kriak; Amazon's head of online advertising, Jason Nickel; and Eric Kuhn, the first agent at United Talent Agency focused on online performers.
So move it on out, you Vine "phenoms" and Instagram splashes. Evan Hansen is the new bomb. So shouts twitter.com/dearevanhansen, facebook.com/dearevanhansen, @dearevanhansen, and #dearevanhansen. And this time, you can believe the hype.
215-854-5960@JTakiff