Dear Evan Hansen won 6 Tony Awards in 2017, including Best Musical, and made Ben Platt, then 23, the youngest solo winner of the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical at the time, a record Myles Frost took in 2022.
This production has closed on Broadway, but touring and regional productions of former Broadway hits often continue elsewhere — verify current availability before building a trip around it.
Benj Pasek and Justin Paul wrote a score that sits closer to the singer-songwriter tradition than to theatre pop. The melodies are pitched high and slightly beyond comfort, so that the strain in the voice is doing narrative work — the title character is audibly pushing at the top of his range whenever he lies. Steven Levenson's book is tighter than the songs suggest, running a single deception forward with almost no subplot to break the pressure.
The production's design was its most-copied element. Peter Nigrini's projections surrounded the stage with scrolling feeds, comment threads and shares, so that a boy alone in a room was visibly enclosed by other people's posting. Michael Greif directed. The show reached Broadway by a deliberate path: a premiere at Arena Stage in Washington in 2015, then an off-Broadway run at Second Stage in 2016, with substantial rewriting at each stop.
It opened at the Music Box Theatre in December 2016 and won six Tony Awards the following June — Best Musical, Best Book, Best Original Score, Best Actor in a Musical, Best Featured Actress for Rachel Bay Jones, and Best Orchestrations for Alex Lacamoire. It closed on Broadway on 18 September 2022.
Its reception changed considerably over its run, and that argument is now part of the work. The show asks an audience to stay with a protagonist who exploits another family's grief, and a substantial body of criticism came to hold that it let him off too lightly — a reading that sharpened after the 2021 film adaptation flattened the ambiguity the stage version had kept. The counter-argument is that the discomfort is the point, and that the score's most durable song is sung by a boy describing exactly how invisible he feels before he does anything wrong at all.
239 W 45th St, New York, NY 10036 · Official site ↗
Dear Evan Hansen is a stage musical with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and a book by Steven Levenson. The musical follows Evan Hansen, a high school senior with social anxiety, "who invents an important role for himself in a tragedy that he did not earn".
This background summary is from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The editorial on this page is ours.