This musical arrives from the US laden with honours – including six Tony awards and a Grammy – and you can see why. It captures the agonies of youth, allows the songs to grow out of the action and boasts a great role, here memorably taken by Sam Tutty, for its lead actor. I admired the show without lapsing into unqualified rapture.
It starts with the advantage of a book by Steven Levenson – co-creator of the TV series Fosse/Verdon – that could stand up as a play in its own right. It tells the story of Evan Hansen, a high-school senior suffering from social anxiety, who is urged by a therapist to write encouraging letters to himself. One such missive is appropriated by a bullying schoolmate, Connor Murphy, shortly before he kills himself. Finding the letter, Murphy’s parents assume it was genuinely addressed to Evan Hansen who does nothing to disabuse them. Indeed, he creates a wholly fabricated friendship with the dead boy, finds himself warmly embraced by the Murphy family and sees his memorial tribute to the suicidal Connor go viral on social media.
It is an intriguing scenario that touches on a wide range of subjects. It shows how an elaborate fiction can help Evan overcome his sense of isolation. The story also illustrates the way grief allows families to mythologise the dead and how the internet can turn fake news into assumed fact: people willingly subscribe to something called “The Connor Project” based entirely on a spurious relationship. My main complaint is that Levenson fails to follow his narrative to its logical conclusion. It builds towards the statutory uplift demanded of the musical, in which there seems no price to pay for Evan’s guilty invention and in which his mum, who has appeared culpably negligent, belatedly reveals her maternal love.
The music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul – who collaborated on the movies La La Land and The Greatest Showman – are good enough to overcome the occasional holes in the story. The songs, mostly in a pop-rock idiom, seem to happen instinctively rather than being carefully planted. Requiem, in which the Murphy family articulate their complex reactions to Connor’s death, is especially haunting, and Waving Through a Window, where Evan explains he is “always on the outside looking in”, deftly captures the dilemma of the alienated teenager.
Mawkishness is also kept at bay by Tutty’s performance. Making his West End debut, he captures Evan’s loneliness through an array of nervy smiles and hesitant gestures, and suggests his whole body could disintegrate at any moment: paradoxically, he conveys a lack of certainty with complete technical assurance and, when it comes to his solo numbers, proves he can really sing. Lucy Anderson, another debutant, also impresses in capturing the emotional wariness of Connor’s sister and there is fine work from Rebecca McKinnis as Evan’s mum, even if she has to undergo a last-minute transformation, and from Lauren Ward and Rupert Young as the misled Murphy parents. Michael Greif’s direction, deploying a kaleidoscopically digital design by David Korins, is swift and sensitive.
Everything, in fact, is expertly done but, if I didn’t totally surrender to the show, it is because it lacks the courage to admit that high anxiety is not so easily cured.
• At Noël Coward theatre, London, until 2 May.
