By Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
We saw Next to Normal at Beck on opening night and we’d like to add our praise to the applause that greeted this fine local production of Tom Kitts’ moving musical score and Brian Yorkey’s clear-sighted and biting book and lyrics. So much went well. So much could have gone so wrong.
The first thing you see when you walk into the Beck’s curtain-less Mackey Main Stage is the multi-tiered set — Production Designer Jeff Herrmann, Carpenter Dan Folino — with its floors sloped at precarious angles, a perfect metaphor for the home of a bi-polar mother and the family she loves. The peril of that set and the home it represents came home to us as we watched the cast hurling themselves through Choreographer David Zody’s assignments. We’re too embarrassed to admit how long it took us to realize that the windows of the set were bordered with prescription pharmaceutical bottles; that yellow orange glow cast a ghastly pall on us over time.
The six cast members are uniformly excellent, each projecting a character who’s doing his or her best in an impossible situation. The wife/ mother / mental patient Diana is played by Katherine DeBoer. Her doctor is played by Phil Carroll. Her mental illness is difficult to medicate properly so she’s left with his – hollow — professional reassurances and disclaimers. Daughter Natalie – Caroline Murrah – is following in her mother’s footsteps as an over-achieving perfectionist, confused and angered by Diana’s erratic behavior. Husband / father Dan – Scott Plate – is steadfast but frustrated that Diana’s illness does not respond to treatment.
We were especially impressed by DeBoer and Murrah, both vulnerable and flawed but eliciting our sympathy.
Words alone cannot pull the load that this show takes on. Much credit is due to the cast’s powerful rock vocals and the Next to Normal Band, conducted from her keyboard by Nancy Maier. Props to the string players Kevin Aylward, Amanda Stenroos, Allison Lint, and Dan Hild who added so much emotional color to Diana and Dan’s lament for their dead child, How Could I Ever Forget?
This is the second time Beck has partnered with the Baldwin Wallace Musical Theatre program. Both the production staff and the first and second casts of this Next to Normal are packed with BW faculty, alum, and students. We’d heard good things about last year’s collaboration, Spring Awakening, also directed by Victoria Bussert of BW.
Now join us in considering what could have gone wrong in some alternative version of this script. Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her portrayal of a mentally ill person in Three Faces of Eve but despite the film’s based-on-a-true-story premise, its depiction of mental illness was merely sensational, a star turn rather than a serious statement.
One could say much the same thing about the more recent Silver Linings Playbook, which one of our friends, a former social worker, derided as “mental health lite.” Good acting in an entertaining movie that avoids coming to grips with serious issues.
Or consider mental illness as the subject of a television special, all packaged as a drama and neatly resolved at the end of the episode, which mental illness doesn’t often do.
Sure, psychopharmacology can help a lot of people, but the truth is some people – like Diana — don’t get better. Speaking from a brief personal experience, as well as for the characters in Next to Normal, there comes a time in a relationship with a persistently bi-polar person like Diana when you just wish them gone and in some alternative universe. Sometimes friends and family turn away to save themselves.
Happy ending? For Diana and her family, life sucks. What we need is music, preferably loud rock vocals, and Beck’s Next to Normal brings it.
Next to Normal opened at Beck Center for the Arts and runs through 4/21/13. Go to http://www.beckcenter.org for more information and tickets.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.