Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Next to Normal is essentially a show about a person’s right to pain. Diana (Carman Napier) is a suburban housewife dealing with intense bipolar disorder, her unexpected mood swings bring chaos to her family formed by husband Dan (Chris Caron), son Gabe (Luke Hoback) and her daughter Natalie (Lindsay Bayer), all of whom, to one degree or another, suffer because of Diana’s illness as much as she does. Even though Diana goes to therapy (Benjamin Sheff plays her psychiatrist), the pills don’t seem to be working leading her husband to having to make the harrowing decision of whether to have her undergo electroshock therapy...or not.
And that is precisely the moral axis of Kitt and Yorkey’s piece, should Diana be allowed to keep her delusions, her hallucinations and her false memories, even if she’s harming others along the way? Will she even be Diana, if she undergoes a treatment that will erase most of her personality? And for that matter, are we our personalities? When done under the right circumstances, Next to Normal can be a majestic rock musical that ought to make your heart stop on more than one occasion. Sadly this is not the case in The Gallery Players’ production (open until October 5th), which has all the intentions to be good, but seems so eager to please that it ends up losing something in the process.
The ensemble is serviceable, even if the age gaps between the teenage sons and the parents seems a bit too small for it to be believable, with Caron and John Wascavage (who plays Natalie’s boyfriend Henry) being the clear standouts. The production design is functional and the lighting design efficiently transports us from place to place even without any set changes, but there’s something about the production that makes it seem both too polished and rushed. Michael Bello’s direction is also too on the nose. Next to Normal’s biggest emotional punch consists of a plot twist halfway through the first act that ought to send shivers down the audience’s spine, in this version, it comes and goes with a whimper; the actors trying hard to deliver their best “acting”, without ever turning the script into raw emotion. It might sound like a big cliché, but this Next to Normal needed to go a little crazier.
