By Joan Marcus
After an Off-Broadway production and then a stint in Washington, D.C., why isn’t Next to Normal next to perfect? Despite critics praising its new focus, there are still enough distracting details to mar what is otherwise a clever and dark new musical about the effects of manic depression.
Take Gabe (Aaron Tveit), the long dead son of stoic Dan (J. Robert Spencer) and Diana (Alice Ripley), a mother waging a constant battle with herself for sanity. Existing as a delusion for his unstable mother, Gabe nevertheless physically affects the plot. Director Michael Greif, who has elicited some spectacular performances from his six actors, has directed Tveit at crucial points in the show to move a bag and a box for other characters to find, both times with dire consequences. Eventually, one begins to wonder if Diana might not need an exorcist instead of a round of electroconvulsive therapy.
But to emphasize what’s wrong with Next to Normal would be churlish, when the mere existence of a Broadway musical aimed squarely at adults is so rare. And though Alice Ripley’s stagey singing voice often clashes with Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s rock score, she and the rest of the company manage to subvert our expectations in what could have been Sybil!: The Musical.
One of the show’s great pleasures is watching Ripley slowly unpeel Diana’s complexities. First appearing as a relentlessly perky mother who blithely announces to her 16-year-old daughter Natalie (Jennifer Damiano) that she’s off to have sex, Diana refuses to either take her treatment or her disease seriously. “Valium is my favorite color,” she chirps at her pharmacologist, as they embark on another intensive round of medications. But even in the early scenes, Ripley allows glimpses of the desperation beneath Diana’s cracked faade of domesticity. In an otherwise darkly comedic tango with the man she calls her “psychopharmacologist,” Ripley repeatedly sings, “Without a little lift, the ballerina falls” with so much intensity that Diana’s wisecracks momentarily cease to disguise her precariousness.
Bookwriter Yorkey has drawn the rest of his characters with broader strokes—the stoic husband; the rebellious, perfectionist daughter; the comforting doctor—but the cast mostly manages to overcome their bland roles and find the specificity in them. Tveit, in particular, does a remarkable job of exploring the manipulative underside to the golden boy son, emphasizing the parasitic relationship between a mother and her first-born, as well as a woman and her delusions.
Roaring out his songs in a rock star voice that the other cast members are missing, while running up and down the steps of Mark Wendland’s menacing and elegant industrial set with breathtaking confidence, Tveit matches Ripley’s show-stopping performance with one of his own. Whether he’s railing against Dan for forgetting him or slyly convincing Diana to follow him, Tveit memorably straddles the line between a loving son and a dangerous figment of Diana’s hazy mind. He’s the Pied Piper of Next to Normal, leading everyone down a dark and twisting road that can never end in happily ever after.
Damiano and Spencer aren’t as fortunate in their roles, both of which are too narrow to become showstoppers. Natalie’s high school boyfriend subplot, in particular, feels like a tacked-on attempt to present something other than unremitting pain on stage. And her rebellion against a family that has let her down her whole life can never match what we see Diana going through, but Damiano gives a thankless role her all.
Unwilling to sacrifice Dan’s likeability by allowing him more than flashes of anger and impatience with his stubborn wife, Yorkey has written the character into a corner. Dan stays with Diana to the bitter end, refusing to back out of his marriage vows. His dedication to a decades old promise is impressive, but somehow he never seems like anything other than an unrealistic martyr. That we side with Diana’s more ambivalent feelings about their relationship is not a good indication of Dan’s reasons for staying. But maybe the boring, stolid Dan needs someone like Diana in order to be interesting. After all, it took a Sylvia Plath to make Ted Hughes a household name.
>Next to Normal
Open run. Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-239-6200; times vary, $25-$115.
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