Because these new American musicals were being written with less thought to commercial potential, often with no aim toward Broadway, they were much more personal works, which generally steered them toward the form of the Hero Myth. If we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now find our own way to become ourselves, and have entered the wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity.
Here, Diana literally journeys into her own unconscious. Only the thorough integration of these contrary tendencies permits a successful existence. Now I see her feel the fire, Now I know she needs me there To share. And while she runs free and fast, Seems my wild days are past.
Despite the abundance of rhyme here, the language and sentence structure are completely natural, and the self-awareness Diana expresses moves her character forward and propels her to action. There are wonderful, almost hidden interior rhymes, like blank and the first part of tranquil, a trick Yorkey uses throughout the score.
This intro works as important self-awareness for Diana, but it also makes sure the audience recognizes these two parallel journeys. Just as Oklahoma! Could Gabe be both magic amulet and evil wizard Could Dr.
Madden be both wise wizard and evil wizard? The one advantage Natalie has in her Hero Myth is self-awareness. While Diana is desperately trying to understand herself and her journey, Natalie is very clear-eyed, though maybe a touch too pessimistic.
To Natalie, each disaster for Diana is a future disaster for Natalie. After all, Dan sees himself as the martyred Good Guy which may be his great tragic flaw. On the other hand, Henry does seem to know exactly how damaged Natalie is, and he chooses to be with her, without any external pressures, with his eyes fully open. Natalie and Henry have a much more honest relationship than Diana and Dan do, and so the younger couple will probably have a healthier relationship.
The Hero Myth works because we instinctively recognize the elements of the story, even if only subconsciously, as elements of our own lives. In an age of skyrocketing ticket prices and more and more non-English-speaking tourists in the audience, Broadway producers are rarely eager to take on a brand new show, especially one dealing with a topic as harrowing as mental illness.
The show began its life in as a ten-minute workshop sketch called Feeling Electric. Both Yorkey and Kitt moved on to other projects, but they kept returning to their ten-minute piece, eventually expanding it to a full-length musical. This version went through several workshops as the team kept working on it. In September , an abbreviated version of the full-length piece was part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival, where it attracted some positive attention.
Second Stage Theatre in New York workshopped the piece in and , featuring for the first time the woman who would give the brilliant, startling, visceral performance at the heart of the story, Alice Ripley, and with director Michael Greif Rent, Jane Eyre, Grey Gardens at the helm. To watch this tale of a haunted housewife beautifully played by Alice Ripley and the household she in turn haunts is to ride a speeding roller coaster of responses.
In the end, the show is exactly like Diana — always unpredictable, never fully balanced. That worked for Rent. But Yorkey and Kitt kept working, focusing like a laser on the emotions of the family, ultimately fashioning a score that was almost unbearably emotional.
Yet another new version of the show was then given a regional theatre production at the Arena Stage from November through January Greif returned as director.
Robert Spencer. Finally, though no one might have expected it, the little six-actor rock musical that could began previews on Broadway in March This brave, breathtaking musical focuses squarely on the pain that cripples the members of a suburban family, and never for a minute does it let you escape the anguish at the core of their lives.
Next to Normal does not, in other words, qualify as your standard feel-good musical. Instead this portrait of a manic-depressive mother and the people she loves and damages is something much more: a feel-everything musical, which asks you, with operatic force, to discover the liberation in knowing where it hurts.
Such emotional rigor is a point of honor for Next to Normal. With an astounding central performance from Alice Ripley as Diana Goodman, a housewife with bipolar disorder, this production assesses the losses that occur when wounded people are anesthetized — and not just by the battery of pharmaceutical and medical treatments to which Diana is subjected, but by recreational drugs, alcohol and that good old American virtue, denial with a smile.
In between these tweets, the show would periodically post a link to an audio file of a song from the show to move the story forward. This Twitter feed, designed to build a community around the show, eventually racked up more than a million followers. The song was then publicly performed at a special event in New York. Late in the run, real-life married couple and Broadway veterans Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley took over the two leads, while Alice Ripley went on tour with the show.
The Broadway production closed in January after performances. The vocal arrangements are spectacular. Music primarily brings emotion to a story, and this story requires a special kind of emotion. As he did with High Fidelity, Kitt does as much storytelling here with his music as his collaborators do with words.
Kitt and Brian Yorkey have written musical dialogue scenes that both sound entirely naturalistic and also boast really economical, well-crafted lyrics with wonderful, original, surprising rhymes, including tons of interior rhymes, some almost hidden. And sometimes a dark laugh too. For just another day, I will keep the plates all spinning With a smile so white and winning All the way.
We get the Ps of keep, plates,, and spinning; then the Ss of spinning, smile, and so; then the Ws of with, white, winning, and way. And those Ws link back to the Ws of the previous three lines, and want, wipe,, worry, and away. This is really skillful, powerful writing. The music itself, even without the lyrics, could not be set to any other story.
He sometimes plays two key signatures against each other. Dramatically, the score is just as extraordinary. It uses interior monologues for all the main characters, a device most people today think of as a Rodgers and Hammerstein staple, but it really goes back to Shakespeare.
Both are deeply felt, desperately complicated, wrapped around metaphors, and focused on a choice to be made. But Kitt and Yorkey are at their dramatic best in the fight scenes — real, visceral, knock-down-drag-out fights. The show is also very cinematic. Almost every scene dissolves into the next, sometimes even interrupting each other.
There are often two scenes going on onstage at once, juxtaposing the action in really interesting, revealing ways. The two scenes slam up against each other in a powerful, emotional way, but only implying the connection that we in the audience then complete, delivering more character and relationship information than a much longer dialogue scene could. And this happens throughout the show, often in a cinematic split-screen effect.
Next to Normal is part of an evolution of the musical theatre. No one today goes to a musical expecting the old Rodgers and Hammerstein faux naturalism. Next to Normal lives in a metaphorical world as much as in the physical world. The audience is on this roller coaster ride with Diana, strapped in right beside her.
We have to live in her illness, her delusions, her twisted world, with her for two hours. When she sees the doctor as a metal rocker, we see that too. You have to play the notes on the page! There's no room for improvisation! Henry : Oh no. Dan : Who's crazy? The one who's half gone? Or maybe the one who holds on Dizziness, drowsiness, sexual dysfunction Diarrhea, constipation, nervous laughter, palpitations.
It debuted on Broadway in and was nominated for eleven Tony Awards in that year. In , it became the eighth musical in history to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Diana then starts working with another therapist, Dr. Madden, who first prescribes hypnosis in which Diana's memories of Gabe's death begin to come to the surface and then, when neither hypnosis nor talk therapy appears to be doing her any real good, electroshock therapy.
At first, Diana is powerfully resistant, feeling like Gabe is being taken from her. Natalie is unhappy about the idea of such a violent treatment, but Dan eventually convinces Diana to give it a chance. After receiving the treatment, Diana's memory is erratic, and her family struggles to keep being patient as she herself struggles with putting the pieces of her memory back together. Meanwhile, Natalie pushes Henry away, and Dan becomes more insistent that Diana's memories about Gabe remain locked in her mind.
Eventually, however, those memories push their way to the forefront of Diana's mind, and she remembers not only that he died when he was a baby, but she also realizes that because she grieved for him so intensely for so long, she has neglected Natalie.
Her attempts to bridge the distance between them eventually result in a tentative reconciliation. Meanwhile, Diana is also realizing just how much of a role Dan has recently played in trying to keep her memories of Gabe suppressed, and realizes she has to leave him in order to come to grips with her past, and her memories of Gabe, on her own terms.
As Diana prepares to leave, Natalie opens herself to the relationship with Henry and Dan opens himself to his own memories of Gabe along with his own guilt about what happened to him. As the musical comes to an end, all of the characters join together and sing about the importance and value of hope, and of letting its light "shine" in the darkness of despair and fear. Read more from the Study Guide.
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