David Stone’s last major Broadway musical was “Wicked, ” a blockbuster beloved by many suburban families. His newest musical, “Next to Normal,” is about a loving suburban family that spends almost all of its time in pain.
Written by Brian Yorkey and composed by Tom Kitt, produced by Stone, this is a gutsy, unconventional show centering on a bipolar mom. Its musical numbers deal with such matters as suicide, pills, bereavement and, most strikingly and daringly of all, the after-effects of electroconvulsive therapy, a truly primal topic that sends unmitigated terror down most of our spines. Music or no music.
The show’s lyrics ponder memory loss, depression and confusion. A typical musical number is “My psychopharmacologist and I.” This not only is a serious, substantial, dignified and musically sophisticated new American work, intensely staged by Michael Greif, but a frequently moving picture of an empathetic nuclear family whose members are struggling, like many of us, to take care of themselves and each other, and to keep the stitches in the fraught daily fabric of their everyday lives.
In its best scenes and songs — and there are many here — the show offers an honest exploration of the direct and indirect effects of mental illness. That is how the collection of symptoms that come from depression, bipolarity, whatever that always challenge those who have them and those who live around them.
More impressive yet, “Next to Normal” powerfully reminds us that while normal is always boring for the normal, it is nirvana for those who have something in the way. That’s the point of the title. All this little family wants is to be next to normal. That would be more than enough.
There are times when “Next to Normal” seems to inhabit such a pharmacologically savvy universe that the non-Zoloft popping folks in the room might wonder on what neurotic planet they’ve landed. Everyone — doctors, patients, family members, authors — seems to be into some kind of drug here, and the show doesn’t always contextualize that gestalt as it might. I also think the scrambled dramaturgy of Yorkey’s book — structured to maintain a certain level of suspense over the fate of the family’s son and its effect on everyone’s mental health — needlessly convolutes some scenes. It sometimes gets in the way of our empathetic involvement. In Yorkey’s poetic lyrics, simple truths about marriage, life, parenting, fear are often exquisitely expressed. But sometimes a more strained dramatic fog has to lift.
Still, on Broadway this season, this provocative little show is like a fearless indie movie surrounded by a sea of mostly enjoyable but largely predictable blockbusters.
It will have its fans — fierce, passionate, determined, serious-musical fans, who appreciate the formative complexity of Kitt’s score (which lands somewhere between William Finn and Duncan Sheik, with frequent nods to a more classical orientation). In the two lead roles, Alice Ripley and J. Robert Spencer (the original Nick Massi in “Jersey Boys”) offer guileless, authentic, simple, deeply moving performances that don’t focus on vocal perfection so much as honoring ordinary married people in a way you don’t often see on Broadway. Jennifer Damiano and Aaron Tveit, who play their children, sing beautifully. Tveit, a creepily handsome young man with a near-perfect voice, could do to lighten up a little, but Damiano is charming as a restless teenager who, like all kids, seems to want so little and yet demands so much.
Stone made his money on “Wicked.” In the artistic universe, this is how you are supposed to spend it.
At Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St., New York; tickets at telecharge.com.
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cjones5@tribune.com
