Dear EVAN HANSEN... what the hell, dude?
We review the baffling new musical and bid a heartfelt goodbye to an old friend
It’s Wednesday, September 22, and here’s where we are…
I am having a hard time processing the death of Willie Garson.
We weren’t day-to-day close, but Willie was one of the first actors to ever treat me seriously, one of the first actors to ever read my work out loud, one of the first actors to actually perform my work. We talked from time to time about family or work or old movies, but he was a wildly busy guy living a full and fruitful life. I was so impressed and moved by his advocacy for adoption, an issue that is enormously significant to me as well. He used his success to help so many people, and I am sure there are people all over this industry who are hurting today at the loss of this dear friend.
For two years in the ‘90s, there was a one-act festival at the Met Theater in Los Angeles that was produced by Act One, a theater company founded by Jerry Levine and Risa Bramon Garcia. The festival was underwritten by Paramount and Showtime, and it was designed to create a showcase for new voices. Jerry had made a short film based on a one-act he directed called Big Al, and that spurred the larger idea that they would create a festival that could easily generate new talent for the studio or the network. The plays for the festivals were chosen by a creative committee made up largely of actors, and the plays that were chosen were plays that gave actors something meaty to do.
The first year, we had our play Sticks and Stones chosen for production, and our first cast was John Capodice and Willie Garson. We rehearsed it with them, and we had every intention of opening with them. Capodice had a family crisis, though, and we understood completely. The play was a two-person piece, and it depended on the chemistry between the two actors, so we were faced with a decision: scratch the play or replace both actors. We had to scramble with less than three weeks until we opened, and Willie couldn’t have been better about the whole thing. We ended up with Jonathan Silverman and Lou Mustillo in the roles, and they were both fantastic.
A year later, though, we had a second play called Broken Bones chosen for the follow-up festival, and this time, we went to Willie first. We knew we wanted him to be our lead, especially because of the experience we’d had when things imploded that first year. Don McManus was our director, and he did terrific work with Michelle Joyner, Debra Jo Rupp, and Willie. I was so glad we were able to circle back to work with him, and over the years, watching him work has always been a pleasure. He’s got a real gift for comedy, and most people know him from Sex and the City, but he was capable of anything you gave him.
Rebecca Swan actually recorded a performance of Broken Bones and for a short time, I thought we could put it back online so people can see this other side of Willie, and to honor the gift he gave us all those years ago. Willie was one of the people that made me believe it was not a mistake or an accident that I moved out here, who made me believe that my words could actually work. I could never fully express to him how much it meant to me, to be treated as an artist by another artist, and now he’s gone, suddenly, and I’ll never get that chance. It is a reminder of just how fragile things are, as if the last two years hadn’t been a constant reminder of that anyway, and it feels more emotionally raw than I would have expected.
For now, if you’d like to see Willie’s performance, you can check it out here, and my thanks to Rebecca for making it available again.
WORDS FAIL
It’s not easy making the jump from stage to screen, especially for musicals. There are plenty of great classic movies that were adapted from Broadway, sure, but there are just as many examples of things that didn’t translate, that couldn’t translate, and it can be for any number of reasons. Sometimes things just plain work in one space and don’t work in another, and having never seen a stage production of Dear Evan Hansen, I can only address the film, which is indeed a spectacular, ghoulish mess.
Ben Platt’s performance is a problem, but it is the least of the movie’s problems. He’s clearly not a high school student, but this is hardly the first or most egregious example of someone playing younger than they are, especially when you’re dealing with teenage stories that deal in difficult subject matter. Sometimes, you want an older actor so they have some perspective on what they’re playing. Sometimes you’re dealing with something explicit and you don’t want to put a teenager in that situation. Sometimes, you’re just the movie Grease. Whatever the case, if your only gripe is that Platt’s the wrong age, you’re missing so many things that are much more wrong. Platt’s played this role so many times on stage that he has learned these ingrained mannerisms and tics and gestures that may have worked perfectly when he’s playing to the fifteenth row of a theater. On film, though, shot from six inches away, he’s a cartoon, exaggerated and eventually almost grotesque.
Beyond any of that, though, Dear Evan Hansen strikes me as deranged from conception, and I’m fascinated that it worked on stage as well as it did.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with building a musical around mental health issues. Musicals can tackle any topic, and there’s no right or wrong to it conceptually. I was skeptical about Come From Away, which just made its debut on Apple TV+, but that takes a highly improbable idea and uses the music and the stark theatrical staging to make some canny human comments on the way we all felt on 9/11. Suicide is a huge topic to try to tackle, and there are ideas and impulses in the book for Evan Hansen by Steven Levenson that are of value. But I’m struggling to understand how this particular execution won six Tony awards because there are some massive story issues I can’t get past.
Evan Hansen (Platt) is the most awkward teenager to ever awk a ward, and he’s starting high school after a particularly difficult emotional summer. His therapist tells him to write letters to himself as a motivational exercise, and when he prints one out at school, Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan) grabs it off the printer before Evan can retrieve it. Connor’s a loner whose only interactions with Evan are angry, hostile encounters, but for one moment, just before he grabs the letter, Connor seems to be trying to reach out in some way.
Evan wants the letter back, but Connor leaves school and never returns. Instead, Connor’s parents show up with some shocking news: Connor has killed himself, and they found a note with him that appears to be addressed to Evan. They didn’t know Connor had any friends, and they want Evan to help them understand what appear to be Connor’s last words. Evan ends up telling them an elaborate lie about this non-existent friendship with Connor, and things spiral out of control from there.
Everything else hinges on that lie, and that moment metastasizes as he keeps lying, insinuating him into the lives of Connor’s family. His mother Cynthia (Amy Adams) is almost pure pain, his father (Danny Pino) seems to be withdrawing into invisibility, and his sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever) is angry at everyone and everything. He sees a family, though, one he can fit into, and his lies start to give everyone what they need, including himself. One of the other students, Alana (Amandla Stenberg), starts a foundation in Connor’s honor, driven by the version of Connor who Evan describes to everyone, and they start raising money in his name.
Without detailing every beat of the film, suffice it to say I am at a loss as to what I’m supposed to take away from this movie. Evan Hansen, the character, makes some horrifying choices here, and the film doesn’t fully grapple with the weight of those choices. What he does to this family is genuinely monstrous, landing on them at their most vulnerable moment, and in particular, what he does to Zoe is inexcusable. There’s nothing in this film that makes it feel like Evan is responsible for the choices he makes, and there’s no real consequence for what he does. Instead, the entire film seems to excuse it with a few songs about how hard things are for Evan or his mother, and there’s something almost offensive about the way it asks us to brush by everything we see him do.
I speak from hard-earned experience when I say that lies, left unchecked, become time bombs, and when they go off, they can destroy everything they’ve touched. Once you’ve lived through that, if you’re lucky enough to rebuild your life and your reputation and your emotional connections to people, the only way that works is if you actually learn from what happened. Evan doesn’t really seem to learn anything here. The “penance” he performs is entirely self-appointed and while it offers some emotional comfort to the people he hurt, there’s no way it balances the sheer scorched-earth damage he did to them.
The music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are undeniably infectious, at least in part, and that’s not a surprise. I know them primarily from La La Land and The Greatest Showman, and I think they’ve clearly got a knack for emotional belters. I think The Greatest Showman is a flat-out terrible movie, but I am not surprised by the staying power of the songs. They’re so big, so anthemic, so immediately emotionally expressive, that it doesn’t matter where they’re from or what the original context was. I’m not sure how I feel about that in terms of musicals overall. I like it when the songs and the story work together, I think, but I acknowledge the value of a straight-up banger.
There are plenty of songs that have become far more famous than the shows they’re from, and sometimes a song takes on a life that severs it from that original context completely. I think it’s amazing that two of Whitney Houston’s biggest hits are from a cheesy biopic of Muhammad Ali and The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, but she took those songs and made them hers by setting them into whole new contexts. Those songs became bigger than where they started, and Pasek and Paul seem like they write songs that can easily do that.
There’s one moment in Dear Evan Hansen that genuinely flattened me, near the end of the film, when Evan’s mom Heidi (Julianne Moore) tries to explain to him how hard it is as a parent to raise a child alone and how hard it is to watch the other parent hurt that child through neglect, and “So Big/So Small” works for me because it’s so specific, such a beautiful story told in very painful details, while a lot of big anthems in the film fall flat for me because they’re straining to make Evan’s behavior universal, and it’s not. There’s a new song here, “The Anonymous Ones,” which is a showcase for Stenberg’s character. I like the song, and I really like her performance, but her character is perhaps an even bigger asshole than Evan is, making a choice near the end of the piece that is so wildly out of bounds, so manipulative and ugly, that I’m not sure what we’re supposed to take away from it regarding the character. Is she supposed to be a giant piece of shit? If not, then perhaps this could have used another pass because there’s no justification for what she does, and just saying “mental health!” isn’t enough.
The songs that don’t work here, though, feel almost like someone writing a parody of a Broadway song, like they’re surrealistically insensitive. As staged here, I think “Sincerely, Me” is a nightmare, jovial and ridiculous, and I can’t truly express how creepy I think every bit of “If I Could Tell Her” is. Removed from this film, I’m sure there is comfort in the message of “You Will Be Found,” but in context, it’s just another of Evan’s lies, another moment in which he makes an emotional fool out of all the people around him. It feels like the film almost wants to say that it’s okay for Evan to tell that lie because of the people who have a genuine emotional reaction to that story, but we live in an age where the internet manages to make the most insane demands on our empathy every day, and what Evan does only makes it harder to believe the people that are genuinely reaching out for human contact.
One of the things that did this film no favors in my house was that we’re watching Sex Education on Netflix and we just wrapped up the first season. It’s a beautifully written show, with every role cast well, and Asa Butterfield’s work as Otis, the show’s lead, is a nuanced portrait of what awkward youth really looks like. Even when the show wades into difficult material, it does so with wit and grace. There are plenty of smart shows written for and about teenagers today, and I remain inordinately fond of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his own book. He’s a sensitive writer and director, and I feel like he’s throwing everything he’s got at making you feel everything that the creators want you to feel. More than anything, though, I feel manhandled, manipulated, and uncomfortable with what I’m being asked to accept from this character. If Chbosky couldn’t crack Evan Hansen, no one was going to, and I suspect this film will tank the show’s reputation in a way that the creators will eventually regret.
AND FINALLY…
I just published a new digital book, and it would mean the world to me if you checked it out.
When I published it at the start of this week, it put me in a nostalgic mood since it is a collection of five original works that Rebecca Swan and I wrote together. One of them is the one-act play Sticks and Stones that I mentioned in the opening of this newsletter and the other four are full-length screenplays that are very near and dear to our hearts.
Believe me… I understand that this is a very different thing than what I normally publish, but I think film criticism and filmmaking are impulses born from the same place. In both cases, you see films and you react to them. You start to pull them apart, to try to figure out how they have the impact they do, and you want to impart that to the reader or the viewer. If you want to understand what I think of zombie films or vampire films or fantasy stories, you can read these scripts, and you’ll see that in the work. These are some of the most purely entertaining things we wrote, and they demonstrate a broad range of what we accomplished as writers.
You can buy the book from the Pulp & Popcorn Store now, and I appreciate each and every person who has taken the plunge. I am challenging the way we’re told as writers that our scripts only have value if they are filmed. I don’t agree. I think a finished film is a conversation between the writer and the actors and the director and the producers and everyone brings something to that. The film is not the script, clearly. But the script can be a complete thought on its own, a promise made by the writer, a dare thrown down on the page. You may not have the finished film to look at, but if you want to see what we wanted to do with Joe Dante on Bat Out Of Hell, this script gives you a good glimpse. If you want to read the script that got us into rooms all over town, the scripts that ended up getting us jobs at Revolution Studios and 20th Century Fox, these are those scripts.
Anyway… I’ll be back Friday with another newsletter, and in the meantime, I’m watching Fantastic Fest movies and trying not to let a general sense of anxiety and melancholy overwhelm me. It feels like it’s been a hard couple of years, and the loss of a friend, especially once who played such an important part in validating me at a time when I needed it so desperately, can feel like a step too far. It helps to look at how much love for Willie and his work has been shared online today, and it helps knowing that the very real good he did for others will live on as well. I’m trying to find the light, guys, even if things are feeling dim, and I appreciate those of you who are here trying to find it with me.
Be kind. For god’s sake, be kind. See you Friday.
I never got into "Sex & the City," and I'm sure it's a lovely show, but I knew Willie Garson through "White Collar," which was this fun USA "blue skies" procedural like "Monk" or "Psych" where the show didn't necessarily reset every week like a normal procedural, but the endings were mostly happy and the choices the characters made continued to build on each other and each season always ended in a cliffhanger. It's a fun show about a career con man who helps the FBI "white collar crimes" division, his FBI handler, and then a cast of friends, coworkers, and family around them, of which Willie Garson has the best part of a pathologically suspicious, genius con man best friend of the main character named Mozzie. He stole the show every scene he was in, and I can't imagine the show without him. If y'all haven't seen it, I definitely recommend it. It stars Matt Bomer, Tim DeKay (another member of the "That Guy!" HOF), and Willie Garson, and you can find it on Hulu.
Before "White Collar," to me, he was always one of those great, quintessential "That Guys!" who show up in movies and television shows as the pivotal supporting character or guest star. Funny, warm, witty, and charming; always.
I'm sorry you lost your friend, Drew.
I’ve only seen the stage version of DEH and I’m not that interested in the film. I’ve never agreed with the argument others and Drew makes here, though, as Evan is rejected and alone at the end. The family he could have had is brought together, but it’s clear they haven’t seen him since and “the love interest” keeps him at arm’s length. He did a bad thing that had good consequences, but he’s not good for doing it.
Returning to the letter writing at the end could be read that he’s trying this time to take responsibility. Or returning to “For Forever” could be that he can’t escape his pathological issues. At least in the show’s staging, Evan is separate from the rest of the cast during the final feel good number, which is why I never read it as the show forgiving his actions. But who knows, after Greatest Showman maybe the writers don’t know their characters are sociopaths.