MUSICAL THEATRE REVIEW: NEXT TO NORMAL
21 JUL/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

TORONTO - In musical theatre, prevailing wisdom has long held that songs should come at the points where the emotions become too much for mere words.
But those emotions have most often involved things like love, hope, joy, and on occasion, hearts broken cleanly in two — in short, all the things that one finds in a so-called normal life. 
In Next to Normal, however, composer Tom Kitt and lyricist/playwright Brian Yorkey unleash a whole different palette of emotions: anger, madness, despair and hearts that are being torn apart piece by piece, instead of snapping cleanly in two. Now, after trekking through Middle America on the heels of its Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway run, Next to Normal has pulled into Toronto for its final stop, taking up residence under the Dancap banner at the Four Seasons Centre, through July 30.

It is, first and foremost, the story of Diana Goodman, played with towering conviction by Tony Award-winner Alice Ripley, and her struggle with bi-polar disorder — a condition that has plagued her for years. But in a world where no woman is an island, the shifting tides of her mental illness wash over her family in wave after wave of hope and despair. Alice may have the disease, but clearly her loving husband Dan, played by Asa Somers, her spirited son Gabe (Curt Hansen) and her troubled daughter Natalie (Emma Hunton) suffer from it as well — each in ways far different than her but no less painful, one suspects. Even Natalie's stoner boyfriend, played with loopy charm by Preston Sadleir, finds himself sucked into the vortex of Diana's illness.

It's not a new struggle for most of them, as Yorkey's book makes clear, but as the play begins, Diana's tenuous grip on reality — apparently achieved largely through massive chemical intervention — is starting to slip, despite the best efforts of the latest in what has no doubt been a long string of doctors, all played presumably by the gifted Jeremy Kushnier. And as she descends into yet another round of torment, she takes her family and her audience with her thanks to a startling plot twist that clearly underlines much of the pain that lurks at the very heart of this troubled family.


Often over-charged musically and, at its best, minimally orchestrated, Next to Normal relies less on its score than most musicals and more heavily on the quality and commitment its cast brings to each of their performances. And it is here that director Michael Greif scores his major triumph. Led and, on occasion, driven by the power of Ripley's bravura performance, everyone in the six-person cast gives nothing less than their best, leaping into the dysfunction and finding a way to make it function in ways that are often achingly sad and heartbreakingly beautiful. As ordinary people trapped in extraordinary circumstances, Somers and Hunton turn in powerful and deeply affecting performances, while Hansen's layered and strangely seductive turn proves both touching and chilling, leaving it to Sadleir and Kushnier to anchor the show in some sort of reality.


Needless to say, Next to Normal is not going to be every musical theatre lover's cup of tea. Saddled with a story that defies conventional happy endings and driven by a score that, at least for this viewer, didn't exactly linger, it will be for many, a tough slog. But for those who like their theatre served up with the grit and grime of life still clinging to its roots, it's certain to be a winner.