“Dear Evan Hansen” has long been my white whale when it comes to musicals. I read the book adaptation in 10th grad, and from there, I fell in love with the original Broadway soundtrack. I listened to it so many times that Ben Platt, who played Evan in the original cast, became my top artist for multiple years between high school and graduating college. I missed the show when I was visiting New York, so I was so excited to see the (tragically terrible) movie adaptation featuring Platt, reprising his role as Evan at age 27. But despite the years I’ve spent calling “Dear Evan Hansen” my favorite musical soundtrack, I hadn’t actually seen the full show live until the Mid City Civic Theatre’s final dress rehearsal on Thursday.
For those who are unfamiliar, “Dear Evan Hansen,” is about the titular high school senior who is assigned by his therapist to write letters to himself hyping himself up each day. “Dear Evan Hansen, Today’s going to be a good day and here’s why…” But when one of Evan’s letters is found in the pocket of fellow student/bully Connor Murphy after he died by suicide, Connor’s parents believe that he and Evan were best friends and Connor had written his suicide note to Evan. Seeing how devastated the Murphys are, Evan lies and even goes as far as to fabricate emails to prove what great friends they were. Chaos commences.
The lynchpin of a successful production of “Dear Evan Hansen” is how believable it is that this low key ridiculous situation could have transpired and then allowed to keep going. It’s a tightrope walk balancing the seriousness of themes of teen mental health/suicide and the genuinely funny moments of the musical. Xavier Haynes, the Zachary High School sophomore who plays Evan, is a jaw-droppingly talented performer who is just the right amount of awkward to pull it off.
Evan’s mom, played by Marion Mayfield, added a dimension to the character that other iterations lack. Parents are so often NPCs in stories about children, and even having been exposed to multiple versions of “Dear Evan Hansen,” before the Mid City Civic Theatre’s production, I’d be hard pressed to tell you a concrete detail about the mom’s life other than she worked a lot. Mayfield brought the tenderness and unconditional love of being a mother in her real life to the stage. There was not a dry eye in the theater when she sang “So big/so small.”
Good musical productions leave you humming along to showtunes all night. Great musical productions change you for having experienced them. “Dear Evan Hansen” has the potential to be overly earnest or even cliche in the wake of its popularity in the 2010s, but this production hits the sweet spot in terms of execution and manages to deliver the script’s core message in a tender way.
There are parts of ourselves we try to hide from others. There are some things that we can’t even admit to ourselves. But if you’ve ever sat alone wondering if anyone would care if you disappeared, you should know that other people are sitting alone wondering the same thing.
The heart of the musical is that in the very moment that everything is crashing down around Evan, the moment where not only does Evan have yet to succeed in life but has actively made a mess of everything, the mother who he has taken for granted embraces him, tells him that she loves him, and that she is not going anywhere. He is treasured and valuable, not because of what he’s done or even in spite of it, but because he simply exists.
“Dear Evan Hansen” at the Mid City Civic Theatre is the kind of show that makes you fall in love with Baton Rouge all over again. This isn’t a touring company that will be here today and gone tomorrow. These are the students and performers and people in our own community. We are not alone. We are in Baton Rouge, and this is the kind of magic we’re building together.
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