Today is going to be a good day and here’s why, if you go to see Dear Evan Hansen at the Grand Opera House this week.
The long-awaited Dear Evan Hansen has finally arrived in York, and the eager audience’s anticipation was certainly in the air for opening night. The Olivier, Tony and Grammy award-winning musical follows Evan, an anxious high school kid whose attempts to fit in spiral into something far beyond his imagination.
Dear Evan Hansen is at the Grand Opera York from Tuesday 24 to Saturday 28 June.
But was it worth the wait? The short answer is – absolutely.
Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s soundtrack is well-loved by a whole generation of musical fans, and it is paired perfectly with Steven Levenson’s heartfelt – and genuinely hilarious – book.
After previously seeing Ryan Kopel shine as the self-assured Davey in Newsies, it was wonderful to see him take on the stumbling and socially-anxious titular Evan Hansen – and is perhaps the greatest performance I’ve seen on stage this year. His embodiment of the character is extraordinary, every vocal inflection and physical tic is embedded into Kopel’s performance. Not to mention his beautiful voice that soars across the theatre in stand-out numbers like ‘Waving Through a Window’ and the achingly devastating ‘Words Fail’.
I think Kopel’s performance is part of the key of making this production so successful. It would be easy to mischaracterise Evan as someone who is maliciously using a tragic event to further his own social standing, but Kopel infuses his character with such an earnest and endearing vulnerability that you fully empathise with Evan and understand how an initial misunderstanding could have snowballed to the extreme.
Whatever well-deserved praise Kopel has already received for his portrayal is simply not yet enough – it was a performance that will stick with me for a long time.
The rest of the cast are equally as strong. Alice Fearn as Heidi Hansen, Evan’s mother, is a force to witness on stage. She shares such brilliant chemistry with her onstage-son, and is totally believable as a mother trying her best. Fearn’s incredible voice is gutsy in the underrated banger ‘Good For You’, and delicately fierce in the emotional ‘So Big/So Small’.
Tom Dickerson as Jared and Vivian Panka as Alana bring a lot of much-needed lightness and comedy, while similarly delivering their own emotional gut-punches in their performance. At times, they almost act like a devil and angel on Evan’s shoulders as he further tangles himself up in his web of lies.
The constellation of grief that is the Murphy family is agonisingly real. At the opening night performance, we were lucky to see understudies Will Forgrave as Connor Murphy and Lara Beth-Sas as Zoe Murphy. Forgrave’s Connor is hostile on the outside, but you felt his manic energy hiding a legion of pain. Beth-Sas’ Zoe starts as spiky as her hair, and her controlled performance also gives way to hidden depths of hurt.
Helen Anker (Cynthia) and Richard Hurst (Larry) are excellent as parents who could not connect with their son, and their palpable desperateness to reach him was felt across the theatre. In ‘For Forever’, the fantasy that Evan builds up is just as much his as it is theirs.
The ensemble were a welcome addition to this production and manoeuvred around the stage smoothly, aided by Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s subtle and graceful choreography. The sliding windows set (Morgan Large) was always interesting to look at and furthered pivotal moments in the show effectively, along with Matt Daw’s lighting design.
I thought the video elements worked particularly well (Morgan Large and Ravi Deepres), and highlights the show’s theme of social media. Among the other moral dilemmas in the show, it raises the question of sincerity of social media – yes it’s a platform to reach so many people, but how real is it, really? And what does it cost?
For anyone who found being a teenager difficult, this show will resonate with you. No matter how lonely you feel in the world, it’s simply not true. The anthemic ‘You Will Be Found’ – one of the biggest musical theatre songs of the past decade – is one I’ve listened to so many times. However hearing it live, especially accompanied by musical director Michael Bradley and his fantastic band, is a transcendental experience. You are not alone, the cast sing and in that moment we all believe it.
‘I wish anything I said mattered’, Evan says early on in the show. It does. You do.
Dear Evan Hansen is at the Grand Opera House until Saturday 28 June. Tickets start from £15 and are available here.