Dear Evan Hansen

Last night, my mother cried.

Don't worry, it wasn't due to anything horrible. In fact, it was just the opposite.

My brother and I, about a month ago, decided to take the family for a night on the town, specifically to St. Louis' Fabulous (yes, that part of it's name), Fox Theater.

Regardless of what outsiders, whose only impression of St. Louis comes from the horrible news that often comes out of the City, may think, STL actually has a lot of culture to offer. Our parks, our Zoo, our museums are full of enriching sights and are, largely, open to the public by being free of charge. However, one of the largest parts of its cultural richness is the City's great tradition of theater.

Playing at the Fox Theater, for the last two weeks was a musical that I'd been wanting to see ever since I'd first heard segments of its cast album.

No, not Hamilton (I still need to see that), but Dear, Evan Hansen.

My first encounter with DEH, came by pure chance. At my day job as an accountant clerk, we always have music playing in the office via our Pandora account, and it's always an eclectic mix of music. Most of it is old classics of rock and roll, swing, early pop, and jazz, but the occasional Broadway tune comes up through the shuffle as well. One day, I was sitting at my desk in the office (either this past December or January), going through our daily onslaught of emails that we received, and from the laptop on which Pandora was running, began playing a song titled, "Waving Through a Window."

The song stunned me the first time I heard it. It spoke to me in that same way that reading Stanley Kunitz's "The Layers," spoke to me. It was as if the lyricist, the musician, and the performer had taken part of my emotional being, which I had never been able to fully articulate into words before, and finally given it a voice. 

Later that day (after work), I went a looked up what was available on this musical, learning its story in the process, and I found the cast album was available, in full, on Amazon Prime Music, and I began listening to it, repeatedly. While the songs themselves were full of that same emotional intensity that I recognized in "Waving...," and I could definitely hear the whole story play out just through the lyrics, I knew I was missing something. I knew I'd only be able to get the full impact of this show if I saw it live.

So when I discovered that, for the Fox's 2019 Season, one of the show's was to be Dear Evan Hansen, I knew we'd have to attend so I could see the show properly, on its feet, live. 

So there we are, up in our nose-bleed seats (the ideal perch if you ever wanted the chance to spit on rich people), and on the stage are several things. Massive screens, that look all too similar to the screens of our smartphones, a mini-orchestra pit, large enough for a cellist, violinist, keyboardist, and drummer, suspended over the stage, but cast in darkness so as not to draw attention to itself, and in the center of the stage, with a spotlight aimed on it, is a bed, a lamp, and a night stand. 

What followed over the next two hours was a unique and wholly contemporary mixture of pathos and humor that manages to create a perfect musical theater experience. 

What makes DEH such a wonderful show is, at least from my watching of it, three crucial elements: its simple story, its universal themes, and its completely human characters.

The whole story of DEH relies on one of the most simple, oldest plot devices in all of storytelling: a chance case of mistaken identity. It catapults our flawed, but endearing eponymous protagonist from high school window-dressing to a place of recognition, something that his fragile self desperately desires more than anything. On this simple hinge swings the whole of the plot. As time passes, our poor protagonist then, through circumstances he cannot control nor cope with well, gets further emmeshed in a mire of fabrications, springing from both a selfish and selfless place. However, as the old adage goes, "The truth will out," and eventually, due to mounting pressure, our protagonist faces a choice: keep he lies coming and retain what that which he's longed for, or tell the truth and lose it all.

With this simple tale, DEH is able to weave in some incredibly powerful topics to discuss, with which, we as a contemporary audience, can closely identify. 

The most important is the discussion and exploration of the struggles of mental health, and the alienation that such struggles tend to produce. In a time so driven by so-called social media, more people are struggling with mental health more than ever before--openly at least--because they have an outlet through which they can discuss it without fear of shame or admonishment. The show illustrates why it's important to take these struggles seriously, and not disregard them as "attempts to gain attention." We also see, through the show's set design, how social media, while serving as a way of communicating with people, is also a double-edged sword that can connect people, but also act as a terrible stand-in for mob riots. 

Bouncing off of that, we also get a heart-wrenching portrait of grief and how people process it, especially in the aftermath of a tragedy like suicide. It's messy, and it's unique to every person. A maelstrom of feelings erupts around someone when they experience grief, and you cannot make them feel anything except what they have to feel in order to  recover (in as much as one can from a loss). 

Most importantly, to my mind at least, is its embracing of imperfection. Another adage states, "To err is human.". Being human means being equally capable of being both altruistic and avaricious. Being human means wanting to do what's right, or rather what one believes to be right or good, but not necessarily for the best reasons. Being human means being a mess, a contradiction, an oxymoron, capable of being both noble and ignoble. While the show does indeed try to assert the idea that actions have consequences, and that doing the hard thing is the right thing (a lyric from one of its own songs), it doesn't condemn its characters for making the wrong decision. It simply accepts them for what they are: hot messes, who try to do good, but sometimes screw up.

It's in that embracing of imperfection that really allows the final major element of the show to shine: its characters. 

All of the characters in the DEH cast are complex, and their complexity is given freer reign for display thanks in large part to the music. Much like Opera from the 17th and 18th centuries, musical-theater uses the essential element of song to convey the inner life of its characters to is audience. In straight theater, all of that must be implied from a combination of the acting and the text of the play. With musicals, as with Operas, a soliloquy becomes a song (without the foreign language), and the emotional power of its words are only intensified by the music underpinning them. If sung well, a song can reach an audience's core more quickly and deeply than mere words can. And as the story goes on, the music serves as their inner monologue. We feel along with them the quandaries they face. We laugh. We weep. We feel elation at their triumphs and sorrow at their failures. 

As with everything, when you face a piece of art, you bring everything you've ever experienced to it, and thus, the art you experience isn't exactly the same as someone else. (JRR Tolkien called it "Applicability.") 

As my mother watched the show, she cried. At the end of the show, I asked her why. Had it been the music, the great acting, the lyrics? 

It a way it was all of those, and none of those.

As she watched the show, and she encountered everything--and I imagine more--than what I've spelled out here, it got her to thinking about some of the people she knew and knows. The show (and I'm paraphrasing), helped her understand them a little more and little better than she did before. 

What more can one ask from a great piece of art?