Mental health focus in 'Dear Evan Hansen' strikes universal chord

The expansive Centennial Hall stage was transformed Tuesday, Feb. 21, into a flickering wave of social media posts, endlessly scrolling hashtags and pretty faces when Broadway In Tucson opened the Tony Award-winning musical “Dear Evan Hansen.”

How teens are seen through the lens of social media is a central theme of the story about a fidgety, anxiety-riddled teen who gets caught up in a lie that turns his life upside down.

We see in theater-staged real time posts about teens living their best lives and some having truly bad days as Anthony Norman’s titular character navigates his way through counseling and his single mom’s insistence that he take his anxiety meds and write the doctor-order letter to himself: “Dear Evan Hansen, today is going to be a good day and here’s why.”

The musical, which runs through Sunday, Feb. 26, is both a cautionary tale and inspirational anecdote for our post-pandemic world, told through a wonderfully emotional and uplifting soundtrack.

It’s that letter that gets Evan in trouble after a copy of it lands on the school printer and into the hands of the school’s drug-addled bully Connor Murphy.

Connor and Evan are worlds apart and yet they are the same: outcasts by different circumstances, wandering the halls of their existence unnoticed despite their clumsy attempts to have someone see them.

Connor’s parents Cynthia (Lili Thomas) and Larry (John Hemphill) find the letter in their son’s pocket after he commits suicide and they assume that he and Evan are friends. Evan initially tries to tell them that’s not the case, but he ends up in a lie to help the Murphys cope with their grief. That lie grows bigger with every visit to the Murphy home and puts Evan at the center of viral social media and school buzz that he’s only witnessed from afar.

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In Norman’s Evan, which the actor played with nervous twitches and painfully awkward ticks, we see a bit of ourselves: that insecurity we try to mask by escaping to safe places where we don’t allow the outside world in. We felt his longing to belong when he wondered aloud if anyone would notice if he was gone — “When you’re falling in a forest and there’s nobody around/Do you ever really crash, or even make a sound? Did I even make a sound?”

That song, “Waving Through A Window,” which Norman sang with a softly anxious tenor that never let you forget his character’s inherent socially awkward flaws, was a central thread of “Dear Evan Hansen.” Every character had some sense of wanting to belong in their circumstances, from the Murphys questioning if they did right by their son to Evan’s single mom (Coleen Sexton), who is so busy trying to provide for her and her son that she is mostly absent from his life.

We see it in his classmates, Jared (Pablo David Laucerica), the droll and sarcastic “family friend” who helps Evan create fake emails at the center of his fake friendship; and in the obnoxious, attention-starved Alana Beck (Micaela Lamas), who can relate to Evan and Connor’s feelings of going unnoticed.

On paper, “Dear Evan Hansen” might remind you of those old ABC “Afterschool Specials,” shows geared to teens that dealt with difficult and oftentimes controversial situations. But in a world where mental health and suicide have been elevated from whispered conversations to national ad campaigns, the story strikes a universal chord that crosses generations.

The tour’s cast takes Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s haunting yet uplifting score to soaring heights and emotional depths as their characters evolve. Through the projections of the flickering social media scroll, we get a glimpse of a small ensemble of musicians set up on an elevated platform on stage. We don’t fully realize the musicians are there until the final scene, when Norman restates Evan’s letter to himself: “Dear Evan Hansen. Today is going to be a good day and here’s why. Because today, today at least, you’re you and that’s enough.”

“Dear Evan Hansen” continues through Sunday at Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd., on the University of Arizona campus. For showtimes and tickets, visit broadwayin tucson.com.