Next to Normal (plot spoilers)

Attended a performance of the Broadway rock musical "Next to Normal" tonight.  I thought this was excellent, with a strong cast, a strong score, and an interesting, dramatic story.  The premise is a middle-aged couple bedeviled by the death 17 years earlier of their infant son.  They had quickly had another child, a daughter, who grew up starved for love, as neither parent seemed to be able to get close to her.  The loss of her son sent the mother over the deep end, to the point where an imaginary 18-year-old son is prancing across the stage and romancing her, distancing her from her husband, who by the end of the show is seeing the lad as well.  Mom goes through various kinds of treatment - drugs, psychotherapy, electric shock - but nothing really shakes her out of this obsession...  At any rate, the story is gripping, and I found myself fully absorbed and quickly joining in the standing ovation at the end.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  Alice Ripley as the mother and J. Robert Spencer as the father are absolutely unforgetable.  Aaron Tveit as the teenage "ghost" is a marvel -- what a lovely high tenor voice, and what sinuous movements all over the three-story unit set -- and Jennifer Damiano as the daughter projects just the right degree of teenage angst.  Also quite fine are Adam Chanler-Berat as her boyfriend, and Louis Hobson as two doctors who try to cope with the mother's problems.  The staging is quite fluid, well choreographed, the direction clear and direct, the musicians awesomely good.

This is the best musical I've seen since Spring Awakening.... And I thought the music, by Tom Kitt, closely resembled the score of Spring Awakening, but since I'm not a rock fan, it all tends to sound a bit alike to me.  I'm sure this score has its own distinct sound to those fluent in the genre.  Definitely worth going to this one.  I had been scared off by the subject matter, but a friend who saw it recommended it strongly, and I took advantage of a discount offer.  I'm glad I went.

Comments

[Art Leonard]

I'm wondering whether Aaron Tveit, who plays the blond son, is related to the 20th century Norwegian composer, Geirr Tveitt?

[Lisa]

I'm a bit concerned that--once again--the storyline ends too close to normal. In that, while this woman is consistently referred to as a "bipolar mother," by the end we are asked to suspend belief in that diagnosis. Maybe it is not her brain but her soul that needs to heal? Maybe her grief was not pathological and she did not need meds, doctors, or the overprotective spouse? Am I now also expected to just go cry a little and heal thyself? Not a great message, really. I'd rather have the character continue to struggle--not with normal grief of losing a child--but with the next to normal grief of living everyday in a struggle with the bipolar illness and its "treatments." That would have been, for me, both more real and perhaps even more heroic (and optimistic?).

[Art Leonard]

I think you may be misconstruing the show. I did not get the sense that any doubt was being cast on her bipolar condition... The feeling I got was that the family was pulling together through this experience and that her husband and daughter had broken through to a better understanding of her condition, and they would all persevere into the future together. Perhaps this is unduly optimistic but, after all, this is a Broadway musical, not a medical journal treatise.