Content warning: This article contains mentions to suicide and mental health
On the 24th June, I had the pleasure of watching Dear Evan Hansen at Grand Opera House, York, after years of listening to the album for hours on end I finally had the opportunity to see the show in the flesh. On its first UK tour after a COVID-interrupted West End run since 2019, there was neither an empty seat nor a dry eye in the house upon the conclusion of this colossus of modern musical theatre.
Despite nearly ten years since its Broadway debut, the messaging and themes behind the show perhaps resonate more powerfully now than in 2015. The premise centres around the titular character Evan Hansen (Ryan Kopel) an American high school teenager severely struggling with mental health and loneliness who faked a friendship with a boy who committed suicide. In every sense, the musical is a thesis on social media and its effect on society, and that was performed to the fore in the touring musical.
Firstly, the staging was excellently designed and choreographed. Minimalism and actors moving on and off sets has been the status quo in theatre for some time now, it can irk me when directors use it because it’s ‘trendy’. Here though, director Adam Peford’s minimalist staging had a clear purpose, actors on stage surrounded by fragments of the real world (a bed, a high school locker, a dining room table) was a compelling reminder to the audience of how the characters are overwhelmingly in the online space rather than in the real world. This staging also emphasised the frequent miscommunications between characters on stage, as despite close proximity it reminded the audience how increasingly over-reliance on social media is making our own real-world social interactions more and more woeful as time passes.
As the titular character, Ryan Kopel was a tour de force as Evan. There’s a temptation to merely do a Ben Platt (who of course originated the role) impression when playing Evan, and whilst there will no doubt be similarities to the source material, it was refreshing to see an original take on a highly complicated and difficult to play character in Evan. Despite a character who suffers from nervous tics and severe social anxiety, Kopel blended nuance, subtlety, and humour to make Evan deeply relatable to the audience, particularly younger audiences who have experienced the perilous world of social media in high school.
Kopel was surrounded by a superb cast, including two fine understudy performances on the night in Lara Beth-Sas as Zoe Murphy and Will Forgrave as Connor Murphy. The plot underscores how humans are affected by the online world, and how decent people can cause devastating harm. Furthermore, it is a telling criticism of today’s society, namely the classist differences between single mum Heidi Hansen (Alice Fearn) struggling to find time for her son between legal classes and working as a nurse and upper-middle-class housewife Cynthia Murphy (Helen Anker). The portrayal of this classist divide between the two mums is another nuanced and well-measured take on present society, you can see the influence of intersectionality in understanding that what unites these two characters is their humanity despite their flaws.
Another social commentary which I also thought was compelling were the character’s reactions to Connor’s death, ranging from faux-sympathy for popularity, commercialisation and trying to keep a blog alive to prevent his death from falling into the trap of immediacy and becoming irrelevant, further bringing the ballad You Will Be Found to the fore on all of the characters’ loneliness, not just Evan’s.
The singing in the show was nothing short of perfection. Dear Evan Hansen is a thoroughly hard musical to sing, and after a long tour that has been running since October, the cast showed no signs of fatigue in delivering ballad after ballad. Ranging from all-chorus numbers, the hilarious Sincerely Me, love songs and devastating solos such as Words Fail and So Big/So Small, the songs require not just impeccable technique but meaningful acting to genuinely transmit the show’s messages to the audience, rather than appear as forcing emotion too much. It was very pleasing that, on the whole, the cast delivered each song so well.
Notwithstanding, the production was thoroughly deserving of the comprehensive standing ovation at the bows, it was a pleasure to see such an incredible performance in York. And whilst the transitions between spoken dialogue and songs were sometimes clunky, and choreography perhaps a little too infrequent, they did not impede on the quality of the performance. An incredible achievement by the cast and crew.
Dear Evan Hansen is performing in York till Saturday 28th June, before finishing in Edinburgh from the 1st-5th July. Tickets are still available for the performances at York, which can be purchased here.
The Grand Opera House performances of the Dear Evan Hansen UK tour are supported by the York support group Menfulness which is a group that supports the physical and mental wellbeing of men in and around the city. For more information, see menfulness.org.
If you require any help regarding mental health, the Samaritans offer a 24/7 telephone helpline as well as in-person assistance and other services. The phone number for the Samaritans is 116 123.