THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, August 4, 2015

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary

Katie Aramento, Raychel Shipley

PAGES: 18, including this page.

August 4, 2015

Review: In ‘Dear Evan Hansen,’ Teenage Angst Grows Complicated

By Charles Isherwood

WASHINGTON — The quirks of fate prove both kind and cruel in “Dear Evan Hansen,” a sweet, sad and quite moving new musical making its premiere here at Arena Stage. The title character, a friendless teenager crippled by the depression that only being a friendless teenager can bring, is caught up in the whiplash of web fame when a note he wrote finds its way into the hands of another troubled kid, with complicated consequences.

The beguiling score, the finest work yet from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul(Off Broadway’s “Dogfight” and the Broadway musical “A Christmas Story”), blends with unusual dexterity into the sensitive, often darkly funny book by Steven Levenson, whose plays “The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin” and “The Language of Trees” were produced by the Roundabout Theater Company. (He’s also a writer for the Showtime series “Masters of Sex.”) The sensibilities of the show’s authors seem in perfect sync, and the director, Michael Greif, delineates the emotional complexities of the material with the same incisive smarts he brought to “Next to Normal,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical that “Dear Evan Hansen” most brings to mind. (Although its score, delicately orchestrated by Alex Lacamoire, is a more mellow variation on the driving pop-rock in “Normal.”)

Evan, played with endearing awkwardness by Ben Platt, star of the “Pitch Perfect” movies, faces a new school year with agonized trepidation. Blinking with nervousness, he has the pathetic aspect of a walking apology for existence — and in fact, in an encounter with Zoe (Laura Dreyfuss), the girl he has a secret crush on, the words “I’m sorry” spill from his mouth with a mortifying lack of logic. Nor can he manage to find anyone to sign the cast on his arm — a visible badge of shame in the cruel social economy of adolescence. (He broke it falling from a tree.)

Evan is not the only lonely teenager at his school. Zoe’s brother, Connor (Mike Faist), is a misfit of a darker bent. During an encounter in the computer lab, Connor snatches a letter Evan has written to himself, which is supposed to be a daily exercise in pep advised by his therapist, but in this case is a morose cri de coeur ending, “I mean, face it: Would anybody even notice if I disappeared tomorrow?”

Days later Evan is called in to the principal’s office and told that Connor has killed himself. His parents, Cynthia (Jennifer Laura Thompson) and Larry (Michael Park), discovered Evan’s note in Connor’s pocket, and assumed Connor was writing a farewell note to a friend. Although Evan first attempts to set them straight, Cynthia and Larry are so overwhelmed by grief — and comforted believing that Connor had a friend — that Evan soon finds himself embraced by the family as a kind of surrogate son, a feeling he finds hard to resist.

Among the accomplishments of the musical is its nimble integration of the “real” world with the virtual world of the web, where Connor’s death becomes a minor viral sensation. A tech-savvy schoolmate, Alana (Alexis Molnar), creates a tribute page and a fund is set up to create a memorial orchard. The set, by David Korins, trims the stage in transparent scrims of various shapes and sizes,

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on which Facebook posts, Twitter messages and other web communiqués scroll and flicker, underscoring how private griefs — not to mention outright fictions — can quickly become public causes, with unpredictable results.

More notable, and impressive, is the deft manner in which “Dear Evan Hansen” opens up the hearts and minds of its characters, through both dialogue and song, to reveal their scars, their regrets, the true feelings buried beneath their public facades. Zoe, for instance, who is played with a transparent naturalness by Ms. Dreyfuss, views her parents’ willful rewriting of Connor’s character with wariness. She still sees Connor as he was, and in the beautifully rendered number “Requiem” sings:

Don’t tell me that I didn’t have it right

Don’t tell me that it wasn’t black and white

After all you put me through

Don’t say it wasn’t true

That you weren’t the monster that I knew

But even Zoe begins to buy into the fictions being hungrily constructed by her parents, on the basis of emails ostensibly from Connor to Evan, created and backdated with the help of Evan’s snarky fellow student Jared (a funny Will Roland). Cynthia, played with easygoing warmth by Ms. Thompson, and Larry, whom Mr. Park imbues with a sense of stoic grief, virtually adopt Evan. He lives with his mother, Heidi (Rachel Bay Jones), who works long hours as a nurse and is also taking night classes to become a paralegal.

Although her character has less stage time than most of the others, Heidi is drawn — and portrayed by the fine Ms. Jones — with the same clarifying honesty as the rest, and her late-coming solo, in which she welcomes back Evan after the saga of Connor has taken a dark turn, is among the most touching songs in the score.

“Dear Evan Hansen” has its flaws. The integration of the ghost of Connor into the material can be awkward and doesn’t actually add much to an already complicated story. (It also echoes a little too strongly a story line in “Next to Normal.”) But if he’s going to hang around, it would be nice to see him with a little more nuance; alive or dead, he seems to be the generic goth kid clad in what Evan casually mocks as “school-shooter chic.” The last beats of the story feel a little rushed, and Mr. Pasek and Mr. Paul’s music tends to be stronger than their lyrics, which occasionally lapse into gauzy blandness (“All we see is light/ ’Cause the sun shines bright/ Like we’ll be all right”).

But the musical invests a familiar cultural trope — the angst of the lonely teenager — with freshness and vibrancy. Ill-considered though it may be, Evan’s attempt to fill the void left behind by Connor, and the void in his own heart, feels affectingly truthful. “Dear Evan Hansen” also raises the potent question of whether our booming social networks are causing more adolescent despair than they can possibly cure.

Dear Evan Hansen

Book by Steen Levenson; music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul; directed by Michael Greif; choreography by Danny Mefford; music

supervision, orchestrations and additional arrangements by Alex Lacamoire; co-music supervisor and additional orchestrations by Christopher

Jahnke; vocal arrangements and additional arrangements by Mr. Paul; music director, Ben Cohn; sets by David Korins; costumes by Emily Rebholz;

lighting by Japhy Weideman; sound by Clive Goodwin; projections by Peter Nigrini; stage manager, Judith Schoenfeld. Presented by Arena Stage,

Molly Smith, artistic director; Edgar Dobie, executive producer, in association with Stacey Mindich Productions. At Arena Stage, Washington; 202-

488-3300, arenastage.org. Through Aug. 23. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

WITH: Ben Platt (Evan Hansen), Will Roland (Jared Kleinman), Rachel Bay Jones (Heidi Hansen), Jennifer Laura Thompson (Cynthia Murphy),

Mike Faist (Connor Murphy), Laura Dreyfuss (Zoe Murphy), Michael Park (Larry Murphy) and Alexis Molnar (Alana Beck).

A version of this review appears in print on August 4, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the

headline: That Note Isn’t What It Seems. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

August 4, 2015

Review: In ‘Freight,’ a Black Man Follows the Script for Five Incarnations

By Laura Collins-Hughes

Abel Green arrives out of breath from running for the train. It is the 1910s, and he is an actor hopping a boxcar on his way to a minstrel show. But performing is something he’s done since long before he ever was paid for it.

“See, all Negroes are actors by necessity,” he tells us conversationally, getting dressed out of the suitcase he’s brought along. “The script is passed down generation to generation. The Negroes who know they lines tend to live longer than the Negroes that don’t, generally speaking, as it pertains to dealing with white folks.”

America’s constricting racial framework is ever-present in Howard L. Craft’s century-spanning “Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green,” at Here, yet this rich and thoughtful solo play is most concerned with a more intimate self-examination: how to be good to one another within black culture, when the larger culture rewards complicity.

Posing this question with a sardonic humor that recalls George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” and Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle,” the play is made up of five monologues, each spoken by a different version of Abel Green (J. Alphonse Nicholson): the minstrel in the 1910s; a faith healer, grown rich on the donations of believers, in the 1930s; an F.B.I. informant, infiltrating the Black Panthers in the 1960s; an actor who turns his back on an H.I.V.-positive friend in the 1980s; and a can-collecting homeless man, circa 2010, who once made a fortune hawking subprime loans. Their consciences are badly smeared at best.

Presented by the StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, in association with New Dog Theater Company, “Freight” is directed by Joseph Megel on a set (by Daniel Ettinger) that morphs from boxcar to subway train with the aid of Eamonn Farrell’s video and sound design.

Mr. Nicholson transforms from one Abel to the next in front of us, and though he doesn’t quite get his arms around the faith healer, he makes the others distinct and entertaining, each a smart man with the charm to hold a room and the capacity to savor memories of past pleasures.

If they are tormented, too, by the choices they’ve made, they fully understand the context in which they made them.

“I am a snitch,” the F.B.I. informant acknowledges, and he isn’t proud of it. “But even Judas had his reasons, and if you’re dumb enough to think it was just about 30 pieces of silver, then you’re as dumb as a box of rocks, for real.”

“Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green” runs through Sunday at Here in Manhattan; 212-352-3101, here.org.

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August 1, 2015

Atlantic Theater leader started in Vermont

By Brent Hallenbeck

(Photo: COURTESY CECILE ORESTE)

NEW YORK – Neil Pepe's theater epiphany happened as a student in the 1970s at The Putney School in southern Vermont. He gave a monologue from a play with lines about a painfully shy youth; as a painfully shy youth himself, Pepe found his calling. "It was, like, so liberating for me – 'There's a framework, this thing you can do. You can stand up in front of people and express yourself,'" Pepe said. Even better, he said, he could express himself in someone else's words, with the idea to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances." That began Pepe's climb through the theater world, where he now leads one of New York's most prominent off-Broadway companies, Atlantic Theater. That company was founded in Vermont by Goddard College alumni David Mamet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his play "Glengarry Glen Ross," and actor William H. Macy, nominated for an Academy Award for his role in "Fargo." "I always think of myself as a Vermonter," said Pepe, who lives in New York with his wife and two children, ages 5 and 14. He's the artistic director for the Atlantic Theater Company, which celebrates its 30th anniversary when the 2015-16 season begins Sept. 16 with Caryl Churchill's "Cloud Nine." Pepe, 52, spoke this spring from his office in the Chelsea district of New York. A Tony Award his company won for launching the 2007 winner for Best Musical, "Spring Awakening," sat unobtrusively on a shelf to his right. Pepe said his parents moved in the 1960s from New York to southern Vermont to teach at The Mountain School; his father taught music and his mother taught sculpture.

"They were very much a part of that tradition at the time, the back-to-nature movement," Pepe said. Schools such as Windham College in Putney, Marlboro College, Mark Hopkins College in Brattleboro and Goddard in Plainfield were taking off as the 1970s rolled around. "It was a very vibrant time, alive with students." It was an adventurous time, too. Most of the parents in those communities were getting divorced, he said, and their children experimented with sex and drugs. "We kind of bonded together in the chaos," Pepe said. "There wasn't a lot of structure. We created very tight relationships, all of the kids." Some of those tight relationships came through theater. Gia Forakis, daughter of sculptor and Windham College instructor Peter Forakis, created a theater company as a 13-year-old that produced works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Agatha Christie.

Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater on W. 20th Street in Manhattan.

(Photo: BRENT HALLENBECK/FREE PRESS) "There was something about growing up in that time where all of us were very creative," Pepe said. "It was an exciting and confusing time, and a lot of us were trying to figure out what to do with our feelings, how to express ourselves." He attended Kenyon College in Ohio, majoring in drama and apprenticing with theater companies in the Northeast. One apprenticeship happened in the mid-1980s at the Champlain Shakespeare Festival in Burlington, where Pepe said he heard that Mamet, just gaining fame from his Pulitzer Prize, was "doing some kind of summer thing somewhere near Montpelier." A couple of years later his friend Clark Gregg, now known for his film and television roles, was working with Mamet at New York University and asked Pepe if he'd like to come to Vermont to help Mamet and the new Atlantic Theater Company. Pepe served as Vermont development director for Atlantic, which produced the Howard Korder play "Boys' Life" in Burlington. When that play opened in New York in 1988 it put Atlantic on the map, which Pepe said led to the company's growth in New York and eventual departure from regular productions in Vermont. "It was sort of a dream come true where we were creating a home with people who were my heroes," Pepe said. "There's always been something to me about the power and excitement of a community of artists coming together and challenging each other to do great work that I loved."

Pepe has been Atlantic's artistic director in New York since 1992. He said his heart remains in Vermont, where his mother, Faith, still lives in Putney. The summer in Vermont program that Atlantic Acting School runs each year at the University of Vermont keeps the company's ties firmly in Pepe's home state. Summer school for actors on a Vermont stage "It's a very sort of special program. You go to this beautiful place in Vermont and you have this intensive program, sort of boot camp," Pepe said of the program just concluding this year's three-week run. "There's something about getting away and studying." Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.

From Presque Isle to Broadway: John Cariani stars in hit new musical The actor and playwright who grew up in Maine takes on his biggest role so far in the hit musical

'Something Rotten!' August 3, 2015 By Bob Keyes

NEW YORK — Thirty minutes after the final ovation, John Cariani walks across the empty stage of the St. James Theatre. It’s mostly quiet, other than chatter in the wings.

“Stop for a minute,” he says. “Just stop for a minute and look.”

He stands at the lip of the stage, gazes out across the 1,700 empty red seats and says in a voice that suggests reverence: “There’s so much history here. There are ghosts from the past.”

The St. James, which opened on West 44th Street in 1927, is one of Broadway’s storied theaters. It is where Yul Brynner sang and danced in “The King and I,” where Carol Channing starred in “Hello, Dolly!” and where the cast of “Oklahoma!” made Broadway history in 1943 as the first musical written by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

This summer, Cariani, who grew up in Presque Isle, helps bring those ghosts to life as one of the stars of the musical comedy “Something Rotten!” He has a yearlong contract to perform in the musical, which opened in April.

Cariani, 45, is best known in Maine as a playwright. He’s the author of “Almost, Maine,” a play about falling in and out of love in northern Maine. It

has become one of the most produced plays in the United States. He’s written several other plays that have been produced at Portland Stage Company and elsewhere in Maine, and he’s been on Broadway before, in a revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” for which he earned a Tony Award nomination in 2004.

But he’s never been in a hit like this.

“It’s a little overwhelming,” he said, after signing autographs for fans who waited to meet him outside the theater after the show. “When I was in ‘Fiddler,’ no one ever stopped us on the street. This is a much different experience. I’ve been in plays that people love, but not how people love this show. People love this show.”

Cariani is a character actor who has had mostly small roles on stage, TV and film. “Something Rotten!” puts him front and center on the St. James stage in a starring role, and offers him an opportunity to transform his career from bit parts into something bigger. The show spoofs 400 years of theater, and especially musical theater. Casey Nicholaw, who directed “The Book of Mormon” and “Aladdin” among others, directs.

Cariani has the No. 3 billing, behind Brian d’Arcy James and Christian Borle, both of whom have extensive Broadway credits and experience. Cariani is the unknown of the bunch.

“Something Rotten!” is a silly, witty and some would say sophomoric musical, set in London in the late 1500s. It’s about two brothers, Nick and Nigel Bottom. Nigel, played by Cariani, is a playwright. His older brother, played by d’Arcy James, is a producer. They are desperate for a hit, but can’t escape the shadow of the star of the day, William Shakespeare, played outrageously by Borle.

A soothsayer tells them the future of theater involves singing and dancing while acting, and suggests they write the world’s first musical. The show-stopping number, “A Musical,” names or references nearly every musical you’ve ever heard of, and it is turning this show into a cult hit among theater people.

SINGING SERVES HIM WELL

Cariani is enjoying the ride.

He’s been in New York nearly 20 years, working as a character actor on TV and doing off-Broadway and regional theater. He’s appeared on TV in “The Good Wife,” “Homeland” and “Numb3rs.” He’s been in movies and done a lot of TV ads. We saw him in a TD Bank campaign a few years ago as a guy who couldn’t endorse a check at the service counter of a rival bank because the chain on the pen was too short.

But this, by far, is his biggest role and the reason he moved to New York – although he never envisioned himself singing and dancing on Broadway, necessarily. He sang a little in high school at Presque Isle but was more of a band guy. At Amherst College, he sang in the glee club. He’s a tenor with the ability to sing falsetto. Much to the dismay of Cariani’s understudies, the show’s creators wrote the role with Cariani in mind to take advantage of his sweet voice.

Singing has been fun, he said, but nerve-wracking. His first solo comes early in Act I, when he moves toward the front of the stage and sings directly to the audience.

“That’s the hardest thing for me, every night. I am not connecting with someone else on stage. I have to sing for the audience – and I can see them a little bit, and it’s big and it’s scary.”

One of his co-stars and his love interest in the play, Kate Reinders, enjoys being on stage with Cariani, because, she says, “He’s such a goober. And he really loves singing, and I don’t think Maine knows that about him. But he’s really good, and he loves it. His voice is so clear and sweet.

Her favorite moment with Cariani occurs when they clasp hands and sing to each other. “It’s like a big song in a Disney movie. It’s just fun and kind of wonderful,” she said.

Cariani loves this role. Most of the plays he writes are about regular folks falling in and out of love, but he rarely gets to play one on stage. “I am purely a guy falling in love with a girl and trying to write a good play,” he said. “I want to play the love story, and when you are a character actor you don’t get to play the love story. So it’s really fun to play the geek in a love story. I love love stories and I love love.”

AUDIENCE KEEPS GROWING

The musical opened in April, and the show did well out of the gate, earning decent reviews while drawing big crowds. When Tony nominations were announced in May, “Something Rotten!” got 10, which swelled audiences and helped build word-of-mouth publicity.

Houses are averaging 80 percent capacity, and the show is earning $1 million in box office receipts each week, according to the trade publication Broadway World.

Those earnings put it solidly in the middle of the pack of the 30 or so shows on Broadway this summer. By comparison, “The Lion King” was Broadway’s top earner for the most recent reporting period, at $2.5 million for the week that ended July 26.

But “Something Rotten!” is brand new, without a track record. Producers expect audiences will continue to build through the summer and into the fall. Some observers think it has the chance to be a major hit with a long run, because it’s fun, light and easy to digest.

When the Tonys were awarded in June, Borle was the only one from “Something Rotten!” to win. Cariani did not receive a nomination, which didn’t bother him, until people told him it should. He did receive a nomination for featured actor in a musical from the Outer Critics Circle, though he did not win.

He shrugs his shoulders when asked about the Tony snub. “People are coming to see the show. To be in a show that people want to see is pretty awesome,” he said.

His manager suggested that not getting a Tony nomination might benefit him, because people are talking about him as someone who was slighted instead of someone who did not win.

The marketing team for “Something Rotten!” had fun with the show’s lack of trophies at the Tonys. In ads that ran after the Tonys, a big red banner was drawn in above the logo of the show, with the word “LOSER!” on it. That campaign generated buzz on Broadway and helped set the tone that this is a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Brian Allen, artistic director of Good Theater in Portland, saw “Something Rotten!” in May, after the Tony nominations came out. He loved the show and was surprised Cariani wasn’t nominated.

“I thought he was terrific,” Allen said. “His part isn’t quite as flashy as the brother or the guy who plays Shakespeare, but John is the heart of the show. I would have given him a Tony nomination if I were on committee. I thought he was brilliant.”

Cariani has a one-year contract, which means he is committed to “Something Rotten!” through spring 2016. Aside from being in a show that people love, the most beneficial aspect of being in a popular Broadway musical is the chance for other producers and directors to see him. For an actor, being seen is essential to landing more jobs, he said.

PERFORMING AND WRITING

Cariani lives in Manhattan with his partner, a New York City police detective. Working with a yearlong contract – he wouldn’t say for how much – enables him and his partner to save money.

“You don’t get rich on Broadway, but when you find out you are going to run for a year, you can plan on it. We usually shovel my check into our retirement. This is all about retirement. I am saving like crazy. We’re from Maine. We’re always worried about money,” he said.

Cariani performs eight shows a week, with only Mondays off. It’s a rigorous schedule, and most nights he hops on the subway after the show and returns to his apartment in upper Manhattan.

This summer, he’s making the final edits on two plays he has written, “Last Gas” and “Love/Sick,” in preparation for their publication. His next writing task will involve another Maine story. He followed the news about the nurse Kaci Hickox, who returned to Maine last fall after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. She defied state efforts to restrict her movements, which led to concerns in Maine and elsewhere about her exposure to the disease, despite her testing negative and showing no symptoms.

She spent a few weeks in Fort Kent, where her boyfriend went to school. She left facing criticism for fanning people’s fears.

He wants to write about that fear.

“I think she was so right and so wrong,” Cariani said. “I would love to ask her why she was so surprised by her treatment when she came back home, and why she wouldn’t expect it to be a disaster – because she was the first, and when you are the first, people don’t know what to do,” he said.

Although he understood her position, he wishes she had handled the situation differently and used it to educate people about the disease. Instead, the story became about her decision to return to Maine and the reaction of her neighbors, with whom Cariani sympathizes.

“You have to allow people to be afraid,” he said. “The media has made it so we’re all afraid. I would love to write about that. It’s the hysteria of everything right now.”

But that’s next on his creative agenda, or somewhere in the near future. For now, Cariani only has time to think about Nigel Bottom and how he’s going to measure up to the Bard.

Among the fans waiting to meet him on the street after the show is Robin Wilkinson, who traveled from Augusta to see “Something Rotten!” She’s been a fan of Cariani’s for many years and loved seeing him in a big Broadway show. She’s proud of him and his success, she said.

“He was so good, so amazing,” she said. “I am so happy for him.”

Cariani talked to her for a few minutes, addressing her by her first name and asking questions about her week in New York. He meets all kinds of people these days, including strangers and stars he grew up admiring.

“I met Sting. He came up to me and said, ‘You did a good job.’ Angela Lansbury said, ‘You did a good job.’ Billy Crystal, all these people – they see you afterwards and compliment you. The cool thing is, they know who Brian is and they know who Christian is, but they have no idea who I am, because I haven’t done a lot of this stuff. I’m the guy who nobody knows. Who the heck is this guy? That’s been the most fun.”

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