Review: City Theater's NEXT TO NORMAL Is Stunning!

Attempting a production of the complex and heart-wrenching Pulitzer Prize winning musical, Next To Normal, in a small theatre in Maine is in itself a bold bit of programming, but to pull it off with such dazzling aplomb is absolutely extraordinary! This is precisely what Biddeford City Theater's Artistic Director, Linda Sturdivant and her excellent ensemble have achieved in a compelling, moving account of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey's 2009 Tony award-winning masterpiece. The deceptively "small" rock opera - only six characters and five musicians - was blessed on Broadway with an incomparable original cast, who seared the songs and story into theatre memory. Stepping into those iconic shoes requires the kind of talent in evidence on the City Theater's stage this March.

Directed by Linda Sturdivant, Biddeford's Next To Normal takes its staging and scenery inspiration from the original, using a two-tiered minimalist set with multiple staircases by Karl Carrigan to suggest the Goodman home and few other locales of the play, and places the musicians behind the actors against a skrim whose changing colors reflect the moods of the drama. Sturdivant keeps the pace taut, the tension between dark humor and agonizing emotion firmly and subtly in balance, and she draws from the cast intense, deeply interiorized performances.

Music Director Denise Calkins, leading the other four instrumentalists from the piano, shapes the virtually through-composed score with bold line and a keen sense of dynamics. Her tempi are, for the most part, both propulsive and lyrical, though there was an occasional instant of one fermata too many - that tiny pause of silence before a transition that stops the flow. Nonetheless, she elicits from the entire cast strong vocal performances rich in color, expression, and musicality.

Carrigan's set makes optimal use of the Salle de l'Opéra's Victorian styled stage. Constructed of wood and reduced to two levels (not the three of the original), it requires a nimble agility from the actors who race up and down the stairs and defy the railing-less heights. Daniel Brodhead bathes the stage in hues of purple, orange, sunshine yellow and skillfully evokes the chiaroscuro of the script in his lighting design. Barbara Kelly's costumes are serviceable and simple, employing changing touches of color as well. Mariel Roy's choreography makes the best of the limitations of the set (no metal bars for Gabriel to swing from), and together the creative team keeps the piece driving forward.

Rebecca Rinaldi captures all the mercurial mood swings of the tormented bi-polar housewife, Diana Goodman, and she sings the difficult music powerfully and expressively, her full-throated voice rich in color and textual nuance. Brian McAloon incarnates all the pent-up frustrations and repressed fears of her husband Dan with a moving kinetic energy; his consciously quiet, calm steadfast demeanor consistently betrayed by his inadvertently fluttering hands, and he, too, gives the music a strong vocal presence. Maddy Jarvis's Natalie eschews some of the cynicism and surface anger of the role for a subtler, more suffering expression, but she captures movingly a young woman overwhelmed by anxiety, torn between bitterness and hope, and she sings the music with lyric passion. Joel Crowley lacks a little of the insinuating feline danger that Gabe as angel-demon should embody in the first act, but he allows the character to grow in stature to the culminating moment of release, and he negotiates the high-lying vocal line of the character nimbly and vibrantly. James Muller makes an outstanding Henry - believable young, awkward, sweet but not wimpy, funny and touching - and he, too, gives Henry's music its affecting due. Seth Crockett rounds out the fine cast, creating two distinctive portraits of Diana's doctors.

City Theater is not only blessed to perform in the historic and beautiful Biddeford theatre, but to have among its resources such a plethora of talented theatre professionals and the daring and vision of its artistic direction to bring a work like Next To Normal to Maine.

Next To Normal runs from March 11-March 20, 2016 at the City Theater, Biddeford, ME www.CityTheater.org 207-282-0849

Photo credit: Audra Hatch

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