The moral ambiguity of Dear Evan Hansen — Page 4

Did some of you go to the restroom during "Words Fail"? I just don't get all this insistence that Evan never acknowledges his error.

A final scene between Evan and Connor's mother would not have the same impact because the stakes would be so much lower. Yes, he enjoyed being part of a "real" family, but it was Zoe he loved and it is the loss of Zoe that hurts the most. Higher stakes, bigger loss, better drama. How odd that the same people who claim Evan isn't punished enough are also wanting to let the air out of that late scene!

Whatever discussion Evan may have with Jared, the reality remains that those who try to commit suicide are rewarded with attention in both DEH and 13RW. As far as I'm concerned everybody needs to deal with her own trigger, but if I were writing one of these projects, this is the issue that would concern me more than whether Evan's comeuppance is sufficient. Am I the only one who's ever told a lie just to spare somebody's feelings?

What is the general opinion on Hilton Als' theater criticism? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/pop-psychology-onstage-in-dear-evan-hansen

His piece on Dear Evan Hansen seemed to want the show to be something it was not given all the references to other works like Catcher in the Rye which seem to be very different in tone. I sensed a bit of callousness about the mental health aspect ("therapeutic healing" as though he'd be the type to call people "special snowflakes" and hand wave away their problems as not real.

Also, could anyone comment on this part? "One of the more uncomfortable moments in the show is when Alana, a black character, played by Kristolyn Lloyd as a P.C. bully, screams about her invisibility. Levenson and the others are trying to keep up with the times and diversify, but why does it have to feel so forced and tired?"

Actually the first actress to play Alana, at Arena Stage, was white.

The character of Alana also went through some major changes from Arena Stage to Broadway. And it is true that her character seems more like a plot device than a fully fleshed out person. But thankfully they have Kristolyn Lloyd who makes the most of it. But she was originally played by a white actress so we can drop the racial baiting part.

VintageSnarker said: "What is the general opinion on Hilton Als' theater criticism? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/pop-psychology-onstage-in-dear-evan-hansen

His piece on Dear Evan Hansen seemed to want the show to be something it was not given all the references to other works like Catcher in the Rye which seem to be very different in tone. I sensed a bit of callousness about the mental health aspect ("therapeutic healing" as though he'd be the type to call people "special snowflakes" and hand wave away their problems as not real.

Also, could anyone comment on this part? "One of the more uncomfortable moments in the show is when Alana, a black character, played by Kristolyn Lloyd as a P.C. bully, screams about her invisibility. Levenson and the others are trying to keep up with the times and diversify, but why does it have to feel so forced and tired?"



"

Seems to be a lot of last minute "negative campaigning" this year.

GhostXmasPast said: "Seems to be a lot of last minute "negative campaigning" this year. "

Is it campaigning if it happens on a board where, at the end of the day, no one actually votes?

haterobics said: "GhostXmasPast said: "Seems to be a lot of last minute "negative campaigning" this year. "

Is it campaigning if it happens on a board where, at the end of the day, no one actually votes?



"

I hadnt noticed the date on that review.

As to the ultimate relevance of these boards / I'm with you 100%. If Tony voters seek wisdom from those of us here - the results would be very very interesting!

Sunday night will be a fun night of television - Monday morning on this board will likely resemble a Trump Rally held in the middle of a Greenpeace convention. Which will also be fun.

Unarguably, his actions were wrong, even the cast/creative agrees with that. The debate should be about whether or not he had something of a valid excuse for lying/further propagating the lie, not whether the lie was wrong or right. I think the biggest fault in the book is that there is no clear and seriousmoment where Evan's actions are presented as wrong, which I think is an incredibly dangerous thing for a show that has such a large teenaged following.

Search "Dear Evan Hansen" on tumblr and you'll come across thousands upon thousands of posts saying how the show helped people, and how it was amazing to finally have a character that they can relate to in regards to his mental illness. This makes me very upset, because as someone who has anxiety/depression, I could not think of a worse character to see myself in. Yes, it is good that people find some form of healing in Evan Hansen, but I personally wish that they had a better character than him to relate to."



I totally agree. I read the script and to be honest, the story, IMO, is pretty messed up too. A boy (most likely with asperger's sydrome) lies about Connor's suicide and his relation with Evan to Connor's family, then he goes ahead and decides to try and date Connor's sister, all while still lying to her and her family, who then gets up in a fight when everyone begins to hate on them, and throughout all this, Evan and his friends end things on a bad note (literally as I was reading the script, I was waiting for Evan, Alana, and Jared to make up, which never happened,) and Evan faces NO REPROCUSSION for ANYTHING that he did- at ALL, which regardless of having a disorder or not, is unfair as what he did was awful, and garnered him a lot of, IMO, undeserved *good* attention. Nice music, but I feel like the story is not looked into as much as it should be. Evan had nice intentions, but the execution of it all was terrible, which, while I understand is the point, still yields unfair results for Evan, who should not be praised as much as he should be. The Connor Project was a wonderful idea, but I would never move past him lying about someone's suicide, and then trying to ate the dead man's sister, while the family is falling apart (Both Evan's and the Murphy's).

I think Zoe Murphy should stumble onstage at the end mumbling "patty cake, patty cake bake a man..." before slitting Evan's throat with a straight razor. Much better ending. It'll give the audience that taste of bloody vengeance that they seem to want so deeply in this show.

Gensho said: "I know several times I've used the term Hansen Haters on these boards and I really regret using that term. It's antagonist and the only thing that it does is antagonize people and cut off the opportunity to have a real discussion with people. I had a great conversation with a dramaturg at GWU this weekend discussing the Tonys and we talked about Great Comet, a show I really didn't like unfortunately (I wanted to like it) and DEH (a show I love). It was an incredibly civil conversation and we both made good points and I agreed with him on some points. What I'm trying to say is that with all of the craziness going on right now, we can be kind and civil to each other (paging CFA!). Which is why I regret being antagonistic and patronizing, at times. I'm better than that. And I'm sorry for that.

With that being said, I get really upset when I hear people throwing about the idea of Evan as a sociopath, con artist, exploitative, self-absorbed (every teenager is self-absorbed. That's where they're at developmentally.)

DEH is a deeply personal work for me. Which is why I get personally upset when I hear when I hear criticisms about Evan's character. I was Evan Hansen growing up. My father died when I was 8 from cancer. He left my mother with $500,000 worth of credit card debt that she wasn't aware of. She had a modest job and because of this had to start working around the clock so she could support myself, as well as my two older sisters. She was profoundly depressed, worked all the time and took up drinking. She started drinking so much that she got into a car accident, totaled her car and nearly killed herself. Luckily she walked away with two bruised knees. Just think, I could have lost both my parents then and there.

At school, I was a bullied and teased. I was effeminate and called fag. I was punched in the face at the back of the school bus once. Did I tell my mother? No. Did I tell anyone? No. I thought that I deserved it. Who was there to teach me values? How I should I be in the world? No one. Who could I look up to, turn to? No one.

As an adult, I'm in a much better place. I see the world very differently, but high school was a **** show and it was just about trying to get through the day.

Evan is a damaged kid from a broken home. He's a teenager. He's not an adult. Teens tend to only see their own predicament and not what other people are going through. So they lash out and act terribly with each other. It's not a stretch to see a desire to lie, to desperately want to be someone else. I remember this feeling. I used to lie often as well. It was a little lie here and then a little lie there. Then once you lie, you constantly have to cover your tracks. Luckily there was no internet back then and stories going viral. I wasn't even on medication, my mom was so busy that she had absolutely no clue what was going on in my life. So in high school I turned to alcohol, pot and LSD.

I did make it out alive though and as I got older, I matured and developed more self confidence and the more self confident I became, the less I felt like I needed to lie about things. This was all so long ago. I'm 41.

Evan is a damaged kid from a broken home. His father didn't die, he chose to forget about his son and start a life elsewhere without him. Do you know how psychologically damaging that it is to a kid? What does that teach Evan about responsibility? The consequences of people's actions? What message do you think that sends to Evan that his own father couldn't be bothered with him? It's ****ing awful. And Evan had to figure this out in his own painstaking way.

During Words Fail, the Murphy's are clearly upset, but I have no doubt that they are seeing their own son in Evan. As parents of a troubled teen themselves, they understand. On a painful level, they get it. And Zoe is the strongest person in the entire show. She has a strength and wisdom beyond her years. She'll be fine. And Evan is attractive, nerdy, heartfelt and broken. I think these other qualities, not knowing Connor, is what really drew her to him.

Anyhow, the Murphy's are out of his life and he has to start over again, albeit with a greater knowledge of himself.

I think if parents bring their kids, it's a conversation starter. Great art should be this way. But I think people should drop the whole Evan as sociopath con artist bit. It's insulting to kids that are going through this and adults who have been through this."

Gensho, can't you stay consistent for a single page of the thread? The above is a nicely-written (and very personal) defense of the show and why you feel criticism of Evan's character is unfair. I agree with most of it, although I still have a problem with the show's penchant for tying everything up in a tidy bow so everyone can leave the theater happy. But I liked the musical, and I agree with you that some of the criticism is overwrought.

Alas, you couldn't leave it at that. What's especially amusing is that it's quite obvious that, had Dear Evan Hansen not won the Tony award, the victor would have been Come From Away.

But go ahead. Beat up on fans of the closed show that lost investors millions and got deemed racist to boot.

This thread shouldn't be about Great Comet, but I'm perplexed by what confuses you. So here's the basis of my assessment:

Michael Paulson of The New York Times, in a story that ran Aug. 29, a few days before the show closed, wrote a story entitled, "Race, Money and Broadway: How 'Great Comet' Burned Out.'

He wrote:

The show is collapsing after a conflagration that was racially charged and distinctly contemporary: a social media uproar prompted by the financially motivated decision to bring in a white actor to replace a black actor who had succeeded a white actor.

The result: Investors will lose most of the production’s $14 million capitalization, and more than 100 people will be out of jobs after the final performance on Sunday.

The story was a familiar rundown of what anyone who had been following this unfortunate saga has learned from published reports and Twitter. I assume your objection is my comment that the show "got deemed racist to boot."

Well, fine, if you want to split hairs, no one said the show itself - the musical onstage - was racist. But there was a huge, ugly controversy when Okieriete Onaodowan was replaced as Pierre. BroadwayBlack.com wrote that the move raised "questions about how Black actors are valued and supported within Broadway.” A number of prominent African-American performers, such as Cynthia Erivo, along with other entertainers, such as Rafael Casal, raised objections on Twitter.

The net effect of the backlash was to prompt Mandy Patinkin to drop out as the new Pierre. And according to the Times story, no other actor - including one who was supposed to be rehearsing for the role - wanted anything to do with it after the Onaodowan flap exploded.

Again, from the Times story:

Some cast members nonetheless tried to persuade Mr. Onaodowan to say something that might save the show. They met privately with him, Ms. Erivo and others; publicists traded a draft apology from Mr. Kagan and a draft response from Mr. Onaodowan; there was discussion about holding postperformance discussions on diversity issues.

The efforts failed. Actors who had been talking with the producers about joining “Great Comet,” including a TV star training with the music team in Los Angeles, backed out.

“Agents didn’t want their talent hooked up with a show that had controversy associated with it,” said Megan Kingery, a co-producer. “And while I wish they felt differently, I don’t blame them.”

There has been plenty of discussion about who's to blame for all of this (see multiple threads on this board), but it's impossible to avoid this conclusion: After the Onaodowan fiasco, the role of Pierre was "poisonous" for a white actor, according to a Vulture story that ran Sept. 8.

And Onaodowan has continued to criticize the show, even in an article published a month after it closed. In an Oct. 3 story that ran in Forbes, he was quoted as saying:

"You have to cultivate diversity for it to work, and I feel the Great Comet didn't take the time to cultivate it. They didn't want to invest in it," he said. "That's how diversity becomes a gimmick or device, when it is introduced but not supported."

Onaodowan is saying the Great Comet producers didn't "cultivate diversity" and instead used it as a "gimmick." That's a serious allegation, and one that influential people took seriously.

The show's creator, Dave Malloy, in the Vulture story which recounted his Twitter post apologizing for missing the "racial optics" of replacing Onaodowan with a white actor, blamed the backlash for the show closing prematurely.

Once Patinkin left, the show’s producers offered the role to Onaodowan, who declined. Reflecting back, Malloy is perplexed by what those who rallied behind Onaodowan were trying to accomplish, since Onaodowan didn’t want the role back once Patinkin left. “I don’t know what their end goal was,” he says, suggesting the possibility that they wanted to close the show. “If their end goal wasn’t to close the show, that means they didn’t realize that what they were doing could close the show, and they didn’t realize the power that they held, and that feels grossly irresponsible to me.”

I have no interest in rehashing who's to blame here. That has been covered and debated on threads where it belongs. I'm no Broadway insider. I don't know any producers, Great Comet cast members, Onaodowan or the critics of how the whole thing was handled. But the show ended in an ugly, racially-tinged controversy that, according to multiple published reports, made it impossible for the show to continue even past Labor Day. And Onaodowan, the central figure in the drama, continued to attack the show for a failure to "cultivate diversity" weeks after it was dead.

Liza's Headband, if I'm way off base on the conclusions I'm drawing from these reports, we can discuss it further - although I'm kind of weary of Great Comet rehashes. But it shouldn't be on this thread. I made a wiseacre remark about Gensho for his shot at Great Comet fans who don't like Dear Evan Hansen (as if liking one show requires a person to dislike the other), and I probably should have passed on that.

Updated On: 10/24/17 at 01:00 AM

bear88 said: "This thread shouldn't be about Great Comet, but I'm perplexed by what confuses you. So here's the basis of my assessment:

Michael Paulson of The New York Times, in a story that ran Aug. 29, a few days before the show closed, wrote a story entitled, "Race, Money and Broadway: How 'Great Comet' Burned Out.'

He wrote:

The show is collapsing after a conflagration that was racially charged and distinctly contemporary: a social media uproar prompted by the financially motivated decision to bring in a white actor to replace a black actor who had succeeded a white actor.

The result: Investors will lose most of the production’s $14 million capitalization, and more than 100 people will be out of jobs after the final performance on Sunday.

The story was a familiar rundown of what anyone who hadbeen following this unfortunate saga has learned from published reports and Twitter. I assume your objection is my comment that the show "got deemed racist to boot."

Well, fine, if you want to split hairs, no one said the show itself - the musical onstage - was racist. But there was a huge, ugly controversy when Okieriete Onaodowan was replaced as Pierre. BroadwayBlack.com wrote that the moveraised "questions about how Black actors are valued and supported within Broadway.” A number of prominent African-American performers, such as Cynthia Erivo, along with other entertainers, such as Rafael Casal, raised objections on Twitter.

The net effect of the backlash was to prompt Mandy Patinkin to drop out as the new Pierre. And according to the Times story, no other actor - including one who was supposed to be rehearsing for the role - wanted anything to do with it after the Onaodowan flap exploded.

Again, from the Times story:

Some cast members nonetheless tried to persuade Mr. Onaodowan to say something that might save the show. They met privately with him, Ms. Erivo and others; publicists traded a draft apology from Mr. Kagan and a draft response from Mr. Onaodowan; there was discussion about holding postperformance discussions on diversity issues.

The efforts failed. Actors who had been talking with the producers about joining “Great Comet,” including a TV star training with the music team in Los Angeles, backed out.

“Agents didn’t want their talent hooked up with a show that had controversy associated with it,” said Megan Kingery, a co-producer. “And while I wish they felt differently, I don’t blame them.”

There has been plenty of discussion about who's to blame for all of this (see multiple threads on this board), but it's impossible to avoid this conclusion: After the Onaodowan fiasco, the role of Pierre was"poisonous" for a white actor, according to a Vulture story that ran Sept. 8.

And Onaodowan has continued to criticize the show, even in an article published a month after itclosed. In an Oct. 3 storythat ran in Forbes, he was quoted as saying:

"You have to cultivate diversity for it to work, and I feel theGreat Cometdidn't take the time to cultivate it. They didn't want to invest in it," he said. "That's how diversity becomes a gimmick or device, when it is introduced but not supported."

Onaodowan is saying the Great Comet producers didn't "cultivate diversity" and instead used it as a "gimmick." That's a serious allegation, and one that influential people took seriously.

The show's creator, Dave Malloy, in theVulturestory which recounted his Twitter post apologizing for missing the "racial optics" of replacing Onaodowan with a white actor, blamed the backlash for the show closing prematurely.

Once Patinkin left, the show’s producers offered the role to Onaodowan, who declined. Reflecting back, Malloy is perplexed by what those who rallied behind Onaodowan were trying to accomplish, since Onaodowan didn’t want the role back once Patinkin left. “I don’t know what their end goal was,” he says, suggesting the possibility that they wanted to close the show. “If their end goal wasn’t to close the show, that means they didn’t realize that what they were doing could close the show, and they didn’t realize the power that they held, and that feels grossly irresponsible to me.”

I have no interest in rehashing who's to blame here. That has been covered and debated on threads where it belongs. I'm no Broadway insider. I don't know any producers,Great Comet cast members, Onaodowan or the critics of how the whole thing was handled. But the show ended in an ugly, racially-tinged controversy that, according to multiple published reports, made it impossible for the show to continue even past Labor Day. And Onaodowan, the central figure in the drama, continued to attack the show for a failure to "cultivate diversity"weeks after it was dead.

Liza's Headband, if I'm way off base on the conclusions I'm drawing from these reports, we can discussit further - although I'm kind of weary of Great Comet rehashes. But it shouldn't be on this thread. I made a wiseacre remarkabout Gensho for his shot at Great Comet fans who don't like Dear Evan Hansen (as if liking one show requires a personto dislike the other), and I probably should have passed on that."



Somehow, through that unnecessarily long diatribe, you never even addressed my post. Care to revisit it and try again??? I wasn't referring to Great Comet. I was commenting on your assumption that it was CFA's award to lose (if DEH didn't win). But, sure... okay...

Liza's Headband,

First, you're indignant because I make an assertion and you challenge whether I have a "shred of evidence" to support it. Fine, fair enough, but I was puzzled why you thought the assertion you highlighted was terribly controversial. So I wrote an explanation citing multiple news accounts to support my argument.

But it turns out that wasn't your gripe at all. Your complaint is about a different paragraph of mine entirely, my assumption that the Best Musical race was a contest between Dear Evan Hansen (the favorite) and Come From Away.

I don't know how I was supposed to read your mind, when you questioned the wrong paragraph that you went to the trouble of quoting.

There is plenty of evidence to support my assertion, but to save everyone time, I'll give you one: a New York Times survey of actual Tony voters published before the awards show, which states that those two new musicals were the only serious contenders.

Here's the link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/theater/tony-voters-point-to-tight-races-and-sure-bets.html?rref=collection%2Fnewseventcollection%2Ftony-awards&action=click&contentCollection=theater®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=collection

Read it for yourself, or don't. Believe it, or don't. But that's where I got the crazy idea.

To everyone else, sorry for my role in hijacking this thread.

Updated On: 10/25/17 at 01:00 AM