With its stark, unflinching depiction of intractable mental illness and the vast uncertainties that accompany any attempt to treat it, “Next to Normal” is hardly a feel-good kind of musical.
Still, it’s impossible to leave the Paramount Theatre’s staging of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical without a buoyant sense of hope, not just for the afflicted family at the center of Tom Kitt (score) and Brian Yorkey’s (book and lyrics) Tony Award winner, but for anyone who has found themselves or a loved one sucked into the morass of treatment-resistant mood disorders.
The price of love is loss, according to Yorkey’s story-telling lyrics. So it is for Diana (Donna Louden), whose battle with manic depression punctuated by delusional episodes drives the plot of “Next to Normal.”
In staging the production in the intimate 165-seat Copley Theatre, director Jim Corti has shaped an emotionally rich, electrifying and ultimately uplifting meditation on love, loss and the often cruelly fickle nature of recovery. With music direction by Kory Danielson, sound design by Eric Backus and a live chamber orchestra conducted by Celia Villacres, every note of Kitt’s soaring rock score resounds with power and clarity.
It’s clear the cast is up to the intensity of both score and story from the opening number “Just Another Day.” What starts as a fairly normal morning rush in a typical suburban home grows more and more frenzied as the refrains pile up until it’s clear everyone in this house seems to be treading water, barely staying afloat.
As the mania builds and Diana spins out of control, it falls to husband Dan (Barry DeBois) — as it always does — to get her help and keep the family intact. At the office of Diana’s therapist (she has two over the course of the show, both played by Devin DeSantis), we learn she’s been trying different drug cocktails and talk therapies for the past 16 years. None has worked. Diana is an indifferent mother at best to her teenage daughter Natalie (Angel Alzeidan), and obsessed with her first-born, son Gabe (Jake Ziman).
The story is propelled forward by Diana’s exhausting, usually futile attempts to heal via a dizzying array of pharmaceuticals, and then when the drugs fail, two full weeks of electric shock treatment.
As the broken family dynamic unfolds on stage, it becomes clear that there’s not a weak link in the ensemble. Corti makes sure that Diana is the white-hot center of the story. The devastating impact her illnesses have on her family is depicted with heartbreaking acuity.
Louden’s Diana finds the clear, bell-like yearning of “I Miss the Mountains” — a song about being medicated to pure, personality-erasing numbness. She also brings the script’s pitch-black humor to the fore, never more so as when she starts rattling off the potential side effects — headaches to death — packed into most antidepressants in the bleakly hilarious “Who’s Crazy/My Psychopharmacologist and I.”
But “Next to Normal” is also Dan’s story. The anger and the frustration that come when Dan chimes in on “I Am the One” feels palpable as he gives voice to the utter loneliness of watching his spouse disappear into her illness, his stoic support starting to crack because there’s nothing he can really do to help her.
Alzeidan brings grit and fire to Diana’s daughter Natalie, a brilliant young pianist who has dreams of getting into Yale and nightmares of ending up like her mother. The pressure of her overachieving academic life and fractured home life fades — almost — in “Everything Else.” Alzeidan attacks the number’s Bach-like opening with defiant ferocity, her vocals soaring as the lyrics bluntly address Mozart’s own struggles of the mind with blunt matter-of-factness and one of the most well-deployed f-bombs ever to grace a lyric.
Ziman’s Gabe walks a narrow line between boyishly charming and increasingly sinister. Both traits are highlighted in the kinetic showstopper “I’m Alive,” which Ziman fills with joy and a shadow of unshakable menace.
As Natalie’s stoner love interest Henry, Jake DiMaggio Lopez is sweet and slightly goofy as a high schooler whose laid-back attitude belies an ardent heart. And the double-cast DeSantis makes for a scintillating rock star in Diana’s delusions and a weary, caring practitioner in real life.
Michelle Lilly’s minimalist set design has the action playing out on a series of tiered platforms. Its spareness puts the focus on the cast members and their luminous, uncompromising dive into the torment of mental illness and the difficult joys of recovery from it.
