Dear theatergoer: You need to see ‘Evan Hansen’ live to fully realize its teen’s angst

Some musicals make it easy to fall in love at first hearing. Listen to “My Fair Lady” or “Carousel” or “Les Miz” with plot synopses in hand, and you’ll be swept away by lush, buoyant melodies. But some encourage you to fall in love at first sight, and “Dear Evan Hansen” is one of those.

For all the aptness of the score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, which won one of the show’s six Tony Awards in 2017, these songs reach an emotional apex only in the context of a physical production. Take in “Waving Through a Window,” Evan’s early number about isolation, through earbuds and you’ll empathize. Watch Ben Levi Ross deliver it onstage at Belk Theater, torso knotted with anxiety and big voice winging through the hall like an arrow in flight, and you’ll be inside his head for the next two and a half hours.

It’s seldom a happy place. He feels that single mom Heidi (Jessica Phillips) has no time for him. Jared (Jared Goldsmith), his only grudging friend, relates to Evan mainly through contempt. Zoe Murphy (Maggie McKenna), his unattainably cool crush, doesn’t know his name. Evan wonders, as perhaps many high schoolers do, whether anyone would notice if he disappeared.

Then someone really does disappear: Belligerent loner Connor Murphy (Marrick Smith), Zoe’s older brother, kills himself. By a fluke, parents Cynthia and Larry (Christiane Noll and Aaron Lazar) find a note in Connor’s pocket that Evan wrote to himself as part of his therapy — but which, read the right way, seems to depict Evan as Connor’s unknown friend. The dead boy’s parents, desperate to think the best of their son, adopt Evan as a surrogate. Soon he’s in Zoe’s arms and in the bosoms of his classmates, revealing to them the presumably sensitive Connor they never knew and starting The Connor Project to honor his memory.

Pasek, Paul and book writer Steven Levenson gradually reveal that Evan isn’t alone in his loneliness, a fact their hero takes the entire play to discover. Heidi has no one else to love and no time to love the one she has. Connor’s parents drift through a sad union, bound by convention; their daughter seems to have no connections to them or anyone else. The sniggering Jared builds his own self-esteem by tearing down other people’s. Even go-getter Alana (Phoebe Koyabe), who takes over the Connor Project, touts her virtues with a manic need for approval.

Except for a comic number and a romantic one, each song dwells in some way on solitude or disconnection. (That may be why listening without memory of the live production can be a monochromatic experience.) The cast on the PNC Broadway Lights tour delivers them with profound commitment, and they all strike home.

The writers both celebrate and mock the Internet, which embraces The Connor Project nationally without knowing anything about the dead guy. Evan’s “revelations,” which encourage every broken person to let himself be known and loved, lead to a national campaign with the hashtag “youwillbefound.”

Ultimately, or course, “you will be found” must become “you will be found out.” And there the musical poses its most important question: If Evan really does help people through his untruths, especially strangers who’ll never meet him, does it matter that he erects this temple of healing on a hollow foundation?

This story is part of an Observer underwriting project with the Thrive Campaign for the Arts, supporting arts journalism in Charlotte.

This story was originally published March 20, 2019 at 7:25 AM.