Review: DEAR EVAN HANSEN at Broadway San Jose

Dear Evan Hansen opened at Broadway San Jose riding on rapturous waves of Tony Awards (including Best Musical, Book, Score and more) plus a coveted Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Steven Levenson's book fully captures the lives and complexities of today's teens as well as the digital landscape that both shapes and is shaped by them. The burden of social anxiety, divorce and relative poverty make teenager Evan hide in the shadows, afraid of getting burned by the light. Playing now through June 19, 2022, Dear Evan Hansen is an unflinching look into the longing and need for human connection and love. The show will bring tears to your eyes even as it imbues you with hope.

Stephen Christopher Anthony's Evan sings the show's pulsing song, "Waving Through a Window" by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, that sets the tone for the entire show. "On the outside, always looking in / Will I ever be more than I've always been? / 'Cause I'm tap, tap, tapping on the glass / I'm waving through a window / I try to speak, but nobody can hear."

"Waving Through a Window" has Even lyrically tapping on a window trying desperately to connect, just as he tap, tap, taps on his laptop keyboard and cellphone keypad, reaching out into the electronic void for connection. Anthony brings a vulnerability and yearning to Evan that is endearing. He's a teen who suffers from social anxiety. When he speaks, his voice shakes, goes up in pitch but is always quiet, as if seeking in advance to blunt any verbal blows that might come his way if he were ever to express his true feelings.

Evan feels safer in the darkness, as if the sunlight will burn him. Set Designer David Korins made use of this theme when he designed a vast electronic, dark void for Evan's world. It acts as a canvas for Projection Designer Peter Nigrini's massive sliding panels that are filled top to bottom with social media words and pics, the universal backdrop of teenage life. Lighting designer Japhy Weideman uses the darkness to create movement and feeling and eventually light.

Back to Evan's laptop keyboard. His therapist has given him a writing assignment. Evan is tasked with writing himself a daily pep-talk letter, to be printed out and brought to his therapy sessions. It is while he's in the computer lab printing out his letter that school bully Connor (an angry Nikhil Saboo) yells at him. Evan absorbs the anger, visibly flinching at the verbal abuse, but saying very little. When Connor mockingly signs his arm cast in large letters, he still says nothing. It's at that point that Connor pulls Evan's letter from the printer, reads it and immediately goes ballistic. Evan's pep-talk letter mentions Connor's sister Zoe (Stephanie La Rochelle), the girl he has a crush on and Connor, in his paranoia, keeps the letter, mistakenly believing that Evan wrote it to humiliate him.

Days later, Connor's parents (played sensitively by Colleen Sexton and Daniel Robert Sullivan) share that Connor has died by suicide. They cling to the letter as a sign that Connor had at least one friend - Evan Hansen. He doesn't have the heart to tell them otherwise and as one lie builds on the next, and he suddenly finds the connection he's always longed for. When things start finally to unravel and he's at a loss as to what to do, it is his mother, Heidi Hansen (a wonderfully vulnerable Jessica E. Sherman) who wraps him in love, allowing him to come into the light.

Dear Evan Hansen
Now thru June 19, 2022
Book by Steven Levenson
Music and Lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul
www.broadwaysanjose.com
Prismatic Communications
Photo by Matthew Murphy

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