www.broadwayworld.com: The "Dear Evan Hansen" first national tour cast features Ben Levi Ross in the title role. Stage and TV star Jessica Phillips plays Heidi Hansen. Tony Award nominee Christiane Noll plays Cynthia Murphy and Broadway veteran Aaron Lazar plays Larry Murphy. Marrick Smith and Maggie McKenna round out the Murphy family (as Connor and Zoe, respectively), while Jared Goldsmith as Jared Kleinman and Phoebe Koyabe as Alana Beck complete the on-stage company.
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I have to say I have struggled to understand the popularity of this show. As Erin Conley says, the whole point of the show is to reach out to those who are lost and show them that they "will be found", but I could never get over how icky it felt for Evan to be found only by trampling Conner's character "in the shuffle as his death is appropriated for an internet movement". Surely that seems to be part of what the show is about, but it never really seemed to have closure for me with the way the show ends, and it just makes me feel gross. I wish the show had delved more into how the destruction of Conner's real life effected his family instead of spending so much time making me feel bad for Evan despite is quite disgusting treatment of other people. Maybe I just don't "get" Dear Evan Hansen, but so far I am not convinced of the stature it currently sits at in the world of theater.
When this show opened, I, like many others became enthralled with the music and the lyrics within. I was fortunate enough to see Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway while Ben Platt was still playing the main character, Evan Hansen. I absolutely loved the show. While I watched this, and even more after seeing the show, I understood that I was seeing this show in a very different way than someone who had gone through anything like this would. That being said, I was very conscience of this and I understand why those who have gone through these things feel different about the show. When it comes to the technical aspects of the show, I think they did a phenomenal job. The media wonderfully complimented the simple yet powerful set. The set in it of itself help tell the story as different platforms representing different rooms seamlessly slid on and off stage. Overall, I am a big fan of Dear Evan Hansen.
I went to go see the Broadway production of Dear Evan Hansen in February of 2017 with my school group while Ben Platt was still staring. I didn’t know anything about the show, nor did I know of or care about who Ben Platt was. I enjoyed watching the performance, as it was fairly entertaining, but I didn’t, and continue to not understand the massive uproar around it. The music is alright, but it’s pretty bland. The singers are very talented, but there are very few layers to the instrumentals, the lyrics are incredibly predictable and simple. The story was something new to the Broadway scene, sure, but this kind of storyline has been recounted thousands of times online and through other teenagers. It deals with hard subjects, sure, but it feels a little superficial. I liked the simplistic and automated set that made for incredibly clean scene changes, but some of the projections ruined it a little for me, especially when you could see that they weren’t at the right places. I tend to think that projections and the like are just ways of getting away with not building a real set. It’s not a bad show, but it by no means does it deserve all of the hype it gets, and nowhere near deserving of “Best Musical.”
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