Waving Through A Window

(Photo credit to Ashley Smith with Wide Eyed Studios)

Dear Evan Hansen is a show that I have wanted to see for a very long time.  It had a good run on Broadway, and a good tour.  At one point, I had a front row ticket for a performance on the tour stop in Philly, which was ultimately permanently canceled due to COVID.  When I saw The Arden was doing it this season, I was ecstatic.  I’ve seen a few musicals at the Arden, and they’ve all been phenomenal.  I was entirely certain that they were absolutely going to nail this show that I love so much and have never seen.  And I was absolutely not let down.

The one thing is that it was a bit of a trap…in the best way possible!  I can compare it to the first time I saw Next to Normal…I thought I was ready for it, and I definitely wasn’t.  That’s what I went through with Dear Evan Hansen, and I loved every second of it.  It’s definitely not an easy show to watch.  It handles issues like drug use, suicide, and mental health struggles.  As someone who has been fighting mental health issues their whole life, and spent a lot of time suicidal, these are issues that are super real for me.

There are so many elements to Dear Evan Hansen, and the writing and the music connects them all seamlessly.  It’s something I’ve always loved about this musical, and made it even better actually getting to see that.  I think a large part of this was the cast.  They handled this well for me, and Evan Kaushesh, who played Evan, really brought it home.  I felt absolutely awestruck watching these people.  They really made me feel like I could identify with all of them in one way or another.  That’s such a hard thing to do!

One of the things to remember about Dear Evan Hansen is that it’s supposed to take us on a ride.  Evan goes on one himself throughout the show.  It’s something really gorgeous to watch…Evan goes both forwards, and backwards.  He learns how to handle himself as a person and as someone who can interact with people, but he also goes backwards, as he continues to lie and gets completely tangled in a web.  It’s real life shown on stage…there’s no such thing as going 100% one way or 100% the other.  Especially when you live with things like mental illnesses.

It definitely helps that we see a widely ranged cast of characters.  You have Connor, who’s always been the troublemaker and no one really knows what’s going on with him until he kills himself.  His parents didn’t see him, and didn’t see what he needed.  You have Connor’s sister Zoe, who didn’t try, and refused to see her brother.  You have Alana and Jared, the closest thing to friends that Evan has, and they’re barely that.  Evan’s mom, who loves her son desperately, but barely shows that.  And of course, Evan.  There’s no questioning his story and the journey he goes on, throughout the show.

Something else we see throughout Dear Evan Hansen are the very real struggles that people go through.  It sort of goes along with the cast of characters, but also the overlying storyline and everyone’s personal storyline.  This show is about struggle…which is something that makes it so beautiful.  We all have our own personal struggles, and this show doesn’t shy away from that fact.  Not even just the big ones, such as mental illnesses.  Everyone has different struggles, and we see all of them play out onstage.  It makes it so very real.

We cried a lot throughout this show.  And we were both totally okay with that.  I think, more than anything, Dear Evan Hansen brings out therapeutic crying.  It’s not an easy show to get through.  My mom and I have been through a lot of what we were seeing onstage.  I mentioned I’ve been battling mental illnesses for my whole life, and my mom has been there the whole time.  Holy fuck, we were gripping each others hands and crying.  But…we weren’t the only ones crying in the audience.  We heard plenty of sniffles from the whole audience.

The Friday night show we were at was completely sold out.  And something that we noticed was that there were a lot of young people in the audience.  We thought this was absolutely spectacular, because it means exposure to things they might not get anywhere else.  Not to mention it could help them down the line, avoiding the sort of things we saw onstage.  I wouldn’t say every young person could handle this show, but I imagine there are ones that could.  High school is hard!

This is a really important show.  Everything they give us just builds, and between the characters and the story, there is absolutely so much to take away from Dear Evan Hansen.  I graduated high school almost twenty years ago, and it still hit me so hard.  There are so many messages to find in this show, and you can’t really see them all until you’ve seen the show onstage.  So I go back to my first paragraph about having wanting to see this show for many years…The Arden gave me a stunning production, which I loved every second of, and I wouldn’t have wanted to experience this any other way.