(Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)
It’s rare to witness a chorus of performers harmonizing names of anti-depressants as they shake light-up prescription bottles back and forth. Then again, almost everything about “Next to Normal,” the long gestating musical that recently opened at the Booth Theater on Broadway, is a rarity. From the excellent cast and direction, to the more problematic score, “Normal” is full of pleasures and questions, which are bound to divide audiences. But what everyone should agree on is that this musical, which due to its grim subject matter has taken a risk simply by existing, deserves credit for trying something new in a climate where ‘80s songbooks are being spun into theater.
The opening number may seem chipper, as the four core cast members flutter around levels of glowing scaffolding while they go about their morning routines. But it doesn’t take long to see the cracks in the façade of this suburban family paralyzed by a mother’s decade long battle with bi-polar disorder.
For much of the musical, the creators choose to focus on chronicling the various treatments Diana, played by the brilliant Alice Ripley, encounters and how these treatments impact the family. She visits psychiatrists. She stocks her medicine cabinet to the point where she claims her favorite color is Valium. Some of this provides engaging subject matter and moments of excitement in the score—even moments of humor—but the musical truly comes alive when it delves into the mind of Diana.
From the moment Ripley kneels on the floor and delivers “I Miss the Mountains,” a simple metaphor of a song that reveals how her heavily medicated state has transformed her life from one of exploration and unexpected peaks to one whose only goal is flattening every emotion and experience into one even plain, the show begins to turn perceptions upside down. Is it Diana who is truly crazy for feeling her pain? Or is it those around her who insist on making her “normal”?
Ripley creates a woman who is destructive and confused by her own actions one moment and a loving mother trying to make sense of the wreckage the next. She uses every contour of her weathered voice to portray these emotions. And while the notes may not always be beautiful—the days of clear power she displayed in “Side Show” are gone—they help her shape one of the most emotionally true performances in recent memory.
A majority of the time, the creators do the same, and create a show that tries to explore this family’s pain in as honest a way as an unrealistic form like musical theater allows. Diana’s illness has taken such time and energy from her husband and teenage daughter that they both have sacrificed their own experiences and happiness in order to care for her. Both characters, played by J. Robert Spencer and Jennifer Damiano, come across as rather underdeveloped. At first it seems frustrating, but the omission of details of their own personalities ultimately brings you even further into the family dynamic and helps the audience understand the overwhelming presence of Diana.
And just as the show is structured to reflect how the world revolves around Diana, it too can become as exhausting to watch as it must be for the family to live. The score, written by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, is a mix of light rock and musical theater which borrows heavily from “Rent” and “Tommy” in the fact that it is very much a rock opera (even the few brief book scenes are underscored). But where those shows found distinctive sounds and provided melodies that both seemed fitting for the characters and engaged audiences, much of this score seems alienating and disjointed, at least on first listen. I rarely found myself swept away in the emotion of the music. It was always the performances that captured me.
Fortunately there is the seamless direction of Michael Greif, who has created similar staging to that which he did for “Rent,”—where much of the action is played to the audience and the actors adopt a rockish swagger while they navigate the playground of a set—and updated it with a sense of propulsion that always keeps the events moving. To say he makes cohesion out of disparate emotions is an understatement.
Where his true craft makes itself most apparent is with the character of the son, Gabe, played by Aaron Tveit. Not only is this handsome young actor a gymnastic vocalist (and perhaps just a gymnast, as there were times I thought he was going to launch himself off the top floor of the set), but he has proven himself quite the actor, capable of fleshing out a character who has to make much of his impression through ominous glances.
Gabe, though sometimes physically lingering on the periphery, is the catalyst for all of the exploration the characters do as a family and as individuals. And he brings up the challenge at the core of this work: the idea that no matter how one deals with crisis, through facing it head on, looking it in the eye and feeling the pain, or by denying its existence, it can cripple everyone in a unique way. Just because doctors say healing should be done in a week, a month or a year, doesn’t mean it will be.
To the writers’ credit, all of this heaviness never slams you over the head (except the few moments where it is supposed to). Yet no matter how adeptly the creators handle the subject matter, there’s no doubt this musical will have a hard time finding an audience, especially in the midst of a recession where Broadway-as-entertainment (meaning Broadway as a tapping, smiling machine) is expected to be sunnier than ever. Sunny, this show ain’t. But neither is life. And as this show proves, sometimes there's beauty in the pain.
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