Some shows tug at your heartstrings. Next to Normal tugs at them, yanks at them, and tears them apart.
The show opens on a seemingly normal suburban family. The set is flat, three stories consisting of boxes, like a perfect little dollhouse. A mother, a father, a sister, a brother. The father goes to work, and the children go to school. The mother makes the sandwiches. Living an ordinary, normal life. Well, trying to. Before the mother collapses, and is having an “attack”. Slowly, gradually, the characters’ troubles unfold before us. The isolated daughter, the hampered, and so sad and tired father. The mother, [SPOLIER ALERT!!] haunted visions and hallucinations. And they bring you into their wretched life, striving desperately to be normal. The emotion of the characters, the story, and the music draw you in like a dream where you are within each character, living out a part at a time.
Here is the mother, facing her illness. Illusions haunt her. The symbol of her mental illness follows her everywhere, haunting the whole family. The actors and directors did an excellent job showing you, as an audience member, what it is like to fight against a sickness of the mind and within. When that sickness follows you everywhere, and you cling to illusions desperately, escaping reality and living in a dream while reality crashes down around you. The hallucination is shown to you, audience member, and haunts you as it does her, a hole she can’t get out of. A hole you can’t get out of.
Here is the daughter, lonely and independent, nervous and desperately precise and orderly, troubled by her mother’s neglect, her father’s worry. A teenager feeling all alone, her emotions strike a familiar chord within you. And so when things get worse, and she cracks, and breaks, you feel it too.
The mother can’t get better, won’t get better. They try several treatments, several different ways. The father is desperate. The mother is getting worse. The hallucination, personified and singing desperately to draw the mother into a happy dream, is chilling. The mother drags them all down with her.
Oddly, though a tragedy, there are funny parts just as the story is pulling at your heartstrings. Rather than detracting from the emotional value, however, the funny moments even as the situation is worsening, make the musical more like life itself. Therefore, when it crashes slowly down, it affects you all the more.
The rock score composed by Tom Kitt supports the musical while carrying you along with the characters’ feelings during each scene. Brian Yorkey’s lyrics of the desperate need to get out of the horrible mess the characters are in sound hauntingly familiar to what you yourself once may have said, when upset. The dollhouse layout and funny moments of life makes the show all mundane and normal while sad at the same time. Perhaps it is because of this that it affects the audience so deeply. Unless you’re sob story impervious, the raw emotion of the characters will make you shed tears.
They say that a comedy is only good when it makes you laugh. Likewise, I’d say a drama is only good when it makes you cry. There were three shows I have ever seen that made me cry. This was one of them. And this was the only show I have ever seen in which the entire audience was weeping. If you wish to be moved to tears while entranced and see a musical both heartrending and heartwarming at the same time, Next to Normal is the show for you.
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